Very interesting post. I do think some of your examples are more realistic than others. The “how many people are coming to the party?” example is the most plausible: you want a direct, numerical answer so you can build your plans on it, and a roundabout answer is frustrating because it prevents you from executing any plans.
The “what kind of car?” and “what kind of house?” questions are, I think, naturally more open-ended. In most of the contexts where I would ask those questions, it would be to start a conversation, or to signal interest in the other person’s life. (Maybe not when I was eleven, considering I lacked basic social skills back then.) Unless I needed the purely factual information of car colour to make a decision, I wouldn’t want to restrict those questions. Even if I want to decide what kind of car to buy, I would probably learn more from letting the other person, who almost certainly knows more about cars than I do, decide what they think is pertinent. Likewise for the house-building; anyone who is building a house of their own probably has a very interesting story about what kind it is and why. And in the process, their story will reveal something about their personality, so that I can model them better, which will allow me to interact with them more efficiently in future because I’ll know how they see things and how they communicate. (This is assuming I have time to invest in a conversation, but I consider it a quite important investment, as well as being pleasurable for its own sake.)
However, your point holds very true for conversations that are fundamentally about ideas or concepts and not socializing/personal enjoyment. If you’re going to discussion politics or quantum physics, you definitely want information to be transmitted clearly and efficiently, and you want your keywords to mean the same thing to the other person as they do to you.
Very interesting post. I do think some of your examples are more realistic than others. The “how many people are coming to the party?” example is the most plausible: you want a direct, numerical answer so you can build your plans on it, and a roundabout answer is frustrating because it prevents you from executing any plans.
The “what kind of car?” and “what kind of house?” questions are, I think, naturally more open-ended. In most of the contexts where I would ask those questions, it would be to start a conversation, or to signal interest in the other person’s life. (Maybe not when I was eleven, considering I lacked basic social skills back then.) Unless I needed the purely factual information of car colour to make a decision, I wouldn’t want to restrict those questions. Even if I want to decide what kind of car to buy, I would probably learn more from letting the other person, who almost certainly knows more about cars than I do, decide what they think is pertinent. Likewise for the house-building; anyone who is building a house of their own probably has a very interesting story about what kind it is and why. And in the process, their story will reveal something about their personality, so that I can model them better, which will allow me to interact with them more efficiently in future because I’ll know how they see things and how they communicate. (This is assuming I have time to invest in a conversation, but I consider it a quite important investment, as well as being pleasurable for its own sake.)
However, your point holds very true for conversations that are fundamentally about ideas or concepts and not socializing/personal enjoyment. If you’re going to discussion politics or quantum physics, you definitely want information to be transmitted clearly and efficiently, and you want your keywords to mean the same thing to the other person as they do to you.