I emailed a vendor who sells my clients goods through their platform, and asked them questions about their payout report. They don’t read/answer my questions, send incomplete answers when they do, send links to their knowledge base with months old information. I’ve concluded they are either overworked, don’t care, and/or have a parasitic brain fungus which prevents them from using logic.
A few months back I cross posted a programming question to several online communities, and in each got one person answering the question they think you’re asking, rather than the one you actually did ask—literally in words and sentences. And then proceed to answer the easy question—which you provided as context—and ignore the difficult question you brought to the group.
It’s a virus. It’s people optimizing their own successful behaviors and failing to perform in new situations.
In the first case the company says they added features to the report for internationalization. What? 330m Americans is not a big enough group to have a custom payout report without confusing garbage in it? (Like VAT on a receipt for goods bought in US). They bought into their own BS and can’t see.
In the second case, months later I discussed the programming problem at a meetup group and an expert in the domain said what I want doesn’t exist. No wonder the forum peeps answered their own mis-interpretation, because to very high reputation users it’s just a game.