Comment by godelski

> The author completely intended for this level of discussion by asking for you to dogmatically follow the rule and posing a lot of circumstances where most people would allow it to be broken. It appears to be working as intended.

Yeah, this is what I saw the intent as. Author knew some people would interpret their words very carefully, being explicit to follow "the letter" (as is explicitly asked). But recognized that a large number of people wouldn't do this and let their own biases sink in. Then a meta conversation would start. Really all the gamble depends on is having a sufficiently large sample size. Even better if differing native languages. The "gotcha" people (like the shoes person), the dogmatic "obvious" people, and the "well in the real world" people even add to the chaos that illustrates the author's point: absolute precision in language (including interpretation) is impossible. Communication is inherently a fuzzy process. To me it is often striking that people don't recognize language as fuzzy.