The Free Cup Case
Joe was feeling quite dehydrated, so he stopped by the local smoothie shop to buy the largest sized drink available. Before ordering, the cashier told him that if he bought a Mega-Sized Smoothie he would get it in a special commemorative cup. Joe replied, "I don't care about a commemorative cup — I just want the biggest smoothie you have." Sure enough, Joe received the Mega-Sized Smoothie in a commemorative cup. Did Joe intentionally obtain the commemorative cup?
The Extra Dollar Case The creator of this experiment stated that nearly all people without Asperger's Syndrome say that in the first case, Joe did not intentionally obtain the commemorative cup, but in the second case, he did intentionally pay the extra dollar. However, nearly all people with Asperger's Syndrome say that neither case demonstrated any intentionality on Joe's part. The comment thread attached to this report was full of Aspies irritably attempting to prove that the "normal" interpretation is merely a case of fuzzy thinking, as anyone can see by looking at the following analytic proof / mock computer code / advanced degrees I have received. Reading them, I learned two things. One, I learned that while I am not without autistic tendencies my own self, I am firmly in the neurotypical camp on this one. This is true both in terms of the results (I think case two shows intention and case one doesn't) and in terms of the way I reached this conclusion:
Case one Therefore: not intentional.
Case two Therefore: intentional. Another way to think about it is that if this were IF, the first case comes out the same way as if Joe had just typed >Z over and over, while the second case requires typing in an actual command. But my conclusions about the intentionality involved weren't the result of any sort of abstract logical calculus. I just put myself in Joe's place and felt how much intentionality each case required me to summon. The second thing I learned was that I find the sort of comment threads that pop up in fora like these very frustrating. And it occurred to me that the reason is related to why I found political discussions on ifMUD so exasperating back when I used to hang out there. Namely, they look like conversations, but they don't function like conversations. In a conversation, one person talks, and while that person talks, the others listen. Then it's someone else's turn to talk, and again, everyone else listens. You can interrupt, of course, but your interruption actually demonstrates that you're listening — that you've been thinking about what the speaker is saying and want to respond before the point gets lost. This isn't the way conversation worked on ifMUD. I can't count the number of times someone would ask me a direct question, and then while I was trying to write a reply, an avalanche of other people's comments would knock the question right off the screen. And I'd be thinking, "Wait — he asked me a question, meaning it's my turn to talk, and I am talking — I just haven't hit Enter yet — and you're not listening!" So then I started breaking up my responses into shorter chunks, but that was even more of a disaster, because people would immediately jump on my first sentence with all sorts of ripostes and rejoinders and I'd be thinking, "Shut up! It's not your turn yet! That's just the first sentence! I have two more paragraphs lined up here! Just sit there and listen!" Comment threads don't have the same time pressure, but listening is still a problem. In this case, I'd read some Aspie's pseudocode, and I'd want to reply... but the chances were very good that the person I wanted to speak to was long gone. Not listening! How rude to just run up to you and say something and then run off without waiting for a reply! Except, of course, that the comment in question wasn't addressed to me in the first place — it was aimed at anyone who happened to read it. Just as when I decided to look at the comments in the first place, I wasn't hunting for this particular person's opinion — I just wanted to see what a sampling of opinions from random passersby might look like. So instead of person-to-person communication, what we have here is a bunch of people staring at the floor shouting out opinions while others, when bored, occasionally cup their hands to their ears to listen to the shouts. What kind of person would that sort of communication appeal to? (The original link is here.)
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