I believe there are several problems with the premise of your question:
1) It assumes that the poster has described the entire problem. Due to the nature of printed material, things like background, emotions, personality, etc many times are not conveyed completely. Most questions are woefully under-detailed. Most times you are answering what you _think_ the person really asked.
2) It assumes that there is a generalization or rule that the question falls under. Things like "Do I like ice cream?" don't have any kind of generalization to have exceptions from. Not everything is quantitative.
3) It assumes that only one set of patterns can be determined from the same initial data. Many times, multiple patterns apply to the same data.
4) It's not the way people communicate. People are not logicians.When you are a kid and touch a hot stove, your mom didn't give you the formulae for thermodynamics. She probably said something like "Don't do that!" As you got older and our problems got more complicated, the stories got more elaborate. But they were always stories. This is because people naturally communicate by anecdote, something anthropologists have been observing for decades. An anecdote is always true -- but more specific theories and generalizations suffer from 1-3 above.
I admire your quest for certainty. I was that way myself back when I was younger, that is, until I realized -- -yikes! I'm doing it! See what I mean? It's everywhere.
1) It assumes that the poster has described the entire problem. Due to the nature of printed material, things like background, emotions, personality, etc many times are not conveyed completely. Most questions are woefully under-detailed. Most times you are answering what you _think_ the person really asked.
2) It assumes that there is a generalization or rule that the question falls under. Things like "Do I like ice cream?" don't have any kind of generalization to have exceptions from. Not everything is quantitative.
3) It assumes that only one set of patterns can be determined from the same initial data. Many times, multiple patterns apply to the same data.
4) It's not the way people communicate. People are not logicians.When you are a kid and touch a hot stove, your mom didn't give you the formulae for thermodynamics. She probably said something like "Don't do that!" As you got older and our problems got more complicated, the stories got more elaborate. But they were always stories. This is because people naturally communicate by anecdote, something anthropologists have been observing for decades. An anecdote is always true -- but more specific theories and generalizations suffer from 1-3 above.
I admire your quest for certainty. I was that way myself back when I was younger, that is, until I realized -- -yikes! I'm doing it! See what I mean? It's everywhere.