There are 3 things possibly at play here.
Are you trying to make decisions about the same question? If the top score in a game is currently 87 out of 100, and the last player takes their turn. The announcer says the player scored “Ninety…” they won. It doesn’t matter if the complete information is “Ninety-five”, “Ninety-nine” or even “Ninety… just flat ninety” … the final player is the winner. You dont need the second digit. Knowing the score is in the range of 90-99 isn’t COMPLETE information, but it is ENOUGH information… To answer “did this player win” … if you wanted to know if they beat the world record score of 97, then you’d need the second digit. You only need fully complete information if you need a fully complete answer.
Another option is that you already have complete information. “I tossed a coin 10 times and 8 times it landed on heads” – what happened the other 2 times? You already know. Just because no one said it doesnt mean you don’t have it. Not everything needs to be said explicitly for it to be true. “There’s 2 types of people in the world: those that can derive missing data.”
The third option is just that it truly doesn’t matter, usually because of the rule of the first point. How long it takes to get to the destination, whether 3 hours or 4 hours, or 3.5 hours… doesnt matter if the destination closes in 2 hours. “More than 2” is complete enough. Some things are ok with vague answers because the question was vague. Someone may have said “how long does it take to get there” but that truly doesnt matter, because the secret real question was “Can we arrive before the store closes”
I’m aware. Those cases all extend though. Because a lot of times the decision isn’t intended to be a concrete answer.
I just had to conduct an interview. I got to talk to the person for a whole hour. And now I need to determine if we should hire this person.
I definitely have insufficient information. No interview process has ever finished with an abundance of complete information (well, if the candidate is bad enough or just screaming slurs the whole time, that’s pretty complete). And yet I have to make a serious decision that has real consequences for my company AND for the candidate.
I don’t get the option to gather more information. I get it. This case is not fun to deal with.
But regardless of what the company says, the question isn’t “do I think this person will without a doubt be our top employee” or “WILL this person succeed” … the question is “Given the information at hand, do I think there is a higher likelihood of the person succeeding or struggling?” I can make a decision based on “given the information at hand” … and when I do, I always qualify it as such.
If I say yes, and they hire the person, and they don’t fit at the company, I can still just point to “they answered all the interview questions properly” and it’s not my fault things went poorly. I may also say no to amazing candidates who just didn’t represent themselves well in the interview. Even if I cannot make a sound decision, I have to make one though.
And maybe I’m just unlucky in life, but I feel like I face a lot of situations where I need to make decisions with incomplete information just because more information isn’t available, or time is truly a factor in the decision. Some of life is always going to require some guesswork. And we can just try our best to make educated guesses. There is no such thing as “complete” information.
But I fully agree with you that there are situations where some people are just impatient, and corners are cut. But a lot of neurotypicals often don’t like those people too. That’s not just “neurotypicals do this” … that’s “lazy/impatient people do this” and I guess I’m lucky in the sense that I rarely have to deal with this, but then again, I work in a field where basically everyone is on the spectrum.