“You can give me coffee if you want.”

My wife said this to me.

I got really upset.

She couldn’t comprehend why I was upset. I couldn’t comprehend why she’d phrase me giving her coffee as though it was a privilege she was granting me.

To her, it was a polite request. Something like, “If you don’t mind, do you think you could get me some coffee?”

That’s how you say it in Swedish.

To me: “I grant you the privilege of serving me coffee.”

I was new in Sweden.

We were both really confused. The sentence made sense to each of us. We just weren’t hearing the same thing.

Things aren’t often what they seem. This is partly experience, including the kind you acquire by being wrong.

It’s not obvious what’s in the sausage.

I once worked on a mobile app that needed to work offline. There was a database in the app and a database on the server. Save new things locally, send them when we get online, download whatever has changed on the server.

That should be good.

Then you add relationships between the data. Download things in the wrong order and you can end up with a record pointing to something that doesn’t exist yet. Delete something on one side while another record still depends on it. Edit the same thing in both places and now you need to decide which version wins.

And so on and so on.

That feature turned out to be at least ten times more work than I expected. The original description wasn’t nonsense. It just left out most of the work.

Let’s discuss what goes in the sausage before I know how long it’ll take to make it.

This is why “just give me a ballpark” makes me careful. The uncertainty doesn’t go away because we call the estimate rough. That number will be remembered.

I have a similar reaction to business ideas that sound like easy money. There are probably a lot of things we haven’t thought of yet. If it were easy to get rich, everyone would be rich. And that’s not the case.

The idea might be good. I’d still like to know what’s in the sausage.

With people, though, it’s tempting to skip that part. Someone says something we find unreasonable and we already have an explanation: they’re selfish, they’re irrational, they don’t get it.

I read about a study through Daniel Kahneman that makes this awkward. Married partners were asked to estimate their contributions to shared activities, including household chores. If you put those claims together, you end up with more than 100%.

Our own contributions are easier to remember. We have more examples of the things we did than of the things the other person did.

So two people look at what they remember and feel quite reasonable. Neither has to be deliberately lying.

There’s more in that sausage than a selfish spouse.

“How can this person possibly think that? It makes no sense.”

To me, that’s an admission that you don’t understand the other person’s point of view. Which is very different from having looked into it, discussed it with them, and concluded that they’re wrong for particular reasons.

Of course you can understand someone and still disagree about something fundamental. Understanding their view doesn’t oblige you to adopt it. But if you genuinely cannot see how they could think that way, there’s something you haven’t understood yet.

You ask questions. You assume that, to the person holding a point of view, it makes sense. Then you try to figure out what would need to be true for you to see it that way.

That includes asking about things you’re already sure you understood. Such as whether your wife has just offered you the honour of serving her coffee.

Eventually we sat down and figured it out, because we do trust each other to have good intentions. She was being polite. I’d heard condescension.

I had understood every word, yet there was more to it.