Feb 19, 2025
A possible answer: the question is asking something like, “that’s surprising, my model of you didn’t anticipate this, give me information which help me efficiently improve my model of you such that I can better predict your answer in this sort of situation in the future”.
(That is, when people people actually mean the question. Maybe they’re just being polite, or doing a million other things – it’s all just words games and so on and so forth).