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I spent a couple of minutes scanning through the PDF, didn't find anything of that sort, then decided that was a bad use of time given how unreasonable the premise is. Apparently not though, given there seem to be people who think the premise isn't totally outlandish.
In any case, I simply don't believe 92% of people interpret that course of action as reasonable. My priors are strong enough that literally no quality of methodology will convince me otherwise--it will at most only convince me that the author of the paper is lying (or being deceitful in a hard-to-find way) rather than mistaken. At best, the surveyed people were a very odd sample, or were confused enough about the question to "get it wrong". Do you seriously believe that even 50% of Americans would be OK with such an interpretation of their instructions?
The MQD also implicitly requests a "double-interpretation" which the paper ignores. Barrett says:
Not only are we asked to read into the "spirit" of the parent's instruction, but also into the "spirit" of this sentence itself. The trip was inconsistent, not with the parents' literal words, or even the spirit of the words, but with their intention, which informs all instructions but is separate from the words themselves. This is what "spirit" means if you don't ironically interpret that word in the most literal way possible, as Barrett herself explains.
The author's continues:
I think this gets to the heart of the matter. In hypotheticals, people may be inclined to assume conditions under which the characters' actions make sense. Maybe the parents are super rich. Okay, then that might be reasonable. It seems bold to label an action unreasonable without knowing all the details. Crucially, hypotheticals may have all sorts of outlandish hypothetical premises, whereas in reality, the plain meaning of text is no hypothetical. The author takes the analogy much too far, then declares it wrong, playing his own motte and bailey in reverse.
I will stick my neck out and predict, if the wording were changed slightly to reference "you" rather than some hypothetical parent, and if the experiment were definitely not otherwise skewed (such as with a hostile researcher or very strange sample), fewer than 15% of Americans would disagree with the statement which "92% of Americans agree with".
As I said before though, the conclusion is so absurd on its face that I originally thought it not worth debating.
They didn't. As noted by OP, "The respondents rated a multi-day amusement-park trip at 92 percent for adherence to instructions and 4.7 out of 7 for reasonableness." Which, as Justice Barrett herself noted, those are two different things: "Was the babysitter’s trip consistent with the parent’s instruction? Maybe in a literal sense, because the instruction was open-ended. But was the trip consistent with a reasonable understanding of the parent’s instruction? Highly doubtful."
As noted, it does not. The paper asks about both.
Look, I do not mean to defend the paper, because I haven't looked at it closely. Only that your initial condemnation of the methodology ("This is so clearly scientific malpractice. . . . Presumably the question was very skewed against the analogy to begin with"), without even reading it, based solely on your personal incredulity, was ill-advised.
Yes good point, but 4.7 is still extremely high.
You're referring to [adherence for instructions] vs. [adherence to intent of instructions], right? That's not what I'm talking about. My next paragraph was an attempt to explain. Appealing to the spirit of an instruction means attempting to interpret based on the words and context what the intention of that instruction was. Only in hypotheticals is there literally zero context. Thus, equating a hypothetical (which has literally zero context) with an [appeal to the spirit of a law's wording with no context] ignores the spirit of [the argument that we must follow the spirit of the law]. Put in a tiny bit more context--say that you're the parent, rather than some stranger--and I think most people would interpret the babysitter's actions as highly unreasonable. This is still less context than most textualists would argue should be used to interpret laws.
Convoluted, I know, but hopefully this clears up why I referenced the need for a "double-interpretation." Calls to follow the spirit of something must themselves be dealt with in good faith rather than in overly literal ways.
There are some things I'm easily confident enough about to discount all such studies out of hand. I don't care if literally every single scientist in the world collaborated to produce this thing; it's just not true. I'd sooner believe that every scientist is collaborating to lie to me personally than believe that that hypothetical is seen as reasonable. If the methodology is good, that makes me dislike the study more, because it means the author was flat-out lying rather than just using tricky tactics.
Yes, it is, though I would like to see a median.
But, in fairness, Justice Barrett said 1) "But was the trip consistent with a reasonable understanding of the parent’s instruction? Highly doubtful." But then, 2):
Essentially, she was saying that, unless there is context to the contrary, most people would say that the babysitter acted unreasonably. The survey was meant to determine whether that claim re the average person's context-free judgment of the babysitter's action is correct. So, of course they didn't ask about context.
So, I'll agree that the straightforward, literal interpretation of her analogy was addressed directly, which is a point in the researchers' favor. I just think that people interpret hypotheticals differently than they would interpret, for lack of a better term, "real" hypotheticals. In hypotheticals all actions may have plausible causes. Perhaps the babysitter had context clues which the interpreters of the hypothetical do not have, which explains why he acted the way he did.
In other words, people's natural inclination upon seeing strange behavior is to wonder what could cause that strange behavior, and perhaps assume there is some reasonable cause for it. Trying to determine whether such behavior is unreasonable absent context is thus inherently difficult.
More to the point, I think this takes the analogy too far. Yes, Barrett's point was that absent additional context, the babysitter acted unreasonably. However, laws always have more context than this context-less hypothetical. Unless you're interpreting her argument 100% literally, it seems reasonable to interpret her references to "no context" as actually meaning "very little context". That latter "very little context" is still more than is provided in the hypothetical, which is why I think that equating the two doesn't quite work.
Well, she doesn't literally say "no context." That was my summary of her argument. And the hypothetical in the study is the same as the one she suggests. They have the same amount of context.
Of course, part of the problem is that it is unclear why she thinks it is so clearly, on its face, outside the "use this to have fun" rule set forth by the parent. Presumably, if they were in NYC and the babysitter took the kids to Coney Island, that would be OK in Barrett's eyes. Is the difference that the trip is expensive? Is it because it is out of town? Is it because it is overnight? It certainly is not because an overnight trip to an amusement park is not "fun."
It is also possible that "babysitter" brings a different concept to mind for Barrett than for the people in the study.
I know. My point is that even though it's her hypothetical, it still isn't an exact 1:1 match to the legal reality, and to interpret it as such is to be overly literal. It's not meant to perfectly match reality in all respects.
Yes, you've discovered that her meaning was not more robotic and literal than a mathematical argument. It's all of the above. While the stated rule may have involved fun, that doesn't mean that literally any possible action tangentially related to fun becomes allowed.
I hate to keep harping on this point, but there really are two layers of interpretation here, and each must be applied. Her point is that words must be interpreted in the spirit in which they're given, and that point must itself also be interpreted in the spirit in which it was given. Her hypothetical only matters insomuch as it's used to illustrate a legal point. If you truly do disagree with her hypothetical, you can substitute it for another, as I mentioned, and the point it illustrates remains intact.
Fine, but what does any of that have to do with the quality of the research paper?
As for this:
How does that address anything that I just said? She fails to make clear why the hypothetical does not accord with reasonableness, which makes it difficult to discern whether reasonable people might disagree with her. And your comment illustrates the problem: Surely, if the trip is unreasonable, it cannot be because it is "tangentially related" to fun, because 2-day trip to Disney World is not "tangentially related" to fun; it is megafun (for kids, at least). The problem must lie elsewhere.
But her legal point rests on an empirical claim, which is that almost everyone would consider the actions of the hypothetical babysitter to be unreasonable. And that empirical claim is called into question by the survey mentioned in the article. And, that is a key point of the article: that her approach is far more subjective than she realizes. To be clear, I am not saying that the article is correct. Nor am I criticizing the major question doctrine, which seems to make sense (though I have not thought it through to any great extent). Nevertheless, had she articulated why she thinks the babysitter was unreasonable, she might have gone a long way toward assuaging concerns that the major questions doctrine is overly subjective.
I think her legal point is that there are circumstances where actions are unreasonable. The fact that her example is one that people disagree on does not establish that the argument generally fails.
Consider the following: My son asks if he can use my credit card to go to a ball game. I say yes. He asks can be by someone a drink if he meets someone special. I say yes. He buys not just everyone in the stadium a drink, but everyone in every baseball stadium, and sets up a system whereby all future drinks are paid for on my dime, indefinitely. I think this is unreasonable, and I doubt that more than 15% of people would consider his actions reasonable. Ok, maybe 20% of people would be ok with this.
Is this example more analogous to paying off everyone's student loan debt? I don't know, but I do know that there are unreasonable uses of permission.
I think the best metric is possibly that spending an order of magnitude (or possibly two orders, and definitely three) higher than intended is probably suspect. A babysitter who chartered a plane to Disneyland is probably unreasonable. One that hires Justin Bieber to sing the kids to sleep is even more unreasonable (I actually know someone who had Bieber sing their kids to sleep. Beiber did it for free as a favor.) The point of the example is that there are expenditures that are so much larger than the expected amounts that they require explicit permission.
I am not sure what the intended amount of loan forgiveness was in the bill in question. If the permission was expected to be applied on an individual case basis, then blanket forgiveness is perhaps 10 million times more expensive than was intended. This is close to buying everyone in every stadium a beer.
If the bill was intended to allow the forgiveness of 100k people (all active duty servicemen), then stretching it to less than 1 million is probably not objectively unreasonable, as it is within an order of magnitude. This is analogous to my son meeting up to ten girls and buying them drinks. This is excessive but not unreasonably so.
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