For instance, we have been working with a general contractor on a house remodel, and he refuses to give ballpark estimates (time or money) for anything, I think out of fear that we’ll later hold his guesses against him; if I want an estimate he’ll only reply with something fairly narrow after several days or a week, after putting in unnecessarily rigorous effort.
Since we don’t know the field and he doesn’t perfectly understand our priorities and preferences, this slow feedback loop is very frustrating: it prevents us from iterating and exploring the the space of possibilities, wastes his time precisely estimating stuff that we could make decisions about using a rough estimate, and wastes our time trying to get estimates from other sources which have less knowledge of the context.