When we came to a factual dispute among our many long conversations, as a good friend and I do as regularly as we get together, we used to wager one six-pack of beer -- which party's preference controlled the particular type of beer may, at times, have been part of the wager, too, but I recall a six-pack of budweiser as the standard, like that kilogram in France.
Sometimes one of us would win, sometimes the other. It didn't matter, for we meant to drink that six-pack together; in such cases the purpose of the bet was served: to provide the occasion for more conversation to spawn fresh dispute generating new bets and so still more fora for more discussion debate dispute wager beer and . . . research (. . . and so on)!
But, as often as not, dear reader, it would turn out that our question was poorly phrased, which is to say that the point upon which our dispute had arisen represented our shared (or divergent) error with respect to or mutual ignorance of the subject at hand.
I'm not sure whether the frequency or infrequency of such outcomes is surprising; I lack recorded examples (or memory) of the terms of either type of bet, as I likewise lack a true record of the outcomes. Something about the bet-frustrated-by-fundamental-misunderstanding struck me (obviously, by now) as remarkable.
I know mutual-error was my favorite outcome because it turned a competition, presuming winner and loser, into some sort of collaborative learning: all the losers win!
And sometimes we were both right, each, more or less unwittingly, espousing a different one of several theories/interpretations contending for acceptance, but those occasions, it may be argued, also fall into the category of mutual error, insofar as we both assumed a) that there was an authority b) which had one answer c) which was true and d) accepted as true, when, in fact, the is no answer and universities and commercial laboratories full of the persons most qualified to render an authoritative answer -- for conventional, peer-review, scholastic values of "authority" -- who spent lives and fortunes carefully delineating and then chipping away at the bounds of human ignorance of the subject, as to the particulars of some aspect of which we had presumed to wager beer.)
Nowadays, on the rare occasions when we can get together, and when, in our conversation, inexorably, dispute does arise over some trivial datum, what with the ubiquitous data network, we don't get to the betting part so much; instead, we roll our eyes and, gazing balefully up at the nearest shining missionary from Apple, ordained and, indeed, here among us to spread the Message In The iPhone, we mournfully intone, "if only there were a way to find out."
And, in short order, we all get to learn that our question was poorly phrased. And then argue about authority.