Many people seem to totally lack the capability of understanding simple questions. I often have to ask yes/no questions, and even then I have to say "please answer yes or no". Then I have to go beating 1 bit information at the time...
In my experience of sometimes being on the other side of these conversations, the problem is that the person asking for ‘yes/no’ answers is exhibiting a lack of understanding of the subject being discussed. They are asking questions that are not relevant or perhaps even misleading. I’m struggling to get them to stop focusing on irrelevant or wrong things, and listen to more background information that’s required to reach a base level of shared understanding.
You can do that by interrupting and asking them questions. The place to teach them is not by trying to backdoor what you think is important into the answer to some other question that they are asking. They will feel like you're being deceptive, because you are.
You are making a lot of assumptions there and seem to think that this happens to me all the time. I don't have this problem in most conversations.
To the point you're saying without the seeming antagonism - yes, you're right, a quick "wait, I think we need to talk about the background here because we're both making different assumptions" can and does work in most conversations with most people.
In the worst cases, though, some people take it as "ugh, why can't they just provide a yes/no answer to my simple question!?" and the conversation can become increasingly difficult.
If someone's thinking this a lot - like, they think most people are doing this to them to the extent that they wonder why "many people seem to totally lack the capability of understanding simple questions" - it would be wise for them to re-examine their assumptions.
In my experience of sometimes being on the other side of these conversations, the problem is that the person asking for ‘yes/no’ answers is exhibiting a lack of understanding of the subject being discussed. They are asking questions that are not relevant or perhaps even misleading. I’m struggling to get them to stop focusing on irrelevant or wrong things, and listen to more background information that’s required to reach a base level of shared understanding.