I think what they mean by ambiguous could itself be considered ambiguous.
Let's view this from the context of a classical AI problem, trying to be as neutral and computer-like as possible. In that case, the statement is not ambiguous, no. It consists of two events with a connective "when" indicating they happened simultaneously or near simultaneously. We can argue about how simultaneous they need to be for a "when" to be justified, but this paper isn't about factuality, just ambiguity.
Now the choice of politics primes people for culture war and so they will read into that statement more than exists. They will assume the writer is attempting to make you infer something, without outright stating it. They might be right! And with additional surrounding context, perhaps it would become completely certain. But it might also not be the case, for example the surrounding context could be something like this:
"The election was at a time of unprecedented economic turmoil. A loose regulatory approach had left the banking sector unconstrained and primed to fail. As such when President Obama was elected the markets crashed, proving his predictions correct".
Well, now it's unlikely that any causality is being implied even though the words are the same.
The paper authors say they want to improve clarity in communication, a worthy goal. But a serious problem in all political communication is the frequency with which people make statements that are factually correct, and which then get attacked anyway because some listener would rather attack a straw man than the actual claim (or hypothetical listener, in the frequent case of left-wing journalists writing about it under the guise of fact checking).
If they want to avoid this problem then at the very least they should have focused on claims that are syntactically ambiguous. Otherwise it opens them up to this very problem where they infer a straw man then blame the original speaker. No, the blame lies with the person committing the fallacy. Once you go down the route of blaming someone for your own interpretations you end up with micro-aggressions and other stuff that left-wing academics surely assume is obvious and normal, but isn't.
I'm seeing a definition for 'ambiguous' as "open to or having several possible meanings or interpretations". As you mentioned initially, some people may interpret those statement as causal. It seems pretty straightforward to me that the statement is ambiguous.
What definition do you use?
You also mention people attacking straw men and a bunch of stuff about left-wing academics, that seems unrelated?
Ambiguity is an aspect of language and how it's used, not what random people may or may not inferred from a statement. It's possible to be perfectly unambiguous, and still have some people get upset about things that you did not say. That's a big part of politics, in fact.
If you go with your definition of: something is ambiguous if someone, somewhere, might read things into the statement that aren't there, then basically no statement about anything people feel strongly about could ever be unambiguous. At some point you have to draw the line and say that if there's confusion it's the listeners fault, not the speakers (which is what labelling a statement as ambiguous means).
> You also mention people attacking straw men and a bunch of stuff about left-wing academics, that seems unrelated?
A straw man is when you attack a statement your opponent didn't actually make. If you claim a statement X is ambiguous because a statement Y is a fallacy but the speaker didn't say Y, then that's attacking a straw man.
The left-wing academics is related because for some strange reason they thought the best way to demonstrate utility was to try and show agreement between their technique and left wing "fact checkers", although the underlying point of their research didn't really need that.
If you'd like an opposing example, consider how statements by Bill Gates are routinely cast as evidence that he wants to depopulate the world. It happens because he says things like, "if we do a really good job of vaccines, maybe we can cut population growth by X%". Conspiracy-minded people take this statement out of context and then infer that Gates is stating a desire to kill people through vaccines i.e. direct causality, but he isn't as surrounding context makes clear, he's assuming a chain of indirect causality to do with better public health = longer life expectancy = less pressure to have lots of babies, and a defense of such an inference of direct causality by blaming Gates for being "ambiguous" would not be fair.
Let's view this from the context of a classical AI problem, trying to be as neutral and computer-like as possible. In that case, the statement is not ambiguous, no. It consists of two events with a connective "when" indicating they happened simultaneously or near simultaneously. We can argue about how simultaneous they need to be for a "when" to be justified, but this paper isn't about factuality, just ambiguity.
Now the choice of politics primes people for culture war and so they will read into that statement more than exists. They will assume the writer is attempting to make you infer something, without outright stating it. They might be right! And with additional surrounding context, perhaps it would become completely certain. But it might also not be the case, for example the surrounding context could be something like this:
"The election was at a time of unprecedented economic turmoil. A loose regulatory approach had left the banking sector unconstrained and primed to fail. As such when President Obama was elected the markets crashed, proving his predictions correct".
Well, now it's unlikely that any causality is being implied even though the words are the same.
The paper authors say they want to improve clarity in communication, a worthy goal. But a serious problem in all political communication is the frequency with which people make statements that are factually correct, and which then get attacked anyway because some listener would rather attack a straw man than the actual claim (or hypothetical listener, in the frequent case of left-wing journalists writing about it under the guise of fact checking).
If they want to avoid this problem then at the very least they should have focused on claims that are syntactically ambiguous. Otherwise it opens them up to this very problem where they infer a straw man then blame the original speaker. No, the blame lies with the person committing the fallacy. Once you go down the route of blaming someone for your own interpretations you end up with micro-aggressions and other stuff that left-wing academics surely assume is obvious and normal, but isn't.