[HN Gopher] The XY Problem
___________________________________________________________________
The XY Problem
Author : st_goliath
Score : 60 points
Date : 2021-05-06 11:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (xyproblem.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (xyproblem.info)
| melff wrote:
| Is there a name for when person A asks B and B thinks A has
| fallen victim to the XY probem but A really didn't and has indeed
| an unusual problem at their hands?
| zamadatix wrote:
| I've always called it "The XY problem problem". It's not
| usually an issue in person but in async messaging it can waste
| a lot of time if you're not careful. And it goes on forever
| "The XY problem problem problem" where someone is aware what an
| XY problem is but thinks this is for sure an XY problem problem
| so they refuse to spend time thinking otherwise. Then of course
| "The XY problem problem problem problem"...
|
| In those async situations it's best to provide bits of
| information for both directions every time, in person it's
| usually best to collaborate.
| caturopath wrote:
| Overfitting?
|
| In my experience, people who have proven fairly to themselves
| that they're in an odd situation can prove it to others pretty
| easily. "I'm not doing $Z because..."
| not2b wrote:
| Yes, the name is "Stack Overflow".
| [deleted]
| dmd wrote:
| http://3e.org/xy.png
| firefoxd wrote:
| Many will refer to stackoverflow since that's the reason this
| website was created in the first place. But one of the most
| important thing in solving problems in programming is context.
|
| Here is one real question I got in an interview: How do you
| efficiently sort a table containing a million record in
| JavaScript?
|
| My question was "in the front end?"
|
| And my answer was it's probably not a good idea to sort that much
| data in the front end since the user will most likely not be able
| to consume that much data. Since it was an interview, I explained
| how to sort the table anyway.
|
| Sorting in the backend makes sense, but even then using a
| database is more efficient then doing it in JavaScript.
|
| If this question was on SO, I'd probably answer: You shouldn't do
| that in the front end, explain why. And of course they will get
| pissed for not answering how.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| But it is nice when you stumble across an answered question
| that fits your use case.
|
| For instance, if I was making heavy use of local storage where
| I have no back end, it is nice if that question is already
| answered. At that point I don't really care if the previous
| user got a better method, that's what I need to do now.
| peterthehacker wrote:
| I've heard this cited by a couple ctos I've worked for. It's a
| popular metaphor in the engineering department. I think it's
| articulating an important message, but in an ineffective way. The
| name "XY Problem" is too vague and easy to forget. I prefer
| simpler messages like:
|
| - What's the root cause of the problem?
|
| - Is this a solution looking for a problem?
|
| As software engineers, part of our job is naming things well and
| the "XY Problem" isn't a great name IMO.
| vinniec wrote:
| But sometimes this happens because the questioner wants to avoid
| other people's waste of time asking a more specific and limited
| question instead of a generic one. Often this happens because the
| environment where the question is asked is highly selective and
| does not accept too verbose and indirect questions. The solution
| is to be more open to conversation on both sides.
| caturopath wrote:
| That isn't my experience at all. In contexts that are highly
| conversational, people constantly ask XY problems. It's hard to
| see that the path you went down so far may or may not be
| correct, so a lot of people just assume their last three
| determinations in solving their problem were valid.
|
| Conversational environments certainly make it easier to root
| cause them, but it's often still painful.
| js8 wrote:
| I find it strange that some people get offended with this
| approach to problem solving. There is this legendary interview
| question, "I have a mountain in India and I want to move it in
| France, how do I do it?". And some questioners (presumably people
| who like to be authoritative, in charge and order people around),
| really seem to dislike if my first impulse is to ask "Why do you
| want to do that? What is your goal?" And they respond with
| something like, "Why does it matter, just get on with the task, I
| didn't hire you to ask questions!"
|
| Because the method really does depend on what you want to do. Can
| I destroy the mountain? Do I have to recreate the geological
| structure, or is it the biosphere you're interested in, or
| perhaps there is a holy place on that mountain that is important?
| And so on. If you want me to think outside the box (and
| presumably the question is posed to test that skill), then you
| have to be willing to provide more details on what you ultimately
| want.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| To satisfy the authoritarian impulse, one can ask "in what
| manner should the mountain to be moved? Would just transporting
| the dirt be enough?"
|
| And if this is "just interview question", the literal answer is
| "I don't want the fricken mountain moved to France, I just want
| to this exercise in hypothetical done with and you're not
| making it easy on me"
| ben509 wrote:
| > And some questioners ... really seem to dislike if my first
| impulse is to ask "Why do you want to do that?"
|
| An interview works both ways. If you can suss out the
| interviewer's nature and help you determine it's not a place
| you'd want to work, then trust that impulse.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The XY approach _can_ be perfectly legitimate. You 're a domain
| expert. You have a problem X. It's a standard problem in your
| domain but only you can really understand it. However, you can
| see that a general purpose approach, Y, could solve it. Y might
| even sound complicated but is at least fully explainable whereas
| X isn't easily explainable at all.
|
| Of course, the "XY problem" usually presumes a naive person
| ("user")who falsely imagines the more complicated-sounding
| solution Y would solve their simple problem. And that's a pretty
| common situation.
|
| The general approach for all this stuff is whenever someone is
| asking for the solution to a complicated or weird question, just
| verify they have some reason to approach it that way. There's no
| reason to automatically assume either they do or they don't and
| not assuming anything lets you approach them more respectfully.
| Jiocus wrote:
| I've found that this issue crops up in situations where someone
| has a new app idea. They don't possess the skills to create it
| themselves because they're in a different domain.
|
| They ask you about building Y, maybe even Z but they don't want
| to give X away in case someone steals their 'disruptive product'.
|
| There is too little information to go forward, too little trust.
| Project doesn't take off.
|
| _" the world wasn't ready for X, anyway"_, they say. Whatever
| that was.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| This is the entire game in consulting. Your client comes to you
| asking for something but with certain expectations in mind. The
| job of a good consultant is to meet those expectations - stated
| or not. You learn pretty quickly how to figure out what they're
| _really_ asking.
| dahart wrote:
| Someone on HN a year or so back mentioned they like to call this
| 'going _up_ the rabbit hole'. It's a great name, so it stuck with
| me.
| dejj wrote:
| Nice touch: Angela and Obama instead of Alice and Bob
| javier10e6 wrote:
| To call the XY learning QA a problem is akin to calling learning
| to swim a problem. It can be a problem on a sinking ship but not
| at the community pool.
| wayneftw wrote:
| My wife does this all the time. I didn't know there was a name
| for it!
|
| By now I know to ask her what the actual problem is right up
| front.
| not2b wrote:
| Sometimes the XY problem occurs because the fact that X is being
| worked on is a company trade secret and the reporter tries to
| turn it into Y, which can be disclosed. This isn't always
| successful.
| [deleted]
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| This is similar to the "faster horse" quote. If you care about
| helping someone, it's important to understand what they really
| need.
|
| That said, I enjoy giving literal answers to things. Sometimes
| it's a fun challenge, others I'm just being a smartass, and
| occasionally it's a teaching opportunity. A few times I've done
| this to younger team members, then set myself a reminder to check
| on them to see if they figured out why that's not the best way.
| reggieband wrote:
| Reminds me of the classic stack overflow answer to "RegEx match
| open tags except XHTML self-contained tags" [1]
|
| 1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-
| open...
| ben509 wrote:
| The XY problem is really a collaboration problem... most
| discussion media are all horribly transient. When you're
| explaining a problem you did figure out all that context, but
| you're guessing as to what context the next person needs. That's
| necessarily going to leave out things you don't know you need to
| explain.
|
| At work, I have to go from team to team for some issues, and
| we're special (yay) because we're an acquisition, so we're doing
| some very odd things by corporate standards. Even the fact that
| we have a customer facing application is unusual, and I've
| essentially renamed our API to be "BackendForFrontend" entirely
| because each new team assumes our API must be entirely developer
| facing.
|
| What I've found is it's tremendously helpful to always link back
| to (and quote from) Jira issues so the necessary context is
| present whenever I'm asking questions. Whether it's Jira or
| Confluence, you want to treat problem resolution the way you do
| development: it's a permanent thing you're building. And I mean
| permanent, if you solve a problem, you do a write-up for future
| you.
| coldtea wrote:
| The worst XY problem is knowing you want to do Y, even if its
| strange or whatever, asking how to do it, and people asking you
| "why do Y? Do X instead".
|
| Happens all the time in Stack Overflow.
|
| Just answer the fucking question, and then give the lecture on
| why you think it should be done that way, or why it shouldn't be
| done at all...
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Yeah, that drives me nuts. It would take me quite a long time
| to explain the combination of constraints, requirements, goals,
| and office politics that make Y the thing I _actually have to
| do_ , yet even when I say as much in the question people still
| insist that they know my problem domain better than I do. It is
| maddening.
|
| Don't take the actual problem and pretend it is an easier one
| you know how to solve just to look smart and/or helpful.
| chowells wrote:
| There are a few people who frequently have this complaint, but
| I don't think it's a real problem. If you actually need to do Y
| in a situation where most people who think they need to do Y
| are wrong, it's not everyone else's responsibility to divine
| that you are the magical case. It's your responsibility to
| demonstrate that you actually do know what you're doing.
|
| This isn't something you do by discussing how unfair other
| people are. It's something you do by communicating the
| constraints you're working inside, your knowledge of more
| typical solutions, and why they don't work for you.
|
| If you aren't providing that information, you're wasting the
| time of everyone who is voluntarily helping others. It's not
| their fault that you're not providing critical information for
| answering your question effectively.
|
| When you're the special case, you have to communicate that
| fact. It's just wasting everyone's time when you expect others
| to know it without communication.
| mjw1007 wrote:
| It is a real problem.
|
| I've never asked a question on Stack Overflow, but many, many
| times I have entered a question into a search engine,
| received a Stack Overflow link with my question at the top,
| and been greeted with several screens full of text none of
| which is an attempt to answer the question.
|
| In other contexts Stack Overflow's conventions are set up on
| the understanding that they're trying to produce a curated
| database of questions with their answers, rather than acting
| as a technical support forum for individuals. It's a real
| shame that culture doesn't extend to dealing with this case
| properly.
|
| (The most common case is where the question is something like
| "does A provide a function for doing B?" and the correct
| answer is simply "No".)
| SatvikBeri wrote:
| I've had two cases on SO where I explicitly started my
| question with "I know X is the standard way to solve this
| problem, I can't do X because I work at a big company that
| has policy Z which prevents that, so I'm trying to make Y
| work, here's what I've done..."
|
| and the question was marked as a duplicate of a "how to do
| X?" question and closed.
|
| I've also had plenty of good experiences on StackOverflow, so
| YMMV, but in general I've found other forums better.
| yukinon wrote:
| >When you're the special case, you have to communicate that
| fact. It's just wasting everyone's time when you expect
| others to know it without communication.
|
| I strongly disagree. The base assumption is to take it at
| face value, and therefore should be to answer it that way.
| The recommendation that comes after is always the optional
| part. You're wasting everyone's time if you give the Y only,
| and optionally the X.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _There are a few people who frequently have this complaint,
| but I don 't think it's a real problem. If you actually need
| to do Y in a situation where most people who think they need
| to do Y are wrong, it's not everyone else's responsibility to
| divine that you are the magical case._
|
| Well, that's strange, because what they do is still divining.
| They try to divine "what you actually wanted", even though
| you asked another thing.
|
| Even worse, a lot of the time the one doing the asking has
| explicitly said "I know this is unorthodox" or "just answer
| how to do Y please, don't give me your 'better' options".
|
| It's especially annoying when what you what to do is hack
| something (and not do it the official way), bypass some
| restriction that absolutely prevents X, try an alternative
| style, push the envelope, or generally think Y is better even
| though the "conventional" sheep-like answer is "do X".
|
| An example of the latter would be trying to use Java with
| simple POJOs and lite patterns in ~2005, and everybody
| suggesting you go through some monstrous J2EE setup with half
| the GoF book thrown in instead because that's "idiomatic".
|
| Or e.g. trying to ask about trying to use a regex to quickly
| parse some known-quantity HTML where regex will work just
| fine (say, extract all href out of all a elements), and
| everybody insisting they lecture you on proper html parsing
| instead, not caring about your use case.
| dsr_ wrote:
| 'a lot of the time the one doing the asking has explicitly
| said "I know this is unorthodox" or "just answer how to do
| Y please, don't give me your 'better' options".'
|
| After being burnt by a person who never wanted to do
| anything in a conventional, well-supported way* and kept
| making that explicit request, I have given up volunteering
| my time to appease them.
|
| At work I get paid to say "I know a couple of ways of doing
| that, but if you could tell me more about your problem and
| the constraints, I can give a better answer."
|
| *Problem: router and three laptops need to be networked.
| Conventional solution: ethernet cables or wifi. Requested
| solution: IP over serial (SLIP or PPP) over USB-serial
| connectors. Had not purchased USB-serial adapters.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > After being burnt by a person who never wanted to do
| anything in a conventional, well-supported way* and kept
| making that explicit request, I have given up
| volunteering my time to appease them.
|
| That's fine and completely fair. Just don't provide
| unasked for answers as an alternative.
| pwdisswordfish8 wrote:
| > known-quantity HTML where regex will work just fine (say,
| extract all href out of all a elements),
|
| Regex doesn't work fine even on that. You still need to
| tell apart actual tags from contents of attributes,
| comments, uninterpreted contents of <script>, and so on. A
| regex alone doesn't give you the ability to do that. If you
| want to parse HTML, you need a parser. Simple as that.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Only if you care about absolute accuracy in sufficiently
| complex pages. There are many use cases I can think of
| that really don't.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Parsing HTML with regexes is fine if you're not solving a
| _general case_. A regex "parser" will carry implicit
| assumptions about the document structure.
|
| Like, I know "<div.+>.+foo\s+([a-z]+)" will work, because
| I've crafted it for a specific site whose sources I've
| seen.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Regex doesn't work fine even on that._
|
| Most of the time it works just fine for my purposes.
|
| And it's not like I don't know alternatives. And I've
| written a toy compiler in the past (C with classes
| subset), done heavy XSLT work, know how to write a parser
| (manually, with flex/yacc, with PEG), have parsed XML
| with SAX, DOM, XOM, have used xpath expressions, css and
| jquery selectors, and used libs like BeautifulSoup.
|
| Most of the time a quick regex will do just fine for that
| purpose.
|
| See, I don't intend to send the href's to the ISS or to
| some medical equipment that will blow up if, god forbid,
| I accidentally found an A tag in a comment or inside a
| script or attribute.
|
| And I'll probably run another regex or simple editor or
| awk filter to get rid of some false positives and I'll be
| fine.
|
| > _If you want to parse HTML, you need a parser._
|
| That's a tautology, so it's always true.
|
| If on the other hand you just need to extract some
| information from an HTML file, and you can just open the
| bloddy file and see its structure and it is perfectly
| servicable with a regex, you might not need a parser at
| all. Simple as that.
| jbay808 wrote:
| If you're the one asking the question for the first time,
| yes, you should make it clear in your wording that you know
| about X and you really want Y.
|
| There are two failure modes though:
|
| 1) You really want to do Y, not X. You are not asking the
| question, just searching for the answer, and find that "how
| do you do Y?" question, and the answer is "do X instead".
| Because you're a special case, these answers will likely
| dominate your search results.
|
| 2) You decide to ask the question. You make it very clear
| that you want to do Y, not X. Your question is closed as a
| duplicate of the one whose answer was "do X".
| tedunangst wrote:
| This happens all the time, and no, not only in super
| exceptional special cases. Ask how to change the spark plugs
| on a Lotus. Nobody has a freaking clue, but their neighbor
| told them Lotus is unreliable, so you get half a dozen yahoos
| replying "you should buy a Toyota, it's more reliable."
| Thanks, geniuses, but I already have a reliable car, I also
| happen to like playing with my Lotus, which I did not
| purchase because I was tricked into believing it was a great
| value. I feel I should not need to provide a full inventory
| of my garage and driving habits to ask a basic question.
| chowells wrote:
| Ok, you're annoyed at rude people. That's fair. Rude people
| are maddening.
|
| But that's not what the XY problem is about. There is no
| case where "you should have bought a Toyota" is a valid
| response to "how do I change the spark plugs on my Lotus?".
| That's just internet jerks being... Jerks.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| That sounds great in theory, but in practice you end up
| having this enormous, long list of "defenses" as to why it
| isn't an XY problem, and then ... people will ignore them
| anyway. This has happened to me on Hacker News.
|
| People hit that XY button more than needed, and I have seen
| this even in the earliest days of Linux. I remember, pre-
| Google, when asking some questions on IRC about recompiling
| the kernel for my distro, I would get smart-ass responses
| like "What you _should_ have done is selected this other
| distro. "
|
| It's led to me rarely asking questions if I think the issue
| could be construed as XY.
| Groxx wrote:
| In the absence of evidence-you-know-you-need-Y: the odds are
| often HEAVILY skewed towards you not knowing about X, or being
| confused about either X or Y's purpose.
|
| If you do tech support of any kind with random people, it's
| pretty clear that a majority simply don't know what's
| available, or why Y may not be a good idea. They need to do a
| thing, heard that Y can do it, and now they're asking how to
| use Y - reasonable, but frequently misguided. When Y is
| dramatically more complex (either harder to set up, or more
| error-prone to use), recommending X before sinking a ton of
| effort into explaining Y solves a lot of cases quickly, for
| both parties.
| lhorie wrote:
| I get these types of questions from time to time, and the way
| it usually goes is:
|
| them: how can I do Y?
|
| me: you can do A, but you're probably going to run into B, I'd
| recommend doing C instead because D
|
| them: ok, well, I'm already too committed to Y, so I'm going w/
| A. Thanks!
|
| them, later: hey, I ran into B. Can you help me?
|
| me: ...
|
| At that point, I just accept that sometimes people need to get
| burned to learn their lesson.
|
| There _are_ also cases where people ask how to do Y, but
| explain that it 's not an XY problem because such and such
| reasons. These often actually turn into stimulating
| conversations because now you're in brainstorming territory and
| it's clear that the conversation is about procuring novel
| solutions.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| I suspect the type of person who answers questions unhelpfully
| like this is often highly experienced, but without terribly
| deep technical knowledge (in the rigorous, scientific or
| academic sense). You get an often practical answer, but it's
| just not helpful when you are pushing the boundaries in any
| particular domain.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I think people are treating this is as a binary issue.
|
| IMO both Y should be answered as well as X should be
| discussed. Why can't an answer have both? The frustrating
| part is when Y is never to be found on the answer thread.
|
| + 1 on your username :)
| moralestapia wrote:
| Regarding SO, it suffers from a strange form of cognitive
| dissonance:
|
| A. You can't ask "what's the best way to do X" because, for
| whatever reason, these kind of questions are not aligned with
| "the site's scope".
|
| but
|
| B. When you ask something specific, you get a lot of "it's
| better if you do X" answers. I even have had some _really nice_
| questions closed because some mods thought I was "asking the
| wrong thing".
|
| Both behaviors are allowed and encouraged -\\_(tsu)_/-.
| xscott wrote:
| I once asked a question about an obscure corner of C++. I was
| only trying to learn more about the language[0]... The answer
| with the most useful information also contained a long and
| patronizing rant about why I should never do that. I'm not a
| novice, and I'm capable of deciding for myself whether I should
| or shouldn't use something.
|
| I just couldn't bring myself to give that jerk credit, so I
| deleted the question and never logged in again. There are a lot
| of smart people there, but it's just not worth dealing with
| them.
|
| Maybe this isn't an XY problem, but I suspect it's just as
| common (at least on most of the Stack Exchange sites).
|
| [0] Anyone who thinks they know all of C++ doesn't even know
| what they don't know.
| js8 wrote:
| You have to consider that SO exists not only to answer your
| specific problem, but also to help other users who might face a
| similar problem. In that context, it might be helpful to
| mention, if you are the asking person, include the details why
| you cannot do X, if you know you can't; or, if your question
| doesn't include details about your specific circumstance,
| answers that mention that common solution is to do X instead.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| No.
|
| User asks I want to do Y.
|
| The responding party should in my opinion:
|
| - Provide a solution to Y _first_. This is OP 's point.
|
| - Then as a corollary, provide some of their guesswork of
| what X might be and if it is true, then this is how to solve
| X without having to do Y.
|
| So, it is still beneficial to n00bs and the uninformed, just
| puts the direct answer to Y _first_. That 's all OP is asking
| and I agree with that.
|
| Most of the time, smartass responses go into the guesswork
| regime by assuming the User wanted to do X. More than often
| User actually wanted to do Z, it's not always true and it is
| polluting SO against the spirit of "Direct question --->
| Direct answer" because discovery and searching of answers
| happen through Y, not X. Most people came to SO because of Y,
| that's how they landed there in the first place.
| chowells wrote:
| This is not a good approach. For the typical person asking
| a question, you waste their time at best. At worst, they
| actually use your solution to Y and ignore why it's bad.
| Both of those are significantly worse than clarifying the
| problem in the first place.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| No one is saying we shouldn't provide why Y is bad. I
| said, it should be a corollary.
|
| The bad approach is when the entire thread is full of
| guesses of what X might be without knowing the full
| context. Y is nowhere to be found. It breaks the UX of
| SO.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >but also to help other users who might face a similar
| problem
|
| They could ask their own questions.
|
| I'd rather have a database of specific questions with
| specific answers than "X-Ys" all over the place.
| js8 wrote:
| Your question, without explanation why you want to do Y,
| when obvious way is to do X, is then not specific enough to
| people who have XY problem and are not aware of it.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >not specific enough to people who have XY problem and
| are not aware of it
|
| Again, they should be expected to ask their own questions
| on the site, so they could get the answers they're
| looking for. Come on, that's not hard to grasp.
|
| A question like "How to delete a project from Google
| Cloud Console" [1], should have a clear, definite answer.
| I wouldn't expect to see something like "this is how you
| register an account on AWS", just in case "the user is
| changing providers".
|
| 1: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16621921/how-to-
| delete-a...
| nonameiguess wrote:
| The reality that Stack Overflow doesn't seem to want to admit
| is a huge number of questions are coming from people in
| school, MOOCs, going through tutorials, books, whatever the
| case may be, trying to learn and doing things in an
| intentionally suboptimal way for pedagogical purpose, even
| though you would never deploy such code to production. Or
| they're working through LeetCode or something. If an
| assignment says they have to do something a particular way,
| they don't have a choice and it's patronizing and annoying to
| see all the responses questioning why they're doing exactly
| what the assignment requires them to do.
|
| Might also point out that a lot of people finding the
| question later on Google because they the same question are
| just trying to do the same assignment, so Stack Overflow is
| undermining its own stated purpose here.
| edoceo wrote:
| isn't the XY problem that you don't _really_ know you want to
| do Y? and if you did know, wouldn 't you know?
| rzzzt wrote:
| You know you want to do Y, but you don't tell others that you
| actually want to do X, and Y seems like a reasonable thing
| (to you) to do to reach X.
| cramja wrote:
| Content aside (good points!), I love the site's simple layout.
| Though I did have some difficulty reading the code blocks because
| of the low contrast.
| unbalancedevh wrote:
| When somebody asks me a question, I find it best to answer their
| question directly (because maybe I don't understand their
| situation as well as they do), and then give them the information
| that I think they actually need (because maybe they're asking the
| wrong question).
|
| What I find very frustrating is when I ask a question, and get an
| "answer" that doesn't actually answer my question.
| intrepidhero wrote:
| To quote the TFA: After much interaction and _wasted time_ , it
| finally becomes clear that the user really wants help with X, and
| that Y wasn't even a suitable solution for X. (emphasis mine)
|
| Whose time was wasted? For the asker, the exploration of Y and
| the eventual realization that it is not a good way to pursue X is
| a learning experience with value. For the answerer, they may feel
| their time is wasted if the goal is to answer questions. But if
| the goal is to help the asker deepen their understanding then the
| discussion of Y isn't wasted time at all.
|
| This presupposes two things: 1. The asker must have the curiosity
| and humility to interrogate Y as their chosen method to reach X.
| 2. The answerer must set aside their ego in order to provide
| genuine help instead of patronizing advice.
|
| The question/answer format of Stack Overflow does not lend itself
| to curious exploration of questions and I think the gamification
| aspect rewards egotistical answerers. I say this despite deriving
| a lot of value from SO over the years.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> To quote the TFA
|
| Is that how "TFA" is used now?
| alphanumeric0 wrote:
| It's always good to ask the person about the context surrounding
| their question, but I also don't see much harm in seeking how to
| do Y, for the sake of Y. What is a 'strange problem to want to
| solve' anyways? To me, they are all just problems.
|
| Yes, it is often the case that the person has the wrong idea of
| how to solve X, but this does not always say something about the
| validity of problem Y. Often times knowing how to do Y is
| valuable for other contexts besides X. We should try to be
| friendly and make it clear that Y is not a good way to achieve X
| without downplaying Y, necessarily.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Also known as the "I don't know the answer to your question, but
| here's an answer to a different question so I can look smart"
| problem.
| caturopath wrote:
| That's not my experience. A lot of the time there is a VERY
| straightforward answer, e.g. "here's this evil metaprogramming
| thing" or "here's where you access this legacy representation
| with bitey cornercases" or whatever, which is trivial to
| provide (but also harmful).
| minikites wrote:
| This shows up in the library space as the Reference Interview:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_interview
|
| Patrons engaged in research show the same pattern and it's
| important for a librarian to accurately assess what the patron is
| truly looking for.
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