[HN Gopher] It Hurts to Ask [pdf]
___________________________________________________________________
It Hurts to Ask [pdf]
Author : Dowwie
Score : 184 points
Date : 2022-09-27 09:46 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scholar.princeton.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (scholar.princeton.edu)
| daoist_shaman wrote:
| I did not expect to be reading partial differential equations
| regarding the mechanics of asking and offering help over my
| morning coffee.
| diordiderot wrote:
| > We show that a failure to ask can occur even when most helpers
| would help if told about the need, and that even though a greater
| need makes help both more valuable and more likely to be granted,
| it can reduce the propensity to ask. Furthermore, when potential
| helpers concerned about the recipient's ask-shyness can make
| spontaneous offers...
| diordiderot wrote:
| Why people don't ask
|
| 1. Debt aversion: Not wanting to repay the favor
|
| 2. Shame or embarrassment: asking reveals need, dependence, or
| lack of ability
|
| 3. Not wanting to impose
| tlogan wrote:
| I always wonder about that. Maybe the first two are the most
| important?
|
| Many companies have a policy to give a discount, upgrade or
| similar if customer asks nicely for it. But somehow majority
| of people are just rude and they want discount because "your
| hotel is shitty, too expensive service, etc." (put some lie
| or insult). There is no "thank you". No "please"
|
| So people will demand but not ask..
| Cerium wrote:
| My wife is very good at asking questions. She likes to ask
| nicely about discounts when shopping and frequently either
| gets a discount or gets good advice about one - eg "We
| don't have one now, but usually in June we have a good
| sale, come back in a month".
|
| When people ask my business for a discount I always offer
| one to people who ask nicely.
| lazide wrote:
| I think it's based in large part on the customers emotional
| state.
|
| Asking nicely requires a relatively positive emotional
| state. Demanding a discount due to a perceived slight,
| doesn't.
|
| In my experience, it's a lot easier for someone to stay or
| go into a negative place than a positive one.
| lisper wrote:
| In situations like that I always try to remind myself
| that the person I'm talking to is almost certainly not
| the one responsible for the shitty situation I'm dealing
| with. >90% of the time the shitty situation is the result
| of a policy decision made by someone that neither of us
| has ever met or likely will ever meet. Both of us are
| victims of their shitty decision. I find it much easier
| to be civil when I keep that in mind. And on those
| occasions when that's not enough I try to remember to
| say, "I'm sorry, I know you're not responsible for this
| shitty situation, and I apologize for taking my
| frustrations out on you." I've gotten an enormous amount
| of mileage out of this strategy over the years.
| lazide wrote:
| Sounds like you're self aware and actively trying to
| improve folks situation - you're a good person, and work
| to stay that way!
|
| If someone is in a customer service role, they'll deal a
| lot with the other part of the population who isn't
| (today) in that group, and they're very memorable.
| lisper wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words. It's not just about being a
| "good person", though I do try to be sympathetic towards
| my fellow travelers in life. It's more about being
| _effective_. Yelling at someone is just generally not a
| good way to motivate people, _especially_ if they don 't
| actually have the power to change the situation.
| lazide wrote:
| I'd also call that enlightened self-interest, which is a
| good thing IMO. The world needs more of it.
|
| Folks are not usually doing the opposite because they are
| intentionally being ineffective. It's a matter of either
| lack of knowledge or experience on how to do better, or
| more commonly, inability to manage themselves to a better
| state in their environment, and an environment that
| doesn't direct them to being in a better state either. It
| can be very difficult to do. Some people can't do it even
| in the most ideal of environments.
|
| So kudos for managing yourself to be in a good place in a
| harsh environment, or good fortune for being in an
| environment that directs you in a good direction - or
| likely a combination of both to various degrees. Either
| way, sounds like a plus for folks you interact with.
| dqpb wrote:
| 4. They don't really want to know the answer
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Seems like anonymity solves all of these (but introduces some
| other challenges)
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| That's an interesting observation.
|
| Also, one wonders why so many big charity donors are
| anonymous.
|
| Not only asking, but _giving_ is a potentially sensitive
| act that sometimes (perhaps from modesty) demands
| discretion /anonymity.
|
| When giving money to a homeless person I notice I'll prefer
| to do it when nobody is looking, and move on quickly,
| avoiding too much of a "thank-you".
|
| It's not just that act has to be "Kantian".
|
| There's definitely something about giving that carries the
| same barrier, and it's remedied by anonymity. I'll put cash
| money in a charity box, but would never use an identifiable
| card/digital method.
|
| Charities ought to know this if they're wise. that the
| "cash-less" society is the death sentence for them.
| retcore wrote:
| London (City of London) pre pandemic used to regularly
| have troops of charity employees hard selling their pitch
| and only accepting monthly subscription payments via
| Direct Debit, which is the legal equivalent of granting
| joint custody of your funds to the extent that the
| Halifax savings and loan used to refuse to cancel a
| direct debit payment for the customer, claiming that the
| customer has no such right, and the severality of
| granting regulated but effectively unfettered withdrawal
| authority lead me to think twice about taking them to
| court. The UK Direct Debit system doesn't even verify the
| customers name against the account details, wide open to
| fraud. Anyhow the argument for declining both cash and
| once off card donations wasn't anything to do with the
| sidewalk venue, but the charity wanting me to give them
| my tax deduction as well. They'd be lined up across
| Cheapside in funnel formations. No wonder that WFH is
| still so popular.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Ah yes..chuggers [1] (charity muggers)
|
| Sometime in the early 2000s the most of British charity
| was transformed (dragged through the mud) by corporate
| whackjobs, PR gurus, and Feng Shui design soothsayers to
| align their ley-lines and whatnot.
|
| Charity shops stopped having any actual bargains in them,
| and the money boxes we used to enjoy putting spare change
| into vanished.
|
| They made up all kinds of bizarre, frankly unbelievable
| stories about how the staff "weren't trained to handle
| cash" and that robbers would steal their charity tins (in
| broad daylight outside Waterloo station under 200 CCTV
| cameras... like Jimmy Reckon!)
|
| Then all those charity scandals about abuse and
| corruption came out.
|
| Heartbreaking what a few clueless, vicious vandals and
| scumbags in suits can do to brand reputations earned over
| centuries.
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/04
| /secret...
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| It solves 1 and 2, but not 3. You are still imposing,
| whether or not your identity is known.
| [deleted]
| danielbln wrote:
| A reason why I like to ask large language models a bunch of
| things, it takes care of all 3 issues. Of course, it's not
| always suitable, but if it is, I prefer it over burdening a
| human with my query.
| peteradio wrote:
| 4. Knowing the answer is going to be shortsighted and miss
| the point of the question.
| StevenWaterman wrote:
| 4. Not wanting to be rejected and seem demanding
|
| Even when there's a 90% chance of being accepted, the
| expected value could be negative
| _def wrote:
| I think you are right. Luckily, to fix these worries they can
| be translated to some principles one can live by if one wants
| to participate in overcoming this societal problem:
|
| 1. Help people without expecting to be repaid for it in any
| form
|
| 2. Practice empathy for shortcomings of others
|
| 3. Speak up if you don't want to or are not able to help
| someone
| kd5bjo wrote:
| There's also a potential issue of the "help" being a net-
| negative, even when provided. If someone has strong ideas
| about how the work should be done that differ from yours,
| for instance, accepting their help can make things worse.
| Unfortunately, you usually can't know whether this is the
| case until _after_ they 've already started.
| lazide wrote:
| It's not uncommon, in say urban homelessness, that
| shelters or food banks will have conditions that many of
| the people on the street consider unconscionable or
| impossible to meet.
|
| Some reflection on them tends to be informative about
| many of the challenges on both sides, and the nature of
| the problem.
|
| Some of them include shelters with:
|
| - No dog rules (because many people have dogs which are
| poorly behaved, lack immunizations, and have attacked
| other people at the shelters in the past). Many folks
| have animals for companionship and protection.
|
| - No drug rules, including Alcohol (because many people
| have gone on drug fueled benders and attacked others at
| the shelters in the last). Many persistent homeless folks
| have drug problems too.
|
| - Sex segregation rules (because women have been raped by
| others at the shelter in the past). The problem is, many
| homeless women also have boyfriends that provide a
| significant degree of safety and support, and even with
| sex segregation, the shelters have predators.
|
| But what else are they supposed to do?
|
| If they don't make rules to at least protect others in
| the environment, they're making a giant attractive
| nuisance/hazard. If they make exceptions, they're asking
| to be attacked or sued themselves. (You'd be surprised
| how many activists are happy to spend serious money suing
| over something like that).
| lazide wrote:
| Good principles.
|
| They also sounds like a recipe for being taken advantage of
| or abused in an Urban environment, or if applied naively.
|
| In my experience, do it long enough, and blindly enough,
| and it'll end up collecting the worst - in any environment
| it's applied to - when the group set is large.
|
| Mostly because of a filtering effect. The folks who need
| help to get self sufficient will use the help, get self
| sufficient, then go elsewhere.
|
| The folks who will fall back on bad habits, will use the
| help, and break themselves again, and then get into a cycle
| of dependence on the help until either the help is
| withdrawn (which often causes anger), or they find an even
| juicier offer of help.
|
| It isn't a large percentage of people who are like the
| latter group - maybe 1-2%. But given enough folks and
| enough time, and it'll end up collecting a hard core group
| of people that will be a serious problem.
| [deleted]
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > asking reveals need, dependence,
|
| This is a much bigger issue than people realise in our
| technological society.
|
| Once, interaction with any doctor would be considered
| confidential. Today surveillance capitalism and so-called
| "big data" creates a new problem for everyone, young or old,
| male or female.
|
| We've long known that many men "die of embarrassment",
| because they won't go to the doctor. Pride/shame aside, that
| now affects everyone. People stop reporting symptoms because
| they don't want the stigma or economic penalty resulting from
| data being "shared" (increasingly without consent for
| "research" etc) - potentially to employers, insurance
| companies, and various gatekeepers popping up in the digital
| world.
|
| It's ironic at many levels.
|
| The information age should give us better health through ease
| of communication and access to data. However, the research
| benefits to the many that accrue from big-data are a burden
| upon the few/individuals. Searching on Google for medical
| ailments is a sure way to let the advertising world know all
| about your health complaints, real or imagined, and invite
| spam, inappropriate and intrusive insinuations. And, as we
| know recently, for women seeking abortions it can lead to
| violence or imprisonment.
|
| So there is an odd communistic utilitarianism at play that
| defeats the very benefits our technologies should bring.
| rocqua wrote:
| We do need to be careful about medical data sharing. It has
| risks. However I doubt there are any (or any meaningful
| number of) cases of doctors and medical data-sharing
| actually causing stigma or economic penalties. That is
| outside of the 'traditional' a doctor just tells some
| friends. But that traditional case happens regardless of
| big data.
|
| The reason medical data sharing is risky is because _if_ it
| does leak, it can cause large stigma and economical damage.
| But I am not aware of any big-data related cases where that
| did happen. The legal protections (imperfect as they are)
| have either worked, or have caused the people who abuse
| them to hide their tracks.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| The problem isn't about where data _is_ shared or _is_
| leaked. The problem is if it is perceived to be, and if
| those who perceive it so are influenced by the
| perception.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > I doubt there are any cases ... of data-sharing
| actually causing stigma or economic penalties.
|
| That's a strong claim.
|
| It took me 10 second to find these 4 stories of leaks of
| up to 45 million records and many written accounts of
| distress, lost jobs and broken relationships as
| consequences.
|
| https://news.trendmicro.com/2021/07/28/biggest-health-
| sector...
|
| https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/medical-data-
| leak...
|
| https://securereading.com/medical-data-leak-database-of-
| huma...
|
| https://americanretrieval.com/medical-records-breach/
|
| But as my sibling poster says too, your unevidenced
| doubts are neither here nor there, because it's the
| (equally unevidenced with respect to specifics) doubts of
| ordinary people that matter.
|
| And let's be honest, that mistrust is justified in a time
| where data leaks and abuse is rampant.
|
| Medical professionals and researchers may all be saints,
| but their halos are only as bright as the company they
| keep... Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon... and other big-
| tech cloud infrastructure on which sensitive data systems
| are built.
|
| Of course it's a tragedy. Somewhere in that data are
| cures and remedies. But we can't have nice things if some
| are allowed to crap in the punch-bowl and drive the
| guests out of the party.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Plus being told it's wrong for the poor to beg. In Chile only
| the rich are allowed to beg. It goes like this: "hey can I
| have ten cents!" [poor begging rich] "Get a fucking job you
| piece of shit!" [rich begging poor]. Telling a poor man to
| get a job, in Chile, is begging, because jobs they
| realistically can get all pay less than they cost, it's a
| gift to the rich man, a donation, charity for the rich,
| begging. And injure the poor in the process, or demand he
| betray his fellow man. That's why I always try to come up
| with something for beggars, they're doing the best thing they
| could be doing by begging, working would be terrible then
| they'd get a back injury on the first day, feel denigrating,
| which addressing (which society dodges, prefers they take
| that injury and insult to their graves) would cost millions.
| Just huge waste of money. Better they beg and I give, that
| has objectively superior economics. Like I talked to one who
| got a job, told him yeah duh that job is over it was a shit
| job, he was like uh how did you know? I just know because I
| just know. And then I gave him a 20000 peso bill, which I
| first broke for him at the kiosk which I can do but he can't,
| so he could spend it. And told him "spend it on whatever you
| want! Whatever you want!" Dude try to preempt him asking me,
| asking hurts, people insult you, it's degrading, people call
| you inferior, people beat you for asking just like people
| piss on people sleeping on the street to indulge their
| sadism. I've also seen guys take out a 10000 bill (like $10,
| but big money in Chile), stretch it out, and then laugh their
| ass off. Dude it's so cruel. Nobody thinks it could be them
| sitting on the concrete.
|
| And they have all kinds of stories these guys, dude I love
| talking to Jonathan Ramos here, dude way better than all
| therapists I've ever spoken to in my whole life combined. He
| told me "obviously you got tortured, look at the things you
| say, you lay out the truth for people clearly!" No picologo
| could have _ever_ said that! Dude categorically superior to
| every professional therapist! And that cost 4 dollars!
| RegW wrote:
| I just can't take the maths seriously. As a younger person I
| hated to skate on a rebellious subject or show my ignorance of
| what must be obvious to everyone else. As a better person I knew
| I must be patient, but was annoyed with those that didn't speak
| up when they didn't understand, or those that wouldn't accept the
| glaring truth. As an old fart I just try to stop myself letting
| go too loudly.
| [deleted]
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Hmmm. Instead of modeling human relationships and helping others
| as debt/reward/cost. I believe it is psychologically healthier to
| think in terms of circles of trust.
|
| a) Stranger. It is unlikely you will see this person again. It
| doesn't hurt to ask but don't expect much. We may shy away from
| asking as they appear rude/busy/angry.
|
| b) Acquaintance. This is a coworker or someone in the
| neighborhood. We don't want to hurt the relationship. We
| occasionally ask for small favors and in an emergency we may ask
| for a big favor. We are tactful in asking for what we want. We
| reciprocate any favors.
|
| c) Family. This is your best friend or your significant other who
| may be closer than your blood relatives. We trust them implicitly
| and will always believe they can never be wrong. We ask a lot of
| them but are aware of their own struggles and wait for the
| appropriate time. We are shameless in asking for what we want.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| I have not read this PDF (nor do I intend to), so perhaps this is
| something it mentions, but a shift in perspective along Stoic
| lines and identifying some irrational confusions might help. At
| base, the biggest problems are ego and attaching inappropriate
| significance to what people think/say or _might_ think /say.
|
| Of the two, ego is the biggest problem, I would say, and the
| first one that needs to be addressed. The typical reason someone
| might not want to ask a question is because they are afraid
| people will think they're stupid because asking reveals you don't
| know something that you believe is expected you should know. If
| this something is something you should know, then are you perhaps
| pretending to be better than you are? Are you trying to prevent
| people from forming an accurate opinion of you, an opinion that
| you deserve?
|
| With respect to the second problem, people attach way too much
| value to what others say or might think instead of the truth. We
| all think things about each other. So what? Life is a bazaar of
| ignorant and cranky people assessing, misassessing, yammering,
| squabbling, haggling, making noise, elbowing each other, and so
| on, not some preciously arranged crystal palace or the last
| judgement presided over by a capricious teenager. No one is
| thinking about you because they're too busy thinking about
| themselves...just like you're doing by worrying so much about
| what others think of _you_.
|
| There are ultimately two possibilities. Someone's assessment of
| you is accurate or it is inaccurate. If it is accurate, then
| what's the problem? You deserve it. If it is inaccurate, then it
| doesn't matter because it isn't true. In either case, if you are
| treated unjustly, or even uncharitably, then who's the asshole?
| Not you. As Marcus Aurelius would say, as long as you're going
| the right thing, you have nothing to worry about. You've done
| your part. You have no control over anything else, so why worry
| about it? If you don't ask the question, then perhaps no one will
| think you're stupid, but you will have failed to done your part
| by choosing to remain ignorant when all you had to do is ask. You
| would be guilty of what Catholics call "human respect".
| tristor wrote:
| Anecdotally, I don't think I've /caused/ any pain with the
| questions I've asked in my career, but I have often revealed pain
| that was otherwise hidden or being avoided. One of the most
| important skills I learned in my career was asking good incisive
| questions. The only way your team or organization can resolve
| problems is if you first acknowledge that the problem exists, and
| there are often problems in organizations "that everybody knows",
| that asking questions about (especially as a newbie or outsider)
| can help to resolve. It's definitely opening a can of worms, it's
| definitely painful, but the question doesn't cause the pain, it
| just reveals the pain that's already there.
| chrisBob wrote:
| I get it. People love LaTeX, but how about getting rid of some
| white space and changing that front
| musha68k wrote:
| This is very subjective, to me there is nothing that reads
| better than the academic latex defaults. I would also argue
| that they look beautiful, but again subjective.
|
| I think it has to do with most devices low DPI as these latex
| documents historically are made for printing most of all.
|
| I like to save these PDFs in iBooks on my mac and get back to
| reading them comfortably on my iPad. Works great imho.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Probably, like me, they note that it's a) reasonably okay-
| looking, and b) way easier than changing it.
| paxys wrote:
| Or even better, linking an HTML version.
| gmac wrote:
| See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18865043
| fergie wrote:
| What is the font? I keep on seeing it on academic papers.
| [deleted]
| red_trumpet wrote:
| Computer Modern[1] or Latin Modern. It's the standard font
| when using LaTeX.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern
| m000 wrote:
| It is the standard font for LaTeX and a sub-standard choice
| for modern screens and printers.
|
| CM was designed in the late 70s - early 80s. High
| resolution raster displays were an exotic item at that
| time. CM was meant to be used for printing documents on the
| printers of the era, that suffered from considerable ink
| bleeding.
|
| See the pictures in [1] to see the difference between how
| the font looks on screen and when printed on the "right"
| equipment.
|
| [1] https://www.typografie.info/3/topic/22238-ist-die-
| computer-m...
| dhosek wrote:
| Not exactly, CM was designed for image setters and very
| high resolution printing. Early laser printers had
| resolutions in the neighborhood of 200-300dpi and there
| are frequent issues with generating bitmaps from Metafont
| at low resolutions (<300dpi). Some printers had
| asymmetric resolutions usually with a higher horizontal
| resolution than vertical resolution since it as easier to
| do precise positioning horizontally than vertically. In
| addition, there were two approaches to putting toner on
| the page: Writes-black (which was used by HP and Apple
| laserprinters), used the laser to apply a charge where
| the black should be. When the toner then affixed to the
| page at the charged locations, there was a little bit of
| "bleed."1 Writes-white (which was used by Xerox and some
| others), first charged the whole page then used the laser
| to remove the charge where there should not be toner. The
| bleed impact was reversed and the result was an anemic
| appearance to the CM fonts on the page. A hack was
| created in which an extra pixel was added to the edges of
| the shapes to increase their size, although this was
| prone to creating errors in the MF run at resolutions
| <600dpi.
|
| [?]
|
| 1. Not really in the same sense as ink bleed, in which
| the ink spreads from where it is applied, but more just
| that the pixels created by the charge were slightly
| larger than the specified resolution.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Scanning through this I couldn't find much on the ratio of askers
| to askees (what the paper seems to call Receivers and Senders,
| respectively).
|
| That seems like a major factor - there's the classic example of
| the IT person who's constantly being asked to help with
| relatively basic tasks. If that's their defined job, that's not a
| problem - but if they have other responsibilities that are not
| being met due to constant requests for assistance, it becomes a
| problem.
|
| A similar example is found in areas with a high concentration of
| homeless people - i.e. if there is just one homeless person in a
| neighborhood, people might go out of their way to be helpful, or
| if they were asking for money people might be willing to give
| them a few dollars - but if there are 100 homeless people in a
| neighborhood, then treating them all equally would mean shelling
| out several hundred dollars, a more significant burden.
|
| Once a problem becomes organizational-scale or societal-scale,
| then this focus on individual relationships no longer makes much
| sense. In the former case, hiring a person (or team) whose sole
| job is to provide technical assitance is the solution; in the
| latter, some kind of social safety net aimed at keeping people
| off the street is needed.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| I like the homelessness analogy. If a town of 3,000 people had
| 1 homeless person, there is a high likelihood that said person
| would ultimately encounter an altruistic person and get some
| assistance towards ceasing being homeless, yet, in a densely
| populated area with the same ratio of homed to homeless most of
| the homeless people will either receive no assistance or very
| little, right?
|
| At a certain scale the issue requires a altruistic leader to
| marshal the forces to combat the societal problem, and while
| there are many qualified people for just such a task, the task
| of finding such a person, appointing them with the appropriate
| authority, and then giving them the the tools and resources
| they need to succeed are themselves tasks that require long
| unbroken chains of altruism to succeed, even though on a 1:1
| ratio the problem is the exact same proportion.
| cjcole wrote:
| Diplomacy is a species of high-stakes asking.
|
| 'Mr Herapath, I understand that you wish to visit the whaler, and
| you have my permission to go. You are no doubt aware that there
| is a great deal of ill-feeling between the United States and
| England, and that most unhappily the Leopard was the cause of
| some of it: that is why I thought best to forbid the usual ship-
| visiting, to prevent quarrelling of any kind. You also know the
| Leopard's condition: one day's use of a forge and the proper
| tools would enable her to put to sea rather than winter here. The
| whaler certainly possesses a forge, but as a gentleman you will
| understand that I am extremely reluctant to ask a favour of the
| American skipper, extremely reluctant to expose the service or
| myself to a rebuff. I may add that he is equally reluctant to
| come a-begging to me, and I honour him for it. However, on
| reflection he may feel inclined to exchange the use of his forge
| for our medical services. You may give him a view of the
| situation, but without committing us to any specific request -
| harkee, Mr Herapath, don't you expose us to an affront, whatever
| you do. And if it should turn out that he would like the
| exchange, why, I should be very much obliged to you. Very much
| obliged indeed, for I should be even more reluctant to use
| force.'
| jjice wrote:
| Anecdotally, when I started at my current job, it was made clear
| to me that I should ask questions and not think twice about it.
| They said to ask in our public engineering slack channel (remote
| work) so everyone could see and have more eyes on it for answers
| plus future searching. It was such a great experience, and I put
| a lot of that on the culture of questions my boss put into place.
|
| When we had more and more engineers join, including interns, I
| made sure they heard the same thing I did and felt comfortable
| asking _any_ questions. I really love this philosophy, but I
| found out that you can 't just say it once or else people are
| still a bit skittish sometimes (young engineers mostly). I will
| repeat it to the point where it's likely annoying during
| mentoring and onboarding meetings, but people will be very open
| with their questions, which I'm very happy with. It takes a bit
| of extra time out of everyone's day to respond to questions, but
| you're unblocking someone in 2 chunks of 10 minutes (mentor and
| mentee) which saves the mentee upwards of hours, and this can
| compound with future situations if they don't have a complete
| understanding of the situation.
|
| I really appreciate a question friendly culture and I would never
| want to work at a place that isn't like that again.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I was always partial to the aphorism _" The only stupid
| question is the one we don't ask."_
|
| I used to participate in StackOverflow, quite a bit (not so
| much, these days).
|
| They have a culture that _really_ doesn 't like asking
| questions, which is weird, as they are the raw materials of the
| site.
|
| Just look at the question counts of the high-numbered folks.
| It's usually a single-digit number, with that digit frequently
| being "0."
|
| It's fairly obvious that people that actually ask questions are
| treated badly.
| leetrout wrote:
| Lots of questions get deleted too.
|
| I asked this question on the math site
| https://mathoverflow.net/questions/373993/is-the-
| haversine-f...
|
| I am not a "math person" and was struggling to understand how
| these various functions fit into "norms" or not.
|
| I think by-and-large none of these communities are helpful or
| welcoming to most people. And that is a shame.
| henrydark wrote:
| To be fair, mathoverflow.net has always been for
| professional mathematics, mostly for professional
| mathematicians.
|
| Though these days even professional questions are sometimes
| treated poorly.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I remember asking a question[0] on Webmasters Stack
| Exchange. They nuked it, and told me to ask it on regular
| StackOverflow.
|
| Apparently, you are not supposed to ask non-SEO questions
| on Webmasters SE.
|
| [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52060900/strange-
| behavio...
| mistrial9 wrote:
| early unix culture was overtly hostile about beginner'ish
| questions and other fumbling. The advanced practitioner was
| marked with extra awd sed chops while those questioning poor
| man pages were essentially spanked publicly. This happened
| repeatedly in different contexts that I saw.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| awd = awk?
| adamc wrote:
| StackOverflow is kind of horrible. I keep waiting for someone
| to disrupt that market with a less awful product.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| It could be a lot less horrible if people with a bit of
| knowledge weren't horrible. They like to feel elite or
| something and look down on people with snide comments on
| there.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Yeah, I would love for there to be a new StackOverflow
| where newbies could ask questions ad nauseum without being
| blocked for not having answered enough questions or
| received upvotes from others.
|
| It has turned into a walled garden where the people who got
| in early have the credentials to participate and get help
| while also risking losing the clout that got them there and
| everyone else has little opportunity to get help overcoming
| their personal hurdles in becoming competent programmers.
| Attrecomet wrote:
| If you ever find out how to make that product but not be
| flooded with newbie questions when you search
| professionally useful answers you could turn that into a
| lot of money.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This is true in so many systems like MMO games too. I was
| an avid player of one for a few years, did OK but not
| especially well, lost interest. A few years later I
| visited again in a moment of idleness, mainly to see if
| my account was still live. _Completely_ different
| experience: other players would look at my account age
| and flee, assuming that I was packing all kinds of whoop-
| ass.
|
| I use SO all the time but just search for other people's
| answers and apply them to my existing problem. To some
| extent this is simply more convenient for me (I don't
| have to wait and translating a solution to my context
| builds my skills anyway), but the institutionalized
| antipathy to general/conceptual questions make it feel
| like an unfriendly environment.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I remember an experience that I had on a LinkedIn group
| (and is also why I stopped taking them seriously).
|
| A member of the group (it was a Swift Language group)
| asked a fairly reasonable developer question. It was sort
| of a "I have this technical problem, how do I solve it?"
|
| This was something that I had actually solved, many times
| over, quite easily, so I answered it.
|
| Surprisingly, my answer was ignored, even though it was
| the first one, and nailed the problem on the head.
|
| Instead, a flood of "answers," came in, all recommending
| some developer tool/site.
|
| They all got acknowledged. Some resulted in a bit of
| back-and-forth, between the asker and the answerer.
|
| I noticed that all of the answerers were of the same
| nationality as the asker, and realized they were shills.
|
| It was "guerrilla marketing."
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I wonder if it's viable to have a site where you pay for
| asking questions (there are thematic sites like this, we
| call them "support forums", but AFAIK, no generic one).
|
| Volunteer based answering will always lead to some kind
| of reputation economy, and those seem to attract
| assholes.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Would people pay though?
|
| Say it costs $0.75 USD to ask a noob question. The
| answerer receives $0.50 USD of that. The asker gets to
| pick the person who answered them best, and failing that,
| upvotes would decide whom the spoils go to.
|
| It would be easy to game such a system. Ask your
| question, get the answer, have a sock puppet account also
| post that answer, pick your sock puppet as the winner,
| only pay $0.25 for your question to be answered and stiff
| the person who actually put the work in to solve your
| problem.
|
| If it were upvote based, people would have multiple sock
| puppet accounts to upvote their sock puppet answer.
|
| Adding money into the mix makes it more difficult by a
| massive order of magnitude. Stack Overflow could open a
| paid noob question area and profit immensely from it, but
| a newcomer would first have to build the audience, get
| participation, and then introduce the payment system
| while working constantly to guard against sock puppets
| ruining the system.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| People pay for online courses all the time, why wouldn't
| they pay for tutoring?
|
| Anyway, if you are going with this, billing by the
| question and gathering your answering team by random are
| sure ways to break it. You have to somehow limit the
| amount of questions people can ask, have long term
| relationships with both sides, and make sure the asking
| ones won't expect that every single question can be
| answered.
|
| Personally, I would bet on Stack Overflow being
| positioned in a way where trying this would certainly
| fail. It looks way more likely that something like a "Red
| Hat School" could do it.
|
| (But when one can make a comment saying "I know who can
| enter this market! It's IBM!" that's clearly a problem.)
| mediaman wrote:
| For some reason, public technical forums often seem to
| develop that way.
|
| The Arduino official forums, for example, are filled with
| toxic people who are often fairly skilled but whose replies
| nearly always drip with condescension. It's to the point
| that when I'm searching for a problem and find a discussion
| on their forum, I already expect to see it, and I'm nearly
| always right.
|
| I'm sure there are other similar forums.
| personjerry wrote:
| Theory: Highly technical people tend to be less socially
| capable, which leads to making newcomers feel less
| welcome.
| coryfklein wrote:
| > They have a culture that really doesn't like asking
| questions, which is weird, as they are the raw materials of
| the site.
|
| I totally disagree!
|
| I have 50k rep on StackOverflow, and roughly a quarter of
| that comes from the questions I've asked (I have 213
| questions, 166 answers). In fact, that is my favorite way to
| interact with the site; I personally get excited when I find
| a question of mine that isn't answered on StackOverflow.
|
| That said, writing a _good_ question is an art. The
| impression that SO has a culture of not asking questions I
| think is at least partly impacted by the aspects of the
| culture that came into existence to deal with the huge deluge
| of really bad questions that it gets literally every second
| of every day.
|
| Then, even if you put in the time and effort to actually
| write a well researched and thought out question, it's not
| uncommon to get close votes and downvotes. This is
| unfortunate, but it also usually comes from a small fraction
| of users who see your question within its first 5 minutes of
| posting. Once that time has passed, and folks start arriving
| at your question from Google, the upvotes come in as a steady
| stream.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| > Once that time has passed, and folks start arriving at
| your question from Google, the upvotes come in as a steady
| stream.
|
| Only if your question is common, and possibly common enough
| to already have an answer. That's rarely the case for me,
| and this issue is why I've stopped using SO beyond just
| reading.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> I totally disagree!_
|
| Well, I guess we'll just have to "agree to disagree,"
| then...
|
| I have "only" about a 4.5K rep, but almost twice as many
| questions as answers. _Most_ of my rep comes from
| questions.
|
| My SO tagline is _" Judge a man by his questions rather
| than by his answers."_
|
| I have become quite good at writing really good, well-
| researched questions, which usually get ignored. I
| generally end up answering them, myself.
|
| Instead, simple ones get answered; often with a somewhat
| passive-aggressive "slap." I've learned to ignore the
| insult, and still be nice and thankful for the answer.
|
| It's been a valuable resource for me, but is now a lot less
| valuable.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| There do seem to be a lot of angry individuals on there.
| It's usually on questions that if you have expert
| knowledge in an area you can answer without missing a
| beat but would require a beginner a lot of time to find
| out and it's not just "a google search away". I think a
| lot of people like to make others feel inferior and
| that's a huge personality flaw.
| peteradio wrote:
| This probably works well in already competent organizations,
| where followup questions are not met with "because we say so".
| I've worked at orgs where a simple question like "why are we
| reinventing caching at every new instance?" is met with pretty
| subpar answers that amount to more of a digging in than an
| actual enlightening reasoning. Note that many of the customer
| reported bugs boiled down to caching.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| I think the healthiest way to react to that sort of bluntness
| is to respond in kind.
|
| "I understand this isn't my decision to make. I just want to
| be abundantly clear that I think it's the wrong judgment
| call, and here's why. I think it would be valuable, not only
| to solve the problem itself, but also to improve our working
| relationship if you show more value in my perspective in the
| future. I'm not interested in winning or losing. I am here to
| work _with_ you. "
|
| At the end of the day, one of you is wrong. If that can't be
| communicated well, then you deserve a better workplace.
| peteradio wrote:
| Or, don't ask the question and do the right thing so you
| don't go against orders you never received. That is kind of
| what I'm suggesting works if you are stuck in an
| environment with crappy responses.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Only if it's worth it to you to stay.
|
| Most people I've known in that situation were
| _miserable_. It 's usually not worth it.
| diob wrote:
| Yes! You hit the nail on the head. It's also a lead by example
| thing, where I love seeing more experienced folk asking
| questions.
|
| Where do you work if you don't mind the question?
| boris wrote:
| What do you do when some of these mentees (as you put it) get
| so used to having every question promptly answered that they
| stop reading the documentation or putting even a modest amount
| of effort into figuring out why things don't work as expected?
|
| To be clear, I am not being facetious/sarcastic; I have this
| exact problem at the moment (in an open source project) and
| could use some tips. Surely you (or others) must have run into
| this. My best idea so far is to throttle my replies
| proportional to the offences.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Keep answering the questions, but include a reference to the
| docs in your answer.
|
| Your goal is to introduce them to the usefulness of the tool
| that is documentation, not to simply unburden yourself of
| trivial questions. If your documentation is good enough to
| answer their questions, then sooner or later they will start
| to use it first, because that's easier than asking a
| question.
|
| The next thing you can do is ask them if they think the
| documentation can be improved, so that the answer to their
| question is easier for _the next person_ to find.
|
| Usually, it's not the substance of the answer that they were
| struggling to find, but the context that would have lead them
| there in the first place.
|
| When that happens, it feels like your answer is trivial, but
| that's because the real value of the interaction was
| encapsulated into the very act of you answering, not the
| answer itself.
|
| Documentation can be a great way of referencing nouns and
| verbs. Good documentation will probably answer "what?" and
| "how?". Great documentation will answer "where?". The
| trickiest questions end up being "when?" and "why?".
| hinkley wrote:
| You can get people to self serve by putting stuff in the
| wiki. It's a good way to make sure things get into the wiki
| in the first place.
|
| Tired of answering the same question? Did you write the
| answer somewhere? Can people find it? No? Then you're part
| of this equation, buster.
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| Try the whole "teach them to fish" vs "give them a fish"
| approach. So give positive feedback for asking, show them how
| to _find_ the answer online or in documentation, and then
| over time, your first response to their question will become
| "ok, what have you tried so far?" and hold them accountable
| for following the (informational search) algorithm you showed
| them previously.
|
| Some people have trouble turning your advice into a skill
| they perform routinely (partly because they don't take
| notes). So you can help them with that by asking them to make
| notes on what you are showing them, then getting them to send
| them to you for review.
|
| And if the things really _isn 't_ online because it's
| proprietary and it's not explained in the documentation yet,
| then you get them to write the notes with the view to making
| that the documentation. So they take up your time on a task
| that helps them in the company, they pay it back with another
| task that helps others by reducing the chances that someone
| else gets stuck in future
| jjice wrote:
| This is what I try to do, and I believe it works out well.
| Sometimes I can tell that someone is a bit annoyed that I'm
| not showing them just how to add CSRF protection to a page,
| but also why we do it and how it works, but I do believe
| that showing them how to do it and why is where leaning
| comes in and trumps raw repetition/memorization.
| klibertp wrote:
| Create a template of how a good question should look like.
| This is becoming more and more popular on Github's issues,
| not sure since when, but I'm definitely seeing it more often
| these days. Include sections like "what did you try" and
| "where did you look and what results came up", among others.
| Auto-close questions that don't use the template; if it's
| automatic, you're less likely to become a target of hostility
| due to this.
|
| Set up a process of converting questions into docs (wiki
| works). If a question's quality is too low for its answer to
| be put into docs, delete it. If it is good enough, make an
| effort to answer and make it easy to contribute it to the
| documentation. Make sure it's easy to find both Q and A
| afterward.
|
| Make sure you have a "troubleshooting" section in the docs.
| Try to assist people with finding the answers on their own as
| much as you can, but also make sure it's trivial to tell if
| someone actually read that section and followed the steps
| outlined there. If you get a question from someone who
| obviously didn't care to read that, delete it.
|
| Make sure your docs are indexed, searchable, and that you're
| able to link to specific paragraphs (ideally) or at least
| headings (but then make sure to actually use headings that
| make sense). The more precise you are when telling people
| where they should go, the less likely they are to come back
| to you to ask again.
|
| In general: make sure good questions (and their authors) are
| rewarded and make sure people who don't want to put in the
| work to make their questions good are easily distinguished.
| Warn the latter once or twice, then punish swiftly and
| decisively if they don't improve.
|
| Above all else: don't expect your answers to be valued if
| you, yourself, don't value the time and effort expended to
| give them. Just because you know something doesn't mean
| everyone and their cat is entitled to be coached by you. Make
| it clear that getting an answer from you is a trade: the one
| with a question has to put in enough time and effort into
| asking it for you to find it worthwhile to spend your time
| and effort to answer.
|
| Beware of jerks. Just like you can construct malicious
| packets that make the receiving server do a lot of work for
| nothing, it's possible to craft questions that amount to a
| DoS attack on _you_. Manage the time spent on answering
| questions and track it. If servicing a single person takes
| too much of your time, become suspicious. Taking too much of
| your time may just be their goal.
|
| Finally: recruit helpers. People who often submit good
| quality questions probably dislike low quality questions as
| much as you do. Let them help you filter out the noise.
|
| My 2 c.
| jjice wrote:
| As another user said:
|
| > Keep answering the questions, but include a reference to
| the docs in your answer.
|
| If it's something like how to set up a local development
| tool, I'll post a link to our documentation and tell them
| it's near the bottom. I also let them know that if they run
| into any issues, to let me know and we can hop in a call.
| zach_garwood wrote:
| I think a simple "I need you to figure this one out on your
| own today" or "you and Employee 421 should discuss this, they
| had a similar problem last week" is probably better than just
| refusing to reply. Ghosting someone isn't a winning strategy.
| kashyapc wrote:
| As you might already know, this philosophy of openly asking
| questions in a public channel is one of the important aspects
| of open source development model.
|
| FWIW, many moons ago I wrote an etiquette doc[1] on being a
| decent community citizen when asking questions on upstream IRC
| channels (yes, they're still a thing :P) and what to avoid,
| etc. Many of these guidelines apply in an internal setting too.
|
| [1] https://www.rdoproject.org/contribute/irc-etiquette/
| mattarm wrote:
| Yes, question friendliness is beneficial!
|
| Somewhere along the line in school I realized that whenever I
| had a question most often many other people did too. I lost my
| fear of asking questions after a lot of feedback from others:
| "I'm so glad you asked that question, I was completely lost!"
|
| In my career I realized that nothing had changed, and that
| asking for more clarity is almost always a good thing.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| On my teams, we facilitate this by creating a slack channel
| called [new hire]_ASKS with a small team of dedicated watchers
| that set alerts to "all messages"
|
| The new hire knows that there are a group of people whose
| assignment is to answer their questions.
| efsavage wrote:
| > I really love this philosophy, but I found out that you can't
| just say it once or else people are still a bit skittish
| sometimes (young engineers mostly).
|
| It's also important to see established/senior/experienced
| people doing it before less-experienced people will be
| comfortable doing it. I'm the most experienced person on my
| team and I'm pretty sure I ask more questions and say "I don't
| know" more than anyone else.
| jjice wrote:
| That's a good point. We all ask our questions in some open
| Slack channels so that might have a lot do it with it
| actually.
| DeanWormer wrote:
| Interesting topic especially when compared/contrasted with this
| Atlantic article on Asker vs Guesser culture.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/05/askers-....
| golemotron wrote:
| It's interesting that this quote in the abstract points out that
| the dynamic the authors consider bad actually leads to a good
| outcome: self-sufficiency.
|
| > "While quite young,... Vronsky had experienced the humiliation
| of a refusal when, having got into debt, he had tried to borrow
| money, and since then he had never again allowed himself to get
| into such a position." (L. Tolstoi, Anna Karenina)
|
| Self-sufficiency has some downsides and inefficiencies but so
| does its opposite. A better paper would explore that side also,
| and the balance.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| The flip side sure could be interesting, but studying it seems
| like a _very_ different task (with a significantly larger
| scope) than this project. That doesn 't seem realistic to be
| covered in this sort of paper.
| golemotron wrote:
| It would've been nice to mention it. My sense is that the
| quote in the abstract might have been a signal from one of
| the authors who felt the same way.
| Spinnaker_ wrote:
| I doubt it. The author has likely read Anna Karenina and
| fully understands that it is not at all an endorsement.
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