[HN Gopher] How to Ask Questions the Smart Way (2014)
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How to Ask Questions the Smart Way (2014)
Author : chippy
Score : 42 points
Date : 2023-03-17 17:18 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.catb.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.catb.org)
| smlacy wrote:
| What a pretentious bunch of gatekeeping nonsense.
|
| Clearly, ESR (and anyone following the tenets of documents like
| this) are not actually interested in _teaching_ anyone anything.
| They have a truly transactional perspective on "Question Asking"
| in that some questions are "worthy of answering" and others
| aren't. People who "Take without giving back" (his words) are
| exactly those who you're teaching. They absorb knowledge directly
| from those providing the answers.
|
| Teaching is the act of understanding where your audience is in
| the learning process, and leading/guiding them through that
| journey in a kind and patient way. The truly ignorant don't know
| how to ask the question. Think of a child who's first learning
| computer programming. Think of an adult who's studying a foreign
| language for the first time. Think of the questions of a child
| who's never experienced snow.
|
| > What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to
| be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking
| questions. People like that are time sinks -- they take without
| giving back, and they waste time we could have spent on another
| question more interesting and another person more worthy of an
| answer. We call people like this "losers" (and for historical
| reasons we sometimes spell it "lusers").
|
| And this is why "internet hostility" is a thing. Good job
| creating this horrible culture right from the start.
|
| Please don't follow the advice of this column. Be patient.
| Encourage anyone and everyone to ask questions, even if they're
| "duplicates" or "easy to answer". Use the Socratic Method (ask
| questions that lead to more questions). Actually teach people
| things.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| I think this advice is largely geared toward dealing with the
| "Eternal September" dynamic of a small number of elders/experts
| being overwhelmed by exposure to the general public in
| relatively unstructured forums like Usenet and mailing lists
| (despite being tagged 2014, the original is much older). I'm
| not sure we really live in that world anymore.
| dsr_ wrote:
| We do still live in that world: in technical mailing lists
| and forums and even in Q&A sites, asking a good question
| rewards you with better answers and discussion than asking a
| badly worded form of the same question.
| burnished wrote:
| Genuinely, I think you may be getting upset about the tone more
| than the contents. The advice is generally good (if outdated).
| If you follow it you will generally answer more of your own
| questions faster, and when you do need to ask questions they
| will be easier to answer because they will highlight your
| misunderstanding or problem.
|
| I'm saying this as some one who answers newbie programming
| questions on the internet. Trying to help some one who has not
| put any effort into understanding is taxing.
|
| > Teaching is the act of understanding where your audience is
| in the learning process, and leading/guiding them through that
| journey in a kind and patient way. The truly ignorant don't
| know how to ask the question. Think of a child who's first
| learning computer programming. Think of an adult who's studying
| a foreign language for the first time. Think of the questions
| of a child who's never experienced snow.
|
| These are all allowed - "I'm trying to learn more about
| <topic>, I searched for <a,b,c> and the results did not seem
| related, can some point me in the right direction?".
| nescioquid wrote:
| This is advice to individuals on how to be more effective at
| finding answers to their own questions, and how to reduce the
| burden on those who are willing to help.
|
| If you want to be effective at getting answers, please do
| follow this advice.
|
| If you don't want to be impolite and entitled, please do follow
| this advice.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| The document is harsh, but not mean, and not wrong.
|
| If you've ever tried helping out large numbers of people
| online, you'll have encountered most -if not all- of the
| described situations yourself.
|
| ESR is definitely a bit of a personality though. Better
| versions of the document appreciated.
| lliamander wrote:
| I think we mostly agree, except that I'm not sure how it
| could be improved: it's clear, to the point, and has numerous
| concrete examples.
|
| Criticisms of tone are more subjective, but I don't think
| they hold up here either. It lacks the structural
| characteristics of a flame or rant, nor does it portray
| anyone in an uncharitable light: both the perspectives and
| needs of those asking and answering questions are presented
| fairly.
| m463 wrote:
| its unfortunate that ESR has always been a little snooty, but I
| guess that's what gave him the gumption to go publish and
| maintain all this internet history.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| > Teaching is the act of understanding where your audience is
| in the learning process, and leading/guiding them through that
| journey in a kind and patient way.
|
| But the article is written as instructions for asking questions
| to non-teachers, and is a flawed but generally decent guide to
| that. I'm an educator turned software engineer and one of the
| difficult parts of that transition was learning that I had to
| stop answering most questions that weren't "worth answering".
| While I'd love to teach the people answering these questions I
| don't have the time, it's not my job, and often the ROI is low
| (many people asking questions don't want to spend the effort
| needed to learn, they want a problem to be solved for them).
| lliamander wrote:
| > Please don't follow the advice of this column. Be patient.
| Encourage anyone and everyone to ask questions, even if they're
| "duplicates" or "easy to answer". Use the Socratic Method (ask
| questions that lead to more questions). Actually teach people
| things.
|
| That's the thing though, this is advice for people _asking_
| questions, not _answering_ them. If you are advising someone on
| how to ask questions on the internet, telling them how to avoid
| being called a "luser" is very good advice!
|
| He actually does give advice for people answering questions at
| the end, and he definitely encourages them to be more gentle
| and helpful. But it is important not to waste the time of
| people who are providing what is essentially complex technical
| consulting _for free_.
|
| BTW, this is also good advice for asking questions in a
| professional setting. Not being someone who needs to be spoon-
| fed information is always going to make you more respectable.
| m1117 wrote:
| Sorry, what is it about again?
| codetrotter wrote:
| It's more easy to just state something you are unsure about as
| though it was a fact and then wait for someone knowledgeable to
| object. They always do!
| lliamander wrote:
| It's half of the reason I post on the internet.
| rco8786 wrote:
| This is a long article and the first bits comes off fairly
| condescending so I stopped reading...but one thing caught my eye:
|
| "If you are a programmer, try to find an answer by reading the
| source code"
|
| This is basically a superpower at any large tech co if only
| because few people do it, even though we're literally all capable
| of it. When I inherit or start interfacing with a new service,
| the first thing I do is checkout the code and peruse through it.
| Even just 30-45 minutes, for an experienced engineer, is enough
| to get a feel for the layout of things. Then when you have a
| question about "How does X service handle Y scenario" you can
| just go read the code and know the answer exactly.
|
| I can't tell you how many times I've had the answer to a question
| and get something like "dang rco8786 how do you know so much
| about how everything works" and invariably my answer is just "I
| read the code".
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Maybe it's because I'm a less experienced programmer, but I
| find I have a lot of trouble understanding source code if I'm
| not trying to find or change something specific. I can't read
| it like a book, I have to experiment with it.
| rco8786 wrote:
| I don't typically read to understand anything in depth unless
| im doing something like that. But just poking around the
| folder structure, seeing what the api looks like, the
| background jobs (usually pretty descriptive in their names),
| database structure, etc gives you a good feel for high level
| functionality and then more importantly when you want to
| answer a more specific question you know right where to go
| look.
|
| Sometimes a question will come up during a meeting, nobody
| knows the answer, so I'll just pull up the source and because
| it's already handy and since I know the structure I can find
| the answer in a matter of seconds.
| m463 wrote:
| unfortunately "read the code" doesn't always mean "understand
| the code".
|
| You can get lost in certain codebases.
| Shared404 wrote:
| I do like this document, but this is worth a read:
|
| https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond
| lliamander wrote:
| It's really not worth the read.
|
| The whole point of the rationalist movement what to develop
| better intellectual hygiene, which meant taking people at their
| word and arguing against their ideas in good faith (Scott
| Alexander being the best demonstration of this).
|
| To see essentially partisan political flame bait penned under
| the auspices of alleged rationality is pretty off-putting.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| As far as I know rationalwiki is more of a skeptics wiki
| (defined as being anti pseudoscience, cranks, etc.). The
| quality is variable.
|
| see:
|
| * https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
| ackfoobar wrote:
| It's my impression that RationalWiki and rationalism are
| quite orthogonal.
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WYzZ3bxctEJ2q6HFQ/what-
| are-y...
|
| But I agree with your comment otherwise.
| [deleted]
| justincredible wrote:
| [dead]
| ctur wrote:
| Being able to ask questions well, be it in public online or in
| the workplace, is a skill worth developing (as is answering such
| questions). I compiled a shorter and hopefully more actionable
| list of similar guidelines based on a few different jobs in the
| tech industry and public sources, including this one.
|
| https://github.com/chipturner/asking-questions
| mecsred wrote:
| Thank you for making this, I think it's a good primer.
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