[HN Gopher] In Praise of Stupid Questions
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       In Praise of Stupid Questions
        
       Author : ibobev
       Score  : 25 points
       Date   : 2026-03-14 17:12 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (mathenchant.wordpress.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (mathenchant.wordpress.com)
        
       | 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
       | > Toss a fair coin until the number of heads exceeds the number
       | of tails. This determines a stopping time. What is the
       | probability that this stopping time is even?
       | 
       | Claude Code did pretty well:
       | 
       | > Zero. > > The stopping time always falls on an odd toss. Here's
       | why: after >n tosses, heads minus > tails equals S_n = X1 + X2 +
       | ... + X_n where each X_i takes >value +1 or -1. The sum > of n
       | odd numbers shares parity with n. For S_n = 1 (the first >time
       | heads exceeds > tails), we need n odd. > > No even stopping time
       | exists. The probability equals exactly 0. > > Cogitated for 38s
        
       | keiferski wrote:
       | _Fortunately these days I have a very patient interlocutor named
       | ChatGPT blessed with an infinite tolerance for half-baked
       | questions and a soothing lack of judgmentality._
       | 
       | I know it's popular to say AI is overhyped or not actually
       | useful, but I think one area where it's unquestionably a massive
       | improvement is in asking stupid questions. I ask ChatGPT so many
       | questions that I've started looking for ways to automatically
       | send me a daily summary of questions and answers, to add to Anki.
       | 
       | I used to post a lot of these types of questions on subreddits
       | that are Ask-related. Ask Philosophy and Ask Historians, for
       | example. Unfortunately the mod teams for many subreddits like
       | this have gone overboard, deleting anything that doesn't fit
       | their specific idiosyncratic rules.
       | 
       | Needless to say I have almost entirely stopped asking questions
       | on Reddit.
        
         | daveguy wrote:
         | It would be interesting to compare a person trained in an area,
         | asking questions as a student, with answers from LLMs vs an
         | average set of people. Of course that would require scientific
         | funding and someone experienced in the field to set it up.
        
       | duhhhhh1212 wrote:
       | https://math.mit.edu/~apost/courses/18.204-2016/18.204_Jon_L...
       | doesn't this paper demonstrate the same thing like a decade
       | before?
        
       | Neywiny wrote:
       | Good to recognize stupid questions do exist but so does anxiety
       | around asking necessary questions. The engineer I'm mentoring
       | said they'd ask lot of stupid questions. But we're working
       | through them. A lot of them were things I wondered too, like
       | "this current reading doesn't make sense because the upstream
       | supply is saying it's taking less current" but it was a nonlinear
       | buck regulator. I offered to explain more but they just sat with
       | it a minute, I offered again, but they said they were ok. My
       | viewpoint is to give just a hint and then offer more so they can
       | still go through the thought process on their own, which is
       | really what I'm trying to teach.
        
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