Timeline for What's so wrong with taking a question at face value, just because someone suspects an XY Problem?
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| Apr 21, 2015 at 3:01 | comment | added | doppelgreener | @KRyan asserting there's overwhelming consensus about an issue is quite different from asserting that one stance in it has a lack of support. Also, what we have re: SSD's answer is exactly that - a strong indication of lack of support - I would not interpret lack of voting to constitute deliberate agreement. | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 2:10 | comment | added | KRyan | @doppelgreener I would say that my claim of “overwhelming consensus” was directed at d7, or about d7’s answer: there does seem to be overwhelming consensus, at least, that d7’s answer is not satisfactory. | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 2:07 | comment | added | doppelgreener | @KRyan Thank you for noticing that. Absolutely I agree there are common threads of thought that seem heavily in favour among the community here, but it's oversimplifying things to assume there are two sides, and it's glossing over details to lump anything together -- such as me having downvoted this answer but upvoted one of the two you're lumping it together with, which means you're misrepresenting my voting. | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 2:00 | comment | added | KRyan | @doppelgreener I suppose that’s fair; I didn’t even realize I was doing it, but I mostly see this as “we cannot know XY from the face of a question, and it can be very rude to assume it,” vs. “XY happens all the time, and it’s important to dig it out even on the slightest suspicion. No one we want should ever be upset about that!” and it’s on that that I refer when I say “overwhelming.” I’m therefore lumping several answers together on each “side.” At the very least, that’s not at all clear in my statements, and may not be fair groupings nor characterizations. | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 1:56 | comment | added | doppelgreener | In the context that SE is not a system where issues are settled by saying "oh, well, >=51% of people who voted were in favour of this, so I guess that's it then", but a system where people go with what feels right, the one third disagreement is significant. | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 1:51 | comment | added | doppelgreener | @KRyan Consensus is just majority opinion; that's it. Now to whether this is consensus, if we assume everyone who's read this thread has also voted on your answer, you probably have consensus by votes and by a slim margin over another answer, but also heavy disagreement (one third of your answer's voters disagree). Note that I've been asking you to not call it overwhelming consensus; that's hyperbole misrepresenting the truth: this is far from a clean break, considering you are by a narrow margin over another answer with a different stance, and that one-third disagreement. | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 1:42 | comment | added | KRyan | @doppelgreener Fine, the “d7 approves” comment was out of line, but I stand by the rest of it, particularly asking what does constitute consensus then? OK, so you (partially) disagree with me. d7 clearly disagrees. But the votes look pretty strong to me, so I’m wondering what is required to declare consensus? | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 1:38 | comment | added | doppelgreener | @KRyan "What definition are we using? “d7 approves”?" What the hell, man? This is getting out of line. This has little to do with d7. I'm asking you to keep your behaviour in check. It is not good behaviour at the moment. I am also asking you not to assert that the entire community overwhelmingly agrees with you. Certainly, suggest it has not agreed with SSD, that much is clear. Dice the other answer show you want, though, they don't represent agreement with you. (I am saying that as someone who does not agree wholly with your answer, but agrees with one of the next two.) | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 0:36 | comment | added | KRyan | @doppelgreener I think it is acting in bad faith to start a meta discussion and treat it as an opportunity to lecture. It is acting in bad faith, I think, to start a meta question, and then ignore the results when they don’t match what you want. And I wonder what you expect to declare consensus, when after 27 votes my answer has +11. Out of 8 votes, another answer that emphasizes as I do that we cannot know XY from the face of things, and we often get it wrong, has +6. When d7 had +1 after 13 votes, and is only +3 after 7 on the new version. What definition are we using? “d7 approves”? | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 0:26 | comment | added | doppelgreener | @KRyan That isn't an explicit statement he asked the question in bad faith. (Not even an implicit statement, unless you consider that a bad reason to start a meta question. Sounds like an acceptable reason.) Also, certainly there is not overwhelming disagreement with his answer, but we do not have a clear consensus here at the moment. They are indeed compatible with yours! They are suggesting not to bother people with this too much but still leaving the door open. Thus they are also compatible with SSD's response. But they don't appear to agree completely with either of you. | |
| Apr 21, 2015 at 0:16 | comment | added | KRyan | @doppelgreener Re: 1, “The question is an attempt to (...state...) why it's a mistaken position, so that I don't have to hear them on main and in the mod election anymore.” Re: 3, at the time d7 made the comments about giving no regard to the results of this meta whatsoever, there was a 12:1 discrepancy between my answer and his; I feel that characterizing that as “overwhelming” is accurate. Furthermore, each of the other answers currently rated more highly than his, I feel are compatible with my own and not with his. | |
| Apr 20, 2015 at 23:58 | comment | added | doppelgreener | @KRyan Mind your behaviour; you are undermining yourself through overstatements and through making this overly personal. (1) needs citation or it may be slander; I have not seen any explicit statement of this in chats or comments here - he has said he could have handled this better. (3) there is not "overwhelming" community consensus here. There is significant disagreement with your answer, and the next two highest-scored answers do not seem to agree or disagree with either you or SSD. You've referred to this being "overwhelming" elsewhere too, please quit it. | |
| Apr 20, 2015 at 18:06 | comment | added | user17995 | @KRyan: I'm sorry to hear that this discussion has gone from ideas to personalities (and that my commenting this question has perhaps revived it before things cooled down). | |
| Apr 20, 2015 at 18:02 | comment | added | KRyan | @TuggyNE To be honest, I hardly see the point. The #1 XY zealot on the site has stated explicitly that he 1. started this question in bad faith, for the sole purpose of refuting it, 2. never considered, or will consider, the possibility that he is wrong, and 3. will completely ignore even the most overwhelming community consensus on the matter. What purpose is there in improving it? He will not be convinced, and there’s a good chance he’ll be a moderator in two days’ time. Even if not, he’s one of the most influential members here. | |
| Apr 20, 2015 at 17:59 | comment | added | user17995 | @KRyan: I read this answer twice and that distinction wasn't at all clear to me. Maybe you can improve it? In particular, it's not obvious why RPG differs from the rest of the network here in where to draw the line. It's not as though identifying someone's XY problem in their work is necessarily free of pitfalls either. | |
| Apr 20, 2015 at 17:58 | comment | added | KRyan | @TuggyNE And I do not say that you should always refrain from pointing it out. You should refrain from pointing it out when you have no solid evidence that the problem exists. A valid, answerable, and clear question, on its own, provides absolutely zero evidence that that question isn’t asking exactly what the querent needs. There is no problem to address. And questioning why a user wants to know something is rude, unwarranted, and most of all, has historically been used inappropriately to put down differing playstyles – or been interpreted as such even when not. | |
| Apr 20, 2015 at 17:55 | comment | added | user17995 | I don't understand why assuming good intentions is conflated with assuming such elevated levels of competence that the asker can avoid a well-known problem that even some experts fall into from time to time. Just being nice to someone does not (at all!) mean you mustn't think they might have glitches in their thinking, nor that you should always refrain from pointing those out. | |
| Apr 16, 2015 at 20:56 | comment | added | KRyan | It absolutely is relevant. Again, context is everything. Your frame-challenge has quite soundly failed. You have not convinced me, or apparently most others, that rooting out XY problems, even for valid questions, is important, and worth the risk of extreme disrespect. | |
| Apr 16, 2015 at 20:45 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | That is not the domain. That is the charitable representation of your view, which I believe misunderstands the domain, as written by me in the question, to give it a fair shot. My answer is a frame challenge to that misunderstanding: question validity is not actually relevant to whether mentioning the XY problem is OK. Broaden your understanding of the question to deal with the issue, not just the... I don't know, "RAW" of the question. | |
| Apr 16, 2015 at 20:36 | comment | added | KRyan | @SevenSidedDie Again, this entire discussion is limited to the domain of cases where “the question is valid, we can answer it, and the answer will be useful to future readers,” and my statements are being made solely within that domain. Yes, our null hypothesis that people meant to ask what they did can be challenged – by the fact that the question has problems we can detect. But not because you have a niggling suspicion that there’s something else going on. If we don’t have any evidence of a problem, we should not be assuming there’s a problem anyway. | |
| Apr 16, 2015 at 16:49 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | You say "we have to assume that users have done what they should, and are asking their question in the best possible way to get the answers they need". This very-broad statement seems to be trivially contradicted by the existence of any (not just XY-related) never-clarified question closed as "unclear". The reductio ad absurdum that disproves that statement is that it would require VTC as unclear be abolished. | |
| Apr 16, 2015 at 15:26 | history | edited | KRyan | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
addressing the FAQ
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| Apr 14, 2015 at 12:59 | comment | added | o0'. | Not the hero you need, but the hero you deserve. | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 20:34 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | I think where we stand is much closer than we ever thought; we just have specific bee-bites that have led us to express and see the difference as a much larger a gulf than it is. | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 20:28 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | Cool. I added an exception to my proposed handling for charop, but yes, I see it's more about build than specifically charop. I think charop should probably be given similar benefit of the doubt though, since they, too, tend to not spin off into multiple new XY Problem questions. They're kinda subset of build-type questions too. | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 20:26 | comment | added | KRyan | @SevenSidedDie That is... somewhat close to the mark for some of the times it’s been directed at me, but it’s not char-op. It’s that I’m in the middle of building a character, and think “hey, I wonder if there are any options for X. Hey Stack, anyone know any options for X?” and I get a ton of comments and answers ineptly attempting to root out the XY problem or challenge the frame. It comes across as people far more interested in getting the opportunity to talk (give the answer they want to give) rather than being interested in actually helping me. But that’s hardly the only time I see it | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 20:11 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | I suspect that your motive revolves a lot around questions like "I would like to do X" in a charop context, getting XY flak. Am I guessing somewhere near the mark there? If so, here's a thing: I often see those as XY Problems that don't actually cause any knock-on problems. I think that though I might like to see them Y'd instead of staying X out of some sense of principle, but practically, when it comes to charop, a valid "How to X" question is almost always actually useful to everyone involved, and doesn't have the weird side-effects in answers that other XY Problems do. | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 20:09 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | I think we agree on the principle that we need to be kinder about these. That's encouraging. :) I do think that there is value in questioning this on valid questions; I say in detail in my answer here, but short: because an XY Problem question isn't their real problem, they will not vote, accept, comment, etc. on the answers usefully. When they do, hey! It wasn't actually an XY Problem. | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 20:07 | comment | added | KRyan | @SevenSidedDie Updated, because I realized my biggest issue here: what is gained by questioning potential XY issues in a valid question? Who benefits from that? What are the benefits that are so great that they justify possibly disrespecting a user? | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 20:06 | history | edited | KRyan | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
about possible upsides to asking
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| Apr 10, 2015 at 20:01 | comment | added | KRyan | @SevenSidedDie I have stated what I consider to be the best practices: be cautious of what we wish the question was, be courteous in the extreme for any questioning we do make, and err on the side of assuming that people do, in fact, know what they want to learn. Moreover, when users have gone after me demanding justification for the questions that I asked, since they couldn’t answer that question and really wanted me to change my question to something they could answer, I feel that we could do worse than throwing out what we’ve currently got. | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 19:56 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | @KRyan (I don't believe pointing at a salient point of psychology is lecturing, even if someone is schooled in such. No intent to do so.) I think that we can help without frustrating the askers involved (except for those who would be frustrated by our site's operation in general already), and my hope for this meta is that we figure out best practices, rather than throwing out the possibility of being able to offer help on this issue. | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 19:53 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | @Lord_Gareth I'm sorry, but how does recognising that the asker is human and, like everyone, has a human brain insufferably condescending? I'm assuming you have a human brain now, but I hope that's not insufferable. | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 18:57 | history | edited | KRyan | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 70 characters in body
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| Apr 10, 2015 at 18:47 | comment | added | KRyan | @SevenSidedDie You’re right; portions of my answer were written thinking too much of particular cases where I felt that users here were treating a user as if they were stupid, and became heated as a result. Even then, I assume, that was not the intent – but it is certainly how it seemed to me. But overall, yes, users are trying to help. It’s just that their attempts – yes, your attempts – to help have sometimes been, I assume without meaning to, very disrespectful. Rewritten to assume better faith. Also, I have actually studied psychology and am marrying a psychologist. Don’t lecture. | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 18:46 | comment | added | Lord_Gareth | @SevenSidedDie ...No, that still just sounds like you're assuming the asker is too incompetent to handle their own question responsibly. If anything, your explanation as to why it's not condescending only made it sound more insufferably condescending. | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 18:43 | history | edited | KRyan | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
assuming better faith
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| Apr 10, 2015 at 18:21 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | Assuming that "Be Nice" is relevant — that the only reason to ask someone to clarify an apparent XY Problem is that the asker thinks they're stupid — is itself assuming bad faith. You never seem to see XY Problems, so I'll assume that you simply don't grasp the motive is asking, and that's why you believe "they're stupid" is the only possible motive. In actual practice, speaking as someone who asks these questions, the motive is knowing that people are human, and the XY Problem happens because human psychology involves mental blocks. | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 18:01 | history | edited | KRyan | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
a bit of conclusion
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| Apr 10, 2015 at 17:59 | comment | added | KRyan | @thedarkwanderer There are people in my life that I know very well. I still maintain that it would be the height of condescension and disrespect for me to tell them that “no, that’s not what you want at all, you actually want this.” I might say something like that to a child, maybe, but not to anyone I was treating as an equal. | |
| Apr 10, 2015 at 17:54 | history | answered | KRyan | CC BY-SA 3.0 |