>Do you educate people about the complexity of the physics and bureaucracy involved with defining the current time every time someone asks you "what time is it?

>Do you educate people about the complexity of the physics and bureaucracy involved with defining the current time every time someone asks you "what time is it?" Maybe you're (inadvertently) making a caricature by using a simple "what time is it?" question but many user questions are under-specified. Because of that, Stackoverflow answerers in particular do go into the extra complexities because it's part of its editorial DNA to restate the q&a so it's a high-quality community knowledgebase instead of just answering the direct question as stated. I tried to explain this hard-to-grasp nuance previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21115438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21115438 But sometimes, this X-Y problem editorializing mechanism gets so enthusiastic that it can detract from a correct answer. Here's a famous example of a string bytes extraction question with smart people arguing with the correct answers from user541686 (was Mehrdad) and Michael Buen: + correct answer has lots of X-Y pushback in the comments: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/472906/how-do-i-get-a-consistent-byte-representation-of-strings-in-c-sharp-without-manu/10380166#10380166 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/472906/how-do-i-get-a-co... + another correct answer from Buen that emphasizes user541686/Mehrdad works for broken unpaired surrogates: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/472906/how-do-i-get-a-consistent-byte-representation-of-strings-in-c-sharp-without-manu/10384024#10384024 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/472906/how-do-i-get-a-co... The meta layer issue is that the question is underspecified which causes 2 sides with very intelligent people arguing whether or not it's an X-Y problem!