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That sounds great in theory, but in practice you end up having this enormous, long list of "defenses" as to why it isn't an XY problem, and then ... people will
by at_a_remove 6y ago
That sounds great in theory, but in practice you end up having this enormous, long list of "defenses" as to why it isn't an XY problem, and then ... people will ignore them anyway. This has happened to me on Hacker News.
People hit that XY button more than needed, and I have seen this even in the earliest days of Linux. I remember, pre-Google, when asking some questions on IRC about recompiling the kernel for my distro, I would get smart-ass responses like "What you should have done is selected this other distro."
It's led to me rarely asking questions if I think the issue could be construed as XY.
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoI even have this issue in language learning. I ask a quæstion about a specific, unusual grammatical form in a language I find hard to understand, and I am met with “You should instead phrase it in this more basic way that you already understand.”. I am obviously not asking how to translate the specific example sentence I conjured up, I am asking about how to use the specific grammatical form I inquired about.