yah, after a while, asking for help feels like reaching frontline tech support (or first-page google results) over and over and getting the "did you restart?" a

yah, after a while, asking for help feels like reaching frontline tech support (or first-page google results) over and over and getting the "did you restart?" answer. it's often not only not helpful, but a real drag on finding a useful answer. in daily life, folks intrinsically tend to curate others who give them good answers (information), and that's how such 'masters'[0] gain real esteem. typically you realize through experience what questions these 'masters' can answer well and what they can't, leading to genuine social bonds (trust is the real social currency but trust and good information tend to go hand-in-hand). this esteem is so valuable that others game our social systems to get it falsely, which is why social media is such a shitshow (not because of poor moderation as many seem to believe, since moderation doesn't actually change what people believe, except maybe at the margin, but esteem does). basically, people who can answer questions well deserve esteem. the social awkwardness you describe come from people who don't deserve the esteem but want it (or worse, think they deserve it) anyway. and incidentally, the prevalence of this awkwardness is a dependable sign of social degradation (low-trust to low-ethics vicious cycle), as people generally have no problem admitting ignorance in high-trust environments. [0]: i resist the term 'expert' for being thoroughly subverted by fake esteem seekers and mediopolitical propagandists.