7 ms·

The X-Y Problem

46 points by dp-hackernews 4y ago

keyanp 4y ago
Though this is a common issue, it is certainly bothersome when someone _wrongly_ assumes you are experiencing the XY problem and demands a lot of unnecessary information before helping you with something.
- KeepFlying 4y ago
  How else can I delay needing to actually think through your question??
- TillE 4y ago
  Right, it's fine to say that 90% of the time you shouldn't do X, but it's important to understand why you're saying that, and why sometimes you really do need to do X.
- db48x 4y ago
  It's also really annoying when people cannot recognize that they have asked an X-Y question :)
- pathikrit 4y ago
  Why not respond with both X and Y? e.g. for the last 3 character thing, here would be an appropriate response: To get the last 3 characters, do `echo ${foo: -3}`. Are you trying to get the file extension though? What if the extension is not 3 characters e.g. `foo.jpeg`? You then want to do `${foo##*.}`
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Some more probing might still be needed for the second solution, how a .tar.gz gets handled might depend on the programmer intent, could be different from a .gz hypothetically.
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    Because not every answer is as quick and straightforward as your example.
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    Yeah this is definitely the best response. Unfortunately most people (especially on Stackoverflow) are not as wise as you and will just downvote your question and say "you shouldn't do that".
- AbrahamParangi 4y ago
  Definitely frustrating for everyone following as well, since answering the question assuming it's an XY problem is only useful to subsequent readers who are trying to solve the same problem and doing it wrong in the same way. It is not helpful to people who are trying to solve a different problem correctly, who would like an answer to the exact question that the original poster asked, nor is it useful to people who are trying to solve the same problem but in a different, also wrong way - as they will likely never see the post.
- hinkley 4y ago
  In general people don't want to hear that they have a problem from anyone but themselves. I've had so many I Told You So moments with certain individuals that at some point you just assume everything they ask for has been rendered incomprehensible in a game of Telephone, either with other people or with themselves. In public policy they call it, "Something must be done, this is 'something', so we must do it." Neal Gaiman did a compendium of Norse Mythology, and in it he claims that Thor says, "When something weird happens I always assume Loki is involved. It saves time." That's the line that stuck with me the most out of that entire book. The people who fall into this category will tune you out while you say over and over "this is going to hurt us next year" and come in with a Pikachu face a year from now when they find out that it's been a year and the chickens have come home to roost. People, as it turns out, are much more accepting of a team delivering consistently 10% slower than expected versus a team that delivers to expectations one year and suddenly drops by 50% a year later. They can't understand that. They can't predict it. It just looks to them like you've stopped doing what you are paid to do, rather than the truth which is you stopped doing what you were paid to do 2 years ago and you didn't jump ship before the consequences showed up.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  It's less wasteful of collective time and effort to determine up front that the situation is NOT an X-Y problem than to traipse down the primrose path presuming it isn't only to subsequently learn that it is. Those who are experienced enough to understand the X-Y problem will recognise and acknowledge this. Those who aren't will often find reason to take offense. <shrug>
- ithkuil 4y ago
  Indeed. I think it even deserves a name. The "XYX problem"?
kelseyfrog 4y ago
I can see why the author would want to write about the X-Y problem, but what we really need is a way for those trying to answer to quickly discern if an X-Y problem actually exists. When it doesn't, the querent finds themselves at an unending cycle of attempting the clarify and justify in an insatiable appetite to convince them they are solving the wrong problem. The author really should be writing about that.
- prettyStandard 4y ago
  Why do you think people have trouble identifying X-Y problems? ;)
  - gpderetta 4y ago
    Parent is saying that the author has an X-Y problem.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      Parent has suckered you into an X-Y problem conversation.
      - prettyStandard 4y ago
        I suppose I might have disproved my own disbelief that this is a problem.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  That's the Y-X problem...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
wetpaws 4y ago
This resonates so much. Literally the biggest lesson in my IT career was to always ask "what problem you are trying to solve" to every question.
readthenotes1 4y ago
This reminds me of the gauss Weinberg scenario where the salesman wanted to buy a another fax machine cuz they burnt out the previous one. Or, in other words, we don't have any XY problems, what we have are people not properly educated. This is a long-standing problem and we do not have to make up a newfangled name for it
- evandale 4y ago
  Exactly, the XY problem happens because of ignorance. You can't ask X if you don't know X exists.
  - chowells 4y ago
    That's not what the XY problem is. The XY problem is asking for Y because you think it's the only way to solve your actual problem X. It's more of a lack of perspective than a lack of education. You tunnel-vision on what you think the solution will be, and when you go looking for help you you ask only about Y, instead of providing the larger context of X. You can't have an XY problem unless you're trying to solve problem X. It's not a lack of education, it's a lack of perspective on what your real goal is.
    - evandale 4y ago
      If you don't know you're trying to solve for X you will get the XY problem though - that's ignorance or lack of education. The last 3 letters is a perfect example. If you've only been exposed to 3 letter extensions and think that extension == 3 letters because you've never seen anything else it might not occur to you to ask how to get a file's extension. If you don't know the thing after the . is called an extension and you're looking at an ls of a directory where every file has 3 character extensions it won't occur to you to ask how to get the extension of a file. Yelling at a person who doesn't ask how to solve X when they don't even know that they should have asked X isn't helpful to anyone.
      - chowells 4y ago
Turing_Machine 4y ago
Reminiscent of, though not exactly analogous to, the apocryphal Henry Ford quote: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
evandale 4y ago
The thing that always annoyed me with the last 3 characters question is that it assumes everyone knows everything. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ The noob clearly thought extensions are always 3 characters because that's the only thing they've been exposed to. They didn't know "how do I get the last 3 characters in a filename?" and "how do I get a file extension?" are different questions. It may not have occurred to them to ask how to get the extension, and to take it further, maybe they don't know everything after the . is called an extension.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  A decreasing percentage if otherwise IT-literate people know about the 8.3 limit introduced by DOS that is slowly fading into history.
unwind 4y ago
When I was the most active on Stack Overflow, the recommended link for a description of the XY problem was [1]. This was (is?) commonly used in a comment to tell a poster that their question seems dubious, and might not get high-quality answers. Now I see that it seems to be a more or less exact copy of the OP, which is kind of confusing. Does anyone know the background/ownership? [1]: https://xyproblem.info/ https://xyproblem.info/
- mcdoogal 4y ago
  Your URL (which I've also seen and referenced a lot) sources the OP link at the bottom as "Source 2", so it at least seems the OP link predates this one.
- prettyStandard 4y ago
  Based on these two/four links, https://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem?action=info https://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem?action=info https://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem?action=recall&rev=1 https://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem?action=recall&rev=1 https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://xyproblem.info/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://xyproble... https://web.archive.org/web/20140908180346/https://xyproblem.info/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140908180346/https://xyproblem... Definitely seems to be wooledge when you follow the linked sources as well.
- bananapub 4y ago
  this link is from a (at least in the past) very active person on various IRC Linux and programming help channels who wrote the wiki article at least fifteen years ago. make that sixteen years ago: http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem?action=info http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem?action=info
a_c 4y ago
As the saying goes, half of problem solving is about asking the right questions
neilv 4y ago
Maybe more familiar as the response: "What are you really trying to do?" Which is a little related to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Followed immediately by "You don't want to do that. I, some internet guy, know what you really want to do even though I have no understanding of the constraints you are working under or what you're ultimately trying to accomplish!".
  - neilv 4y ago
    It used to have better connotations (such as when coming a good sysadmin), than it got from the same phrase being used on, say, StackOverflow.
at_a_remove 4y ago
Here is the big stumbling block with this, right at this step: "Others try to help user with Y, but are confused because Y seems like a strange problem to want to solve." Of course it is strange. If it were common, I would have, in my due diligence, already found it. I realize the Internet is filled with idiots who cannot or will not use Google, but it sure makes everything else fairly hard. Worst is having to specify, in the question itself, "This is not an XY problem," only for someone to try to find some way to make it an XY problem (you almost always can, if you try hard enough, and not just the degenerate case of "You wouldn't have this if you just stopped caring about X.") and then, once you have sufficiently proven yourself, those folks are nowhere to be found.
gaze 4y ago
From being on both ends of this, just answer the question as asked. It’s especially irritating when people essentially overreach and just decide you’re asking the wrong question. You’re saying “no I’m insisting on being more helpful than you’re asking me to be.” Just answer the damn question and let the person run into the next stumbling block. Why be so upset that the problem you’re now imagining hasn’t yet been solved? Your job is done. The most I think that’s appropriate to do is to answer the question and THEN ask what they’re trying to do. If they bite, they bite. Truly where does this end. You could say — they’re asking the wrong question for a reason. Sounds like you’re not thinking about the situation right because you’re not staying sharp. Have you tried doing sudoku puzzles? Maybe your mind is clouded due to anger. How’s your relationship with your parents? Have you checked for a gas leak in the room you’re working in?
- fluoridation 4y ago
  You're being silly. Why are "answer the question as stated" or "deconstruct the person's entire life to find their ultimate problem" the only logically consistent possible courses of action? If someone asks a question that suggests something might have been misunderstood, there's nothing wrong with probing a little to find the reason for the question. Maybe the person really does know something you didn't, but it's much more likely that by asking clarifying questions you'll save theirs and your own time.
  - gaze 4y ago
    I was providing a silly example but there is a continuum as you’ve identified. My point is that it’s not your place to decide how far along this continuum to go. It’s the job of the person asking the question.
    - ignite 4y ago
      The person asking the question is frequently not the person with the knowledge to determine this. The X-Y response shows up frequently on support forums where people are asking questions that show they haven't yet grasped the system they are working on.
scubbo 4y ago
I suspect this will be a highly divisive comment, but - the `greycat` character in these vignettes exemplifies the "knowledgable asshole" stereotype that does more damage than good. The division is likely to be as to whether this is a good and justified thing - "if they couldn't hack it, they don't belong here" // "respondents do not owe politeness to dumb questioners" - or not. As with many questions, I suspect the answer is somewhere in the middle (though closer to the "or not", IMO). And just so this comment isn't entirely meta-commentary and actually delivers some value - a broader guide on "asking technical questions" is here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html (FWIW the "How To Answer Questions in a Helpful Way" section supports my suspicion that a gentler approach is more productive) EDIT: I _maybe_ take back the "does more damage than good" claim from the first paragraph based `thethirdone`'s comment below - greycat-likes are probably still a net-positive. But they _can_ do better, pretty easily, and we should push for such improvement both personally and in communities where we are seen as leaders.
- thethirdone 4y ago
  I think I would prefer a greycat to be among the people helping me most of the time. Being correct and helpful even if you are not nice about it is still pretty good. I think answerers can be correct, helpful and nice, but getting a least two of those is good enough to be worth listening to.
  - scubbo 4y ago
    You're absolutely right, I wholeheartedly agree, and in fact I think the "greycat-dyad" is the best of the 2/3 situations: * Correct and helpful - greycat. Still gets you to a solution _and_ you learn something, at the cost of a bit of bruised feelings. * Helpful and nice - shows you how to go about answering (or asking!) your question properly, though perhaps not solving your immediate problem. Arguably the second-best of the 2/3 options? I'd rather "learn how to learn" than "get the technically-correct (but not actually correct) answer to my flawed question" * Correct and nice - probably the least-good of the 2/3 options? The querent continues to labour under the misunderstanding that brought them to their incorrect question, and might waste more time (for themselves or others) down the line. Still - better than any one property alone! That said, let's make sure not to brush under the carpet that _it is possible to achieve all three_; that it costs much less time and energy to be nice than is usually claimed; and that the benefits (an improved personal reputation, a more-welcoming community in which folks aren't afraid to ask questions), though immediately intangible, are considerable.
menacingly 4y ago
I don't think we need to evangelize what smug gatekeepers already far over-apply across many domains
didgetmaster 4y ago
From the title, I thought it might be just another rant about people with certain chromosomes (also called males).
warkanlock 4y ago
It's only possible to guess beforehand what you want by wasting considerable time. Look at modern society and how much time they spend pursuing happiness, yet still, nobody knows what they want. There's a well-known quote from a singer in Argentina that claims, "No se lo que quiero pero lo quiero ya." (translated into I don't know what I want, but I want it now)
benchaney 4y ago
Something that I think is pretty important to keep in mind is that when handling a possible XY problem, the key is communication. It is good to ask clarifying questions and questions about context when answering a question. It is good to provide context and be open to the possibility that your question is misguided when asking. Insisting that there isn't or isn't and XY problem and being condescending or combative is bad when asking/answering. I suspect part of the reason this link is so controversial is because the "hero" of the stories screws this up horribly.
rossdavidh 4y ago
The most important lesson here, is that when you realize that the person is asking for X when they wanted Y, make sure to somehow say something critical, sarcastic, or dismissive. That way along with a bit of knowledge that helps them for a moment, you are also delivering a blow to their self-confidence, that will be a detriment for the rest of the day (or, if they were already lacking in confidence, perhaps many days). This may not work on veteran co-workers, but it will work especially well with anyone lacking experience or suffering from Imposter Syndrome.

46 points by dp-hackernews 4y ago

Though this is a common issue, it is certainly bothersome when someone _wrongly_ assumes you are experiencing the XY problem and demands a lot of unnecessary information before helping you with something.

KeepFlying 4y ago
How else can I delay needing to actually think through your question??
TillE 4y ago
Right, it's fine to say that 90% of the time you shouldn't do X, but it's important to understand why you're saying that, and why sometimes you really do need to do X.
db48x 4y ago
It's also really annoying when people cannot recognize that they have asked an X-Y question :)
pathikrit 4y ago
Why not respond with both X and Y? e.g. for the last 3 character thing, here would be an appropriate response: To get the last 3 characters, do `echo ${foo: -3}`. Are you trying to get the file extension though? What if the extension is not 3 characters e.g. `foo.jpeg`? You then want to do `${foo##*.}`
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Some more probing might still be needed for the second solution, how a .tar.gz gets handled might depend on the programmer intent, could be different from a .gz hypothetically.
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  Because not every answer is as quick and straightforward as your example.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Yeah this is definitely the best response. Unfortunately most people (especially on Stackoverflow) are not as wise as you and will just downvote your question and say "you shouldn't do that".
AbrahamParangi 4y ago
Definitely frustrating for everyone following as well, since answering the question assuming it's an XY problem is only useful to subsequent readers who are trying to solve the same problem and doing it wrong in the same way. It is not helpful to people who are trying to solve a different problem correctly, who would like an answer to the exact question that the original poster asked, nor is it useful to people who are trying to solve the same problem but in a different, also wrong way - as they will likely never see the post.
hinkley 4y ago
In general people don't want to hear that they have a problem from anyone but themselves. I've had so many I Told You So moments with certain individuals that at some point you just assume everything they ask for has been rendered incomprehensible in a game of Telephone, either with other people or with themselves. In public policy they call it, "Something must be done, this is 'something', so we must do it." Neal Gaiman did a compendium of Norse Mythology, and in it he claims that Thor says, "When something weird happens I always assume Loki is involved. It saves time." That's the line that stuck with me the most out of that entire book. The people who fall into this category will tune you out while you say over and over "this is going to hurt us next year" and come in with a Pikachu face a year from now when they find out that it's been a year and the chickens have come home to roost. People, as it turns out, are much more accepting of a team delivering consistently 10% slower than expected versus a team that delivers to expectations one year and suddenly drops by 50% a year later. They can't understand that. They can't predict it. It just looks to them like you've stopped doing what you are paid to do, rather than the truth which is you stopped doing what you were paid to do 2 years ago and you didn't jump ship before the consequences showed up.
dredmorbius 4y ago
It's less wasteful of collective time and effort to determine up front that the situation is NOT an X-Y problem than to traipse down the primrose path presuming it isn't only to subsequently learn that it is. Those who are experienced enough to understand the X-Y problem will recognise and acknowledge this. Those who aren't will often find reason to take offense. <shrug>
ithkuil 4y ago
Indeed. I think it even deserves a name. The "XYX problem"?

kelseyfrog 4y ago

I can see why the author would want to write about the X-Y problem, but what we really need is a way for those trying to answer to quickly discern if an X-Y problem actually exists. When it doesn't, the querent finds themselves at an unending cycle of attempting the clarify and justify in an insatiable appetite to convince them they are solving the wrong problem. The author really should be writing about that.

prettyStandard 4y ago
Why do you think people have trouble identifying X-Y problems? ;)
- gpderetta 4y ago
  Parent is saying that the author has an X-Y problem.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Parent has suckered you into an X-Y problem conversation.
    - prettyStandard 4y ago
      I suppose I might have disproved my own disbelief that this is a problem.
aidenn0 4y ago
That's the Y-X problem...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

wetpaws 4y ago

This resonates so much. Literally the biggest lesson in my IT career was to always ask "what problem you are trying to solve" to every question.

readthenotes1 4y ago

This reminds me of the gauss Weinberg scenario where the salesman wanted to buy a another fax machine cuz they burnt out the previous one. Or, in other words, we don't have any XY problems, what we have are people not properly educated. This is a long-standing problem and we do not have to make up a newfangled name for it

evandale 4y ago
Exactly, the XY problem happens because of ignorance. You can't ask X if you don't know X exists.
- chowells 4y ago
  That's not what the XY problem is. The XY problem is asking for Y because you think it's the only way to solve your actual problem X. It's more of a lack of perspective than a lack of education. You tunnel-vision on what you think the solution will be, and when you go looking for help you you ask only about Y, instead of providing the larger context of X. You can't have an XY problem unless you're trying to solve problem X. It's not a lack of education, it's a lack of perspective on what your real goal is.
  - evandale 4y ago
    If you don't know you're trying to solve for X you will get the XY problem though - that's ignorance or lack of education. The last 3 letters is a perfect example. If you've only been exposed to 3 letter extensions and think that extension == 3 letters because you've never seen anything else it might not occur to you to ask how to get a file's extension. If you don't know the thing after the . is called an extension and you're looking at an ls of a directory where every file has 3 character extensions it won't occur to you to ask how to get the extension of a file. Yelling at a person who doesn't ask how to solve X when they don't even know that they should have asked X isn't helpful to anyone.
    - chowells 4y ago

Turing_Machine 4y ago

Reminiscent of, though not exactly analogous to, the apocryphal Henry Ford quote: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

evandale 4y ago

The thing that always annoyed me with the last 3 characters question is that it assumes everyone knows everything. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ The noob clearly thought extensions are always 3 characters because that's the only thing they've been exposed to. They didn't know "how do I get the last 3 characters in a filename?" and "how do I get a file extension?" are different questions. It may not have occurred to them to ask how to get the extension, and to take it further, maybe they don't know everything after the . is called an extension.

jiggawatts 4y ago
A decreasing percentage if otherwise IT-literate people know about the 8.3 limit introduced by DOS that is slowly fading into history.

unwind 4y ago

When I was the most active on Stack Overflow, the recommended link for a description of the XY problem was [1]. This was (is?) commonly used in a comment to tell a poster that their question seems dubious, and might not get high-quality answers. Now I see that it seems to be a more or less exact copy of the OP, which is kind of confusing. Does anyone know the background/ownership? [1]: https://xyproblem.info/ https://xyproblem.info/

mcdoogal 4y ago
Your URL (which I've also seen and referenced a lot) sources the OP link at the bottom as "Source 2", so it at least seems the OP link predates this one.
prettyStandard 4y ago
Based on these two/four links, https://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem?action=info https://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem?action=info https://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem?action=recall&rev=1 https://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem?action=recall&rev=1 https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://xyproblem.info/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://xyproble... https://web.archive.org/web/20140908180346/https://xyproblem.info/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140908180346/https://xyproblem... Definitely seems to be wooledge when you follow the linked sources as well.
bananapub 4y ago
this link is from a (at least in the past) very active person on various IRC Linux and programming help channels who wrote the wiki article at least fifteen years ago. make that sixteen years ago: http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem?action=info http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem?action=info

a_c 4y ago

As the saying goes, half of problem solving is about asking the right questions

neilv 4y ago

Maybe more familiar as the response: "What are you really trying to do?" Which is a little related to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Followed immediately by "You don't want to do that. I, some internet guy, know what you really want to do even though I have no understanding of the constraints you are working under or what you're ultimately trying to accomplish!".
- neilv 4y ago
  It used to have better connotations (such as when coming a good sysadmin), than it got from the same phrase being used on, say, StackOverflow.

at_a_remove 4y ago

Here is the big stumbling block with this, right at this step: "Others try to help user with Y, but are confused because Y seems like a strange problem to want to solve." Of course it is strange. If it were common, I would have, in my due diligence, already found it. I realize the Internet is filled with idiots who cannot or will not use Google, but it sure makes everything else fairly hard. Worst is having to specify, in the question itself, "This is not an XY problem," only for someone to try to find some way to make it an XY problem (you almost always can, if you try hard enough, and not just the degenerate case of "You wouldn't have this if you just stopped caring about X.") and then, once you have sufficiently proven yourself, those folks are nowhere to be found.

gaze 4y ago

From being on both ends of this, just answer the question as asked. It’s especially irritating when people essentially overreach and just decide you’re asking the wrong question. You’re saying “no I’m insisting on being more helpful than you’re asking me to be.” Just answer the damn question and let the person run into the next stumbling block. Why be so upset that the problem you’re now imagining hasn’t yet been solved? Your job is done. The most I think that’s appropriate to do is to answer the question and THEN ask what they’re trying to do. If they bite, they bite. Truly where does this end. You could say — they’re asking the wrong question for a reason. Sounds like you’re not thinking about the situation right because you’re not staying sharp. Have you tried doing sudoku puzzles? Maybe your mind is clouded due to anger. How’s your relationship with your parents? Have you checked for a gas leak in the room you’re working in?

fluoridation 4y ago
You're being silly. Why are "answer the question as stated" or "deconstruct the person's entire life to find their ultimate problem" the only logically consistent possible courses of action? If someone asks a question that suggests something might have been misunderstood, there's nothing wrong with probing a little to find the reason for the question. Maybe the person really does know something you didn't, but it's much more likely that by asking clarifying questions you'll save theirs and your own time.
- gaze 4y ago
  I was providing a silly example but there is a continuum as you’ve identified. My point is that it’s not your place to decide how far along this continuum to go. It’s the job of the person asking the question.
  - ignite 4y ago
    The person asking the question is frequently not the person with the knowledge to determine this. The X-Y response shows up frequently on support forums where people are asking questions that show they haven't yet grasped the system they are working on.

scubbo 4y ago

I suspect this will be a highly divisive comment, but - the `greycat` character in these vignettes exemplifies the "knowledgable asshole" stereotype that does more damage than good. The division is likely to be as to whether this is a good and justified thing - "if they couldn't hack it, they don't belong here" // "respondents do not owe politeness to dumb questioners" - or not. As with many questions, I suspect the answer is somewhere in the middle (though closer to the "or not", IMO). And just so this comment isn't entirely meta-commentary and actually delivers some value - a broader guide on "asking technical questions" is here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html (FWIW the "How To Answer Questions in a Helpful Way" section supports my suspicion that a gentler approach is more productive) EDIT: I _maybe_ take back the "does more damage than good" claim from the first paragraph based `thethirdone`'s comment below - greycat-likes are probably still a net-positive. But they _can_ do better, pretty easily, and we should push for such improvement both personally and in communities where we are seen as leaders.

thethirdone 4y ago
I think I would prefer a greycat to be among the people helping me most of the time. Being correct and helpful even if you are not nice about it is still pretty good. I think answerers can be correct, helpful and nice, but getting a least two of those is good enough to be worth listening to.
- scubbo 4y ago
  You're absolutely right, I wholeheartedly agree, and in fact I think the "greycat-dyad" is the best of the 2/3 situations: * Correct and helpful - greycat. Still gets you to a solution _and_ you learn something, at the cost of a bit of bruised feelings. * Helpful and nice - shows you how to go about answering (or asking!) your question properly, though perhaps not solving your immediate problem. Arguably the second-best of the 2/3 options? I'd rather "learn how to learn" than "get the technically-correct (but not actually correct) answer to my flawed question" * Correct and nice - probably the least-good of the 2/3 options? The querent continues to labour under the misunderstanding that brought them to their incorrect question, and might waste more time (for themselves or others) down the line. Still - better than any one property alone! That said, let's make sure not to brush under the carpet that _it is possible to achieve all three_; that it costs much less time and energy to be nice than is usually claimed; and that the benefits (an improved personal reputation, a more-welcoming community in which folks aren't afraid to ask questions), though immediately intangible, are considerable.

menacingly 4y ago

I don't think we need to evangelize what smug gatekeepers already far over-apply across many domains

didgetmaster 4y ago

From the title, I thought it might be just another rant about people with certain chromosomes (also called males).

warkanlock 4y ago

It's only possible to guess beforehand what you want by wasting considerable time. Look at modern society and how much time they spend pursuing happiness, yet still, nobody knows what they want. There's a well-known quote from a singer in Argentina that claims, "No se lo que quiero pero lo quiero ya." (translated into I don't know what I want, but I want it now)

benchaney 4y ago

Something that I think is pretty important to keep in mind is that when handling a possible XY problem, the key is communication. It is good to ask clarifying questions and questions about context when answering a question. It is good to provide context and be open to the possibility that your question is misguided when asking. Insisting that there isn't or isn't and XY problem and being condescending or combative is bad when asking/answering. I suspect part of the reason this link is so controversial is because the "hero" of the stories screws this up horribly.

rossdavidh 4y ago

The most important lesson here, is that when you realize that the person is asking for X when they wanted Y, make sure to somehow say something critical, sarcastic, or dismissive. That way along with a bit of knowledge that helps them for a moment, you are also delivering a blow to their self-confidence, that will be a detriment for the rest of the day (or, if they were already lacking in confidence, perhaps many days). This may not work on veteran co-workers, but it will work especially well with anyone lacking experience or suffering from Imposter Syndrome.