>Providing a thorough, quality answer to a troll question won't help advance that troll's career, they will pay the price later, for sure, when their intellect

>Providing a thorough, quality answer to a troll question won't help advance that troll's career, they will pay the price later, for sure, when their intellect is on the line. This what would happen in an ideal world. In reality though it's orders of magnitude easier to check credentials than intellect (provided it's even possible to do the later). In many situations, if you go against somebody with credentials without credentials of your own you won't even have a chance to have a battle of wits (like applying for a job that requires a degree). And cheating will get you credentials most of the time, it's not like universities check every graduate's intellect before issuing them a diploma. Otherwise cheating would not be such a big deal in the academia. So yes, helping stupid people with their homework will advance their career. Might not to the level of Google's CTO but to the level of the guy who codes healthcare.gov or the DV's "random number generator" or Toyota's ECU or any other example of crappy code that has a good chance to interfere with people's lives. Please don't do that. If you don't want to troll them - just don't reply.