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Comment by __jal | Hacker News Reader

For me, it isn't even vocalizing - I discovered that forcing things into words helps me troubleshoot after noticing that I solved my own problems after giving up and composing an email to someone to ask for help. The act of describing the problem in written form allowed me to see what I was missing.

Since noticing that, I started doing it fairly, and not just with programming. At some point, I realized I was keeping a (somewhat oddly structured) journal.

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When writing SO questions I tend to only press the submit button 5–10% of the time before realising my error (typically something mundane). The act of putting the problem into words, along with writing up a good background of the problem (as you should for a good question) often forces an objective viewpoint/reevaluation of the problem.

Very much this. The flow for me goes:

1) I don't understand that. Let me ask StackOverflow.

2) I'm having trouble phrasing my question properly. What do you call $X? Googling ensues

3) Oh nevermind, I get it now <closes tab>

Damn. I thought I was the only one who does this :'D

On a serious note, this effect can be applied to our everyday problem as well. Such as when you are feeling lethargic, you'd want to write down all of your thoughts in a list to see the bigger picture and figure out how simple it can be to finish a task at hand.

s/lethargic/anxious/, and I do this all the time! Doing a quick mind dump usually clears out my anxiety, or at least reduces it to a manageable level, allowing me to continue doing things.

You should check out the book "Getting Things Done", which is based on taking what you described and using it to stay organized and adaptable. If you've got anxiety it would probably help at least a little bit.

This makes me wonder what the bounce rate for Stack Overflow questions is and what percent of visitors actually make it through the submission process.

This would actually be an answerable question, because of SO's draft mechanism.

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https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/296990/what-are-the...

I've been thinking along the same lines for a very long time. Thanks for the inspiration to finally ask!

They've responded to questions like that before.

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/5y9l9n/showerthou...

Ooooh, nice one. Thanks for the link!

That's awesome!

If they have a big enough database of half-typed-then-abandoned questions, do you think it would be possible to train an RNN (or something) to read a post in progress and predict at what point the answer should be obvious to you?

Not the same, but while writing the title it suggest other posts.

I seem to recall something similar which does pattern matching comparing the code that you're typing with a database of code in accepted stackoverflow answers and gives "smart autocomplete". Not sure how I stand on the overall impact of such a thing but technically it was cool. :)

Consider posting and answering yourself. I found myself searching for the same problem months later and once I found my own answer.

Hehe, has happened to me as well.

Also when I kept updating my blog posts about stupid problems that gooogle didn't answer seemed to attract some audience.

More than once I've had a problem, found the solution on stackoverflow, clicked up-vote and then got "you cannot vote on your own answer."

On the other hand in the past year especially my experience has been I am asking something for which the documentation is very bad, I don't know enough about the particular problem area I am trying to solve to make a concise description with code examples that nearly work but don't, and as a consequence I just drop it and say it's not worth asking here because nobody will help you understand the problem area unless you understand it really well. Too bad SO has replaced user groups in so many cases.

Writing things down - or sketching or using mind-maps (not software but actually drawing your own manually) - seems to have an amazing effect on the brain.

We haven't been writing long (in evolutionary terms) so I wonder why that is?

maybe writing things down frees up some resource allocation? e.g. save on the memory/disk to save some precious cache resources

lol just saying

I think that the stuff in our mind is mostly abstract. We absorb things from the world all the time, conscious and unconscious, and make conscious and unconscious connections between them.

Thinking aloud, whether in the mind, on paper or even vocally, helps us to identify some of these points, and thus quantify a meaning from it. There's only so many points that we can mentally hold though - we're not good multi-taskers after all! So the better we can think aloud, the better we can consciously grab thoughts and identify the real gaps - which we can fill in by searching/ creating more points in our mind, or go external.

Hmm, just thinking aloud though ;)

I think it's because our brains are good at manipulating tangible things - it's what they've been doing since before we had a neocortex, after all. Making thoughts tangible, sensory experiences can help engage the full machinery of the brain, instead of just limiting it to higher brain functions.

This might be splitting hairs, but I think hearing/reading my own question is more important than the act of writing down the problem.

I theorize that words you hear/read pass through some part of the brain specialized in finding answers, that is not engaged during regular problem solving.

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