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Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

That's a misconception. The respondent absolutely respects that possibility. It's just virtually never the case. If anything, your type of criticism does not respect the low effort involved in almost every question asked.

There's a bit of Dunning-Kruger to this too: the stupidest of questions will come from people who are absolutely convinced that in their case The question is warranted. It's just practically never.

When one in a thousand misguided-sounding questions is legitimate, the only sensible thing to do is to assume all questions that sound misguided are. Then it's up to the person asking to be clear in why it's not. (Not to mention that clarifying that also tends to reveal other meaningful constraints on the answer.)

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The case of questions on public boards is different, because those also serve as reference for future people with the same question. Places like SO in particular exist not just to help the person asking, but the countless thousands who will find the question through Google search.

In those cases, if you do the "looking at your context, did you mean Y instead of X" substitution, your answer will be still attached to a "how to X" query, and will frustrate a lot of people who may have a legitimate reason for doing X.

IMO one of the best things about Stackoverflow is that it helps all the other thousands of people who thought they needed to do X but really needed to do Y. Having the answer for "how to do Y" under the correct label would be useless to these people because they'd never know they needed to do Y.

If you really do need to do X, then explain why clearly in your question and you'll likely get an answer for it. And of course SO allows multiple answers, so we can have both the technically correct and the not technically correct but still useful answers.

> In those cases, if you do the "looking at your context, did you mean Y instead of X" substitution, your answer will be still attached to a "how to X" query, and will frustrate a lot of people who may have a legitimate reason for doing X.

And, conversely, it will help a lot of people who may not realise that their desire to do X instead of Y is flawed.

Which is probably the larger population as this kind of substition happens most often when a common solution to a common problem is not used.

So, when you notice this happens often and it annoys you, ask better questions. Explain what you want to achieve, what you considered and why you discarded certain solutions whilst you know they are common. If you get a substition beyond all of that chances are the person answering knows what's up. Embrace it, see why it is proposed and simply take time to explain why you couldn't use that (or can). It takes a few minutes but the person answering is spending more than you are, for free. Also you help every next viewer of your question.

> The respondent absolutely respects that possibility. It's just virtually never the case.

It's a lot more common that the respondent is trying to get points on SO and wants to appear smarter than he/she is.

> If anything, your type of criticism does not respect the low effort involved in almost every question asked.

This reminds me of my years in university. There was always a professor with this attitude, and it was always the case that the professor was misunderstanding and not helping the student.

Students do ask lots of questions where a professor rightfully says "You don't want to do X, you want Y." But the few professors that insist on it are always problematic. Thank God for TAs and other professors one can turn to.

A good thing to do if you think a question is "low effort" is just ignore it instead of assuming your own superiority.

Ironically, that's not what Dunning-Kruger means.

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