this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2024
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I don't think you quite understood the xy problem. A better way to explain the core concept is "don't ask how to do your erroneous solution, ask how to solve your problem", the corollary to this is "don't just ask how to do something, explain why are you trying to do it or what you're trying to accomplish with it". This helps people to contextualize their answers when trying to help you. Remember that the problem is that the person is not asking for X because they don't understand their problem in the first place. You're right about stack overflow though, very useful info sometimes but incredibly toxic place most of the time.
To some degree it's unavoidable that the answer is you receive are not the answers you want. Most of the time The listener is making some assumptions about what you know or about what you could do or want to do, and those are definitely not going to be entirely accurate. Of course the listener knows that, but if they follow what you wrote too closely, they could be ignoring the obvious solution that you just didn't think about because you were focused on something else.