6 ms·

I often encounter the opposite. I would have a complex problem that I can legitimately solve by something reasonably simple yet I don’t posses the expertise on.

• saghm 3y ago
  I like to call this the "YZ answer"; I'm asking Y, which is the actual question I have, but someone else tries to convince me that my "real" question is "Z" because they happen to know the answer to that. Tangentially related, but does anyone else besides me have an irrationally strong dislike of the name "XY problem" for this phenomenon? I feel like that name could apply equally well to basically any problem where you have two things you could call "X and Y", which is...a lot of problems. Why not call this something like the "mistaken question" problem or the "incorrect premise" problem?
  • pishpash 3y ago
    You're saying the problem isn't what the XY problem is, but that it isn't called Z. So an XYZ problem. /s
  • JdeBP 3y ago
    I refer you to Mark-Jason Dominus's original explanation of what X and Y had to be. It got renamed "XY Problem" after the fact, and that name didn't take off for a long time, really not until Stack Overflow appeared and became popular, well over a decade after MJD posted about this and well after many of us had for that time not been calling it this on volunteer-support mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups. * https://jdebp.uk/FGA/put-down-the-chocolate-covered-banana.html https://jdebp.uk/FGA/put-down-the-chocolate-covered-banana.h...
  • marajit 3y ago
    [dead]
  • plagiarist 3y ago
    On Stackoverflow in particular, there is also a ~YY answer. You explain that you specifically don't want Y, then someone tells you you are wrong and to simply use Y.
    • einpoklum 3y ago
      Well, yes, but many of the times people on SO say they don't want to use Y, it's because of some assumptions they have about Y, and actually they do want to use Y, or use it differently than usual etc.
    • kloch 3y ago
      Might as well just call this the "Stackoverflow problem", although it is really a family of problems where either the requestor or (typically) the responses are less than helpful. As a third party searcher looking for answers to a specific problem, I would prefer to see a direct solution to the stated question first, even if it is followed by admonitions that "you probably don't want to do that" or "this other thing is a better approach".
• pyb 3y ago
  Pretty much stopped asking any questions on web forums because of this. Some people tend to "XY" you whenever they don't immediately know the answer to a complex question.
  • LeonB 3y ago
    I’ve seen a pathology where people ask for irrelevant details to stall for time. As in: “hmmm what version is your operating system? And what’s the version of every package/dll on your computer?”
• resonious 3y ago
  Yeah the whole premise of the "XY" problem seems like it was written up by someone who regulars Stack Overflow. It's pretty frustrating when the highest-upvotes answer to a question is "actually you don't want to do that. do something else instead".
  • JdeBP 3y ago
    It wasn't. Mark-Jason Dominus was the cause of that name. I, Raymond Chen, Charles Cazabon, and Eric S. Raymond didn't use that name at all. I, in particular, chose a name that reinforced the an important part of the concept, missed in this discussion here, that the problem was nonsensical as posed. * https://jdebp.uk/FGA/put-down-the-chocolate-covered-banana.html https://jdebp.uk/FGA/put-down-the-chocolate-covered-banana.h...
    • mjd 3y ago
      Thanks! But it was actually Greg Bacon (responding to my original article) who thought of calling the phenomenon "XY problem".
      • JdeBP 3y ago
        That's why I went with "cause" not "coiner". (-: People took your "X" and "Y" and ran with them, and the fact that "X" and "Y" are not blatantly nonsensical together caused some of the meaning to be lost. I've watched this happen over the years on the likes of Stack Exchange. If Greg Bacon had gone with "Bacon and Hand Drill Problem" instead, perhaps this wouldn't have become so distorted. Although I know a group of Wikipedia writers who would no doubt insist that bacon logically goes with everything. (-:
  • arcanemachiner 3y ago
    I think this is because people Googling a question often end up at a SO post that answers a slightly different question. But since the keywords blazed a trail to a certain answer, that's the one that gets the upvotes, even though it's not the "correct" answer. This has happened to me many times.
• matsemann 3y ago
  I'm sorry, but if people often do this to you, maybe reflect on them actually being right? Or that you're legitimately asking a stupid question given your self-proclaimed lack of expertise? People don't answer that way to be smug or so. They do it because the thankless person they're spending their own free time helping will just come back with a new asinine question the moment one answers their posed question. It's from experience after helping thousands of people, not pettiness. If perhaps you're the one in a million case where this isn't applicable, just add the context, then. Don't be angry about having to do it, that's quite entitled given that you're asking people to solve your problem for free..
  • petabyte0 3y ago
    People do it often because it's a cheap way to feel smart without putting in any effort. It's the same reason how people mention Dunnking-Kruger any chance they can. I doubt adding full context would help much in terms of getting a quality answer. Someone who answers questions in good faith will answer if they are there. All it would do is remove all the XY people I guess
  • permo-w 3y ago
    the general gist of what you’re saying is fair, but I’m extremely sceptical of the claim that there’s no smugness involved. these kinds of forums are full to the brim with smug, vindictive assholes who can’t wait to point out how silly and misguided you are. in my experience there’s no correlation between your propensity towards helping people online and a positive disposition in fact there are definitely people who, if they aren’t helping as an excuse to be rude in the first place, feel it’s okay to be rude because they’re helping. you get this offline too. Gordon Ramsey is a good example
  • skohan 3y ago
    Did you reflect on the case that actually you might be the smug one in this scenario, assuming that every person who asks a question doesn’t know what they are talking about, and you know better than them? I have experienced this many times, and it’s extremely frustrating, when people ask for the context, and I answer something to the effect of: > the context is quite hard to explain but I assure you I thought through this question and this is precisely what I need to know And people will still insist that you don’t know what you are talking about and this must be an XY problem. Even in the case that someone might be wondering down the wrong path, it’s more valuable for the community to let them make their own mistakes and learn from them. That’s how we become experts, not from blindly trusting the “authority” of people who spend a lot of time earning karma on Stack Overflow. I think it’s good to answer a question in the form: “this seems like a strange question because X, but here is the answer”. It’s also fine to ask for context. But it’s quite arrogant to harass someone into providing context until you are satisfied they are solving a problem in a way you deem worthy. If you don’t like the question you’re free to not engage with it.
• thom 3y ago
  Yeah it’s often like speaking to ChatGPT, you have to put in an enormous preamble saying “answer exactly what I’m asking, I promise I’ve thought about it, I know it’s weird”.
• kelnos 3y ago
  > Let’s just get on with the problem solving instead of playing the meta game. I feel like a lot of things in tech have become --- for lack of a better word -- memes, that people trot out to make themselves appear smart. The XY Problem is one of them. Sometimes we have actually thoroughly explored our problem space and know what we need to do, just not how to do it! But someone else seems to think they're going to get Cleverness Points by uselessly derailing the discussion.
  • lelanthran 3y ago
    It's one reason why ChatGPT is going to eat stack overflow alive in no time at all.
• lelanthran 3y ago
  Yeah, it's a false positive identification of the XY problem. The audience falsely identifies your problem as an XY problem. This is, IME, due to the audience wanting to refactor the problem into something they can understand. It's worse in JavaScript probl ms, where, due to the actual inability to do something simple like pause the runtime for 5s, the experts all spend tons of effort trying to convince you that there is no situation in which this is reasonable rather than simply say the runtime environment is too crippled to allow this. It's nonsense of course.
  • circuit10 3y ago
    It’s true that with the way JS is designed, you almost never want to freeze up the entire program like that because it doesn’t exactly have threads so it would freeze the whole page or application even if you could. You can get a similar effect using async functions which can pause for a bit while still allowing events to be processed (or do it the old way using callbacks) So both are true; yes, you almost never want to do that, and the reason you don’t is because is because of JavaScript’s design, which you could argue is a flaw but it does also have advantages
• marajit 3y ago
  im often accused of xy problem. Thing is, I want answers to x AND y. So when they've answered y, i ask x, and that makes them mad
• FeepingCreature 3y ago
  Also enraging: finding X answers for your YY problem on Google searches for Y.
• haswell 3y ago
  I think this highlights that the usefulness of the XY problem framing will depend on context. As a platform product manager working with customers (both internal and external/paying), the most important thing I can do is know with certainty what problem I’m trying to solve and why. Maybe it’s annoying right now, but it ensures we don’t spend 6 months building something that solves nothing. I can’t count the number of times someone asked for features instead of describing their problem and after returning to the problem it quickly became apparent that the feature ask was not the only path forward and probably not the best path forward. In the context of engineers seeking help from other engineers, I can understand why this can quickly become something else. As with all things, context matters. Don’t insist on understanding X to the nth degree just because you encountered xyproblem.info. But don’t assume that someone trying to understand X is just trying to assert their superiority.
• deleted 3y ago
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