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Comments on Is it okay to ask a question because you're too lazy/bored to figure it out yourself?
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Is it okay to ask a question because you're too lazy/bored to figure it out yourself?
It is generally considered good practice to try and do your own research to find the answer to a question before you post it.
There are some questions where the asker is just not capable of finding the answer on their own, no matter how much research they do on their own. As a contrived example, let's say that color of traffic lights in Elbonia is not documented anywhere, and Elbonia has currently closed all borders. A person wondering what color the traffic lights are in Elbonia cannot find it no matter what they do. Their only hope is to ask here, and perhaps a kind Elbonian will volunteer the facts.
A second class is questions where the asker could in theory figure it out, but it would be very burdensome. For example, perhaps the answer requires advanced degrees and a decades of reading literature, whereas the asker is an illiterate child. If the asker tried to answer it their own, they would have to dedicate a lifetime to it, and might easily still fail.
Then we have the spectrum going all the way down to questions where the answer could be easily found with "a basic 5 second google", or even questions where the answer is obvious by simply reading the question back.
I'm asking about questions where:
- The answer is readily available and can be found with "a 5 second google"
- The asker knows that it is readily available
- A quick skim of these answer(s) elsewhere would immediately tell you exactly what the answer is, if you are proficient in the subject matter
- The asker is not proficient, and finds the material hard to understand or difficult to read. Perhaps they have spent some reasonable, short amount of time trying to read it (like 30 minutes), failed to comprehend it, and decided that figuring it out would likely take considerable effort (hours or days). Besides mere effort, the asker may also find the material too boring to attempt to get through (don't laugh - people ask sometimes about laws and standards!).
The asker is basically asking the community to summarize/ELI5 a topic, because they themselves feel like it would be too much work to go through it.
- Is it generally discouraged to ask questions on Codidact if an answer can be found elsewhere on the internet or in a book?
- Is there some minimum level of effort the asker must make, and if so, what is it?
- Is it bad to "use the community as a resource" in this way?
I specifically draw the line at minutes vs. hours because I think this is the useful place to draw it in practice. Asking a question already takes a few minutes, so it is a natural baseline for measuring effort.
I want to question the premise of this question. In the title, you wrote: > Is it okay to ask a question because y …
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Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Then tomorrow, he'll ask for another fish. And you give it to him then too, …
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Regarding the "5 second google" part: We did discuss this very thing at some point over at Software Development Quest …
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Users vs. questions Personally, I don't care much, if at all, about the motivation behind a question - as long as it …
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My answers would be that: It's okay to ask here even if the answer is readily available elsewhere There is no mini …
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Post
I want to question the premise of this question.
In the title, you wrote:
Is it okay to ask a question because you're too lazy/bored to figure it out yourself?
but in the question body, you wrote among else:
- A quick skim of these answer(s) elsewhere would immediately tell you exactly what the answer is, if you are proficient in the subject matter
- The asker is not proficient, and finds the material hard to understand or difficult to read. Perhaps they have spent some reasonable, short amount of time trying to read it (like 30 minutes), failed to comprehend it, and decided that figuring it out would likely take considerable effort (hours or days). Besides mere effort, the asker may also find the material too boring to attempt to get through (don't laugh - people ask sometimes about laws and standards!).
I would say that not being able to understand something pertinent which you've found trying to find an answer, and asking for help in clarifying that, is entirely acceptable.
That's not being lazy.
However, the question you ask should show that you have put in some effort yourself before asking of others, and in order to avoid the XY problem should preferably also state something close to the ultimate goal.
Not only does this help avoid duplicate effort, it also shows that you respect other peoples' time by at least trying for yourself first.
In your example of Elbonian traffic lights, an asker might plausibly write something along the lines of:
For a fiction story I'm writing which is in part set in present-day Elbonia, I really need to get the traffic light colors right. I checked the Elbonian Road Transportation Authority's web site (link), but found nothing browsing it or doing Google searches for "traffic light" restricted to it. This was especially difficult because the site seems to be available only in the Elbonian language which I can't read, so I had to rely on online translation services. I then checked Wikipedia, but the "list of traffic light colors internationally" article (link) lists several neighboring countries but not Elbonia, and the neighboring countries all seem to use different colors so not even that helped. I then tried a broader search but everything I found was about how to cope if you are a color-blind tourist visiting Elbonia; examples: link link link link. I desperation I asked the Tach Drab Elgoog AI search engine, but it gave back different answers every time. The borders are closed so I can't even travel there myself. What color lights are used for Elbonian traffic lights, and what is the meaning of each color used? Photos appreciated.
This would clearly show that the asker has tried and failed to find the answer before asking for free help of others. Also, the question is bounded and specific; the set of possible answers is limited, and each answer can be judged by a subject matter expert on its correctness and on how well it addresses the question.
If on the other hand the material is available but difficult to understand -- say, because it's highly specialized and about all there is about the subject is in scientific journals intended for other scientists in the field, and the person asking is a high school student -- then again this can be pointed out. Another example:
I'm trying to learn about frobnication of thromblemeisters for a 11th grade science fair school project, and everything I find says that "quantum frobnication" is really really important but nothing about why that is the case. I've found lots of scientific articles which seem to discuss the submolecular properties of the quantum frobnication process, but beyond recognizing that this is what they are about those go totally over my head; examples are link, link and link. The physics teachers at my school were unable to help. Just why is the quantum frobnication so important, and what would happen if one did a classical/non-quantum frobnication instead?
Again, this shows that the person asking the question has tried (and what they have tried) but failed in their efforts to find an answer on their own. And also again, the question is bounded and specific. The reference to "11th grade science fair school project" establishes the likely proficiency level of the asker, helping guide the style of potential answers.
Both of those make perfectly valid, very much not lazy or bored, questions to be posed on an appropriate community.
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