> my question (and the answer I'm looking for) is often very simple
If you're asking questions then confidence that the answer - which you do not know - is simple betrays the reality that you've become falsely confident of your understanding despite the fact that you don't know what you're doing or else you wouldn't have a question at all.
Asking questions is a skill, whether you are asking the questions of a machine or of people. An insistence that everybody else is doing it wrong because you get unhelpful answers is a mistake nobody else can fix for you.
> If you're asking questions then confidence that the answer - which you do not know - is simple betrays the reality that you've become falsely confident of your understanding despite the fact that you don't know what you're doing or else you wouldn't have a question at all.
That's a lot of assumptions without even knowing the question, and is symptomatic of troublesome responders.
A lot of times the question I ask is of the form "Yes/No".
As in "Is it possible to do it using X?" If the answer is "Yes" I may have follow ons, but it's amazing how often I cannot get an answer to this question. Even a "Yes, but it's a bad idea" will suffice, but I'm more likely to get several "You probably want to use Y". That's simply not answering my question at all.
"Can doing it via X handle a size of N?"
Sure, maybe doing it Y is usually better than doing it with X, but telling me that is not answering my question, and the majority of times Y will not solve my problem. I also may already know that Y scales better, but my point is that even stating that up front in the question will not get me the answer I am seeking.
Sometimes I'm just curious. I know Y is better, but I want to know what the limits of X are. It's an appropriate question.
Depending on how well I know the person, I may give context, which is part of the skill in asking good questions. However, in an impersonal online setting, this backfires more often than not. As the example showed above, it usually leads to a 5x more effort spent in explaining and justifying the context than in discussions that are on the route to my getting an answer.
(As an aside, I do come from an academic background, where it is the norm to explore, and be curious. A lot of the questions they ask and discussions they have are not for anything practical. Which then becomes annoying when they ask a question online and the other party has all kinds of assumptions on why I may want to do X.)
> Asking questions is a skill
Agreed, and so is answering questions. Jumping to conclusions on what the questioner is trying to do means the person has poor answering skills.
If you're asking questions then confidence that the answer - which you do not know - is simple betrays the reality that you've become falsely confident of your understanding despite the fact that you don't know what you're doing or else you wouldn't have a question at all.
Asking questions is a skill, whether you are asking the questions of a machine or of people. An insistence that everybody else is doing it wrong because you get unhelpful answers is a mistake nobody else can fix for you.