Conversely, there is the XY fallacy: when one [frequently condescendingly] assumes they know better than the person asking, errantly classifies it as an XY problem, and fails to answer the original question.
Yes. Sometimes X is a hairy problem and perhaps well beyond the scope of what anyone cares about, and Y is a well thought out distillation of a sub-problem.
One of the problems I have with stackoverflow is crafting a question so that only those who have the potential to answer the question will answer it. Unfortunately there are always the folks who want to be first to answer the question and don't understand the fullness of the question and proceed to give a quick, poorly thought out solution. This then keeps others from chiming in.
For example, in one question I was asking about JS array performance and was using bubble sort as just a way to exercise arrays. Immediately I get folks mocking me for using bubble sort -- they completely missed the point of the question.
False positives on xyproblem appear to be much more rare and much less harmful than true positives.
At the end of the day a good question provides both context and an indication of things that the asker has tried/learned so far. The person being asked is a person, not an answerbot.
One of the problems I have with stackoverflow is crafting a question so that only those who have the potential to answer the question will answer it. Unfortunately there are always the folks who want to be first to answer the question and don't understand the fullness of the question and proceed to give a quick, poorly thought out solution. This then keeps others from chiming in.
For example, in one question I was asking about JS array performance and was using bubble sort as just a way to exercise arrays. Immediately I get folks mocking me for using bubble sort -- they completely missed the point of the question.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26199420/any-way-to-impr...
OTOH, there are folks who give brilliant answers.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36183602/why-is-nodes-ob...