[lwerdna]

Thanks for articulating this. I call them XY inquisitors. We had a couple at work a few years ago and any question directed at them was met with a somewhat derisive "What are you trying to DO?".

Of course there are cases where the question poser of Y benefits from having their X identified, an archetypal case here:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2691018/decimalformat-an...

[moralestapia]

And that's not even an XY example ...

You guys are so confused you don't even get yourselves.

[SamBam]

Sure it was. But it was a good example, because the person helpfully starts with "I'm trying to do X."

But they still say. "I'm trying to do X. To do this, I'm doing this complicated Y. How come Y doesn't work?"

This is still XY because they're asking about Y. But in the bad cases, they'd only mention the Y part, and omit that they're trying to do X.

[moralestapia]

The XY problem is "I'm trying to do Y" -> "Are you sure you don't want X?"

This is "I'm trying to do X" -> "Here's how you do X"

[SamBam]

No, not exactly. From [1], the XY problem is "you are trying to solve problem X, and you think solution Y would work, but instead of asking about X when you run into trouble, you ask about Y."

So person is trying to solve X, but asks

"How do you do Y?"

"Why are you trying to do Y?"

"Well, I want X and Y seems to be the solution"

"No, to solve X you want to do Z."

In this case the asker nicely gave their X as part of the question, but the bulk of the question was still about trying to move forward on their mistaken "solution" Y.

1. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-x... (and note all the other answers saying the same thing.)

[lwerdna]

When you accuse someone of being wrong, it's helpful to provide justification, not insults.

Y: How do I strip unnecessary symbols after a decimal point?

X: How do I round a number to a desired precision?

It looks like the perfect example of XY problem to me. Please tell me how I'm confused.

[moralestapia]

Your Y is not a different problem, it's just a poorly worded description of X.

In an XY-problem situation, X and Y are different problems.

[lwerdna]

They are different problems. Stripping the final character from "3.14159" does not produce the same result as rounding to 3.1416.

The first action concerns a syntactic property of PI's decimal representation while the second action concerns a semantic property of PI's value.

A related example given on https://xyproblem.info is a user asking (Y) how to extract the final 3 characters of a filename string when he probably intends to ask (X) how to retrieve a filename's extension.