[lmm]

> Therefore, it's likely, that sometimes when you do this, you're actually not helping; the answer is X, and your comments about Y are both wrong and unhelpful.

> Come on, are you never wrong? We're all wrong sometimes.

Whatever you do you'll always be wrong sometimes. Answering Y is usually helpful, that's why people do it.

> I suggest that the 'race to be the first answer and get karma for it' is the motivator that drives people to do this on some platforms, rather than any actual desire to help / any actual competence in the question domain / actually knowing what they're talking about in many cases;

This is, if anything, even more true of people who answer the literal question asked while giving no thought as to what the questioner actually wants.

> a partial answer to X is never that time consuming.

Disagree. Often X really is something possible-but-difficult; you can give a "partial answer" in the sense of "I'll need a research team and five years", but that doesn't really help anyone.

[a1369209993]

> Often X really is something possible-but-difficult

If "I'll need a research team and five years" is actually a valid answer to X (eg: X="How do I determine if a given jpeg image contains a bird?", at least... uh, five years ago), then it's a valid answer for the purposes of answering both X and Y. The problem is people giving incorrect/non-answers like "you shouldn't do that", and then pretending they answered the question because they also gave a (presumed for the sake of argument to be correct) answer to some different question, Y.

[wokwokwok]

> Answering Y is usually helpful, that's why people do it.

That's just opinion. :)

The indisputable fact is that it is sometimes unhelpful and wrong.

Is it more harmful to be partially wrong in answering/trying to answer a difficult question, or wrong about helping at all?

Still, on the bright side with the rise of AI helpers, most people don't need anyone to answer trivial questions going forwards, and actually, it becomes (opinion, mine) increasingly clear that answering hard questions is significantly more valuable in a post-AI world.

/shrug

I think, most of the time, answering hard questions is actually not as hard as people imagine them to be.

The answer is usually either 'that's not possible because of blah' (eg. platform restriction) or 'doing it that way is hard because of blah, but if you wanted to, you would look up these things to do it'.

...but often people are too lazy to add that to their answers.

5 years is total utter hyperbole. Obviously.

Spend 10 minutes trying to answer X before you say 'do Y'. 10 minutes. It's such a tiny investment of time, you're just being lazy if you don't.

[lmm]

> That's just opinion. :)

Well sure, but do you actually disagree? IMO a lot of people are overthinking this and skipping the obvious explanation.

> The indisputable fact is that it is sometimes unhelpful and wrong.

Everyone, and every answering strategy, is "sometimes unhelpful and wrong". (So are AI helpers). So that's not a useful way to compare approaches.

[rezonant]

Well if you can answer both X and Y, then in the case they really wanted X the answer is helpful, and in the case that they overlooked Y, the answer is still helpful. I'd say that's wrong less than either X or either Y

[lmm]

Sure. But cost/benefit; you can always spend more time and effort making a better answer, but at some point life gets in the way. And sometimes you're not up to answering X.

[wokwokwok]

There is no situation where a genuine attempt to answer both X and Y is unhelpful and wrong.

Even if it's wrong, it'll still be helpful to see an attempt at answering both the question and your interpretation of a solution to the problem.

Only an incorrect and wrong attempt to answer an imagined problem (ie. Y) is actually useless.

[lmm]

Why? If an attempt is always helpful, then an attempt to answer Y is always helpful. It's true that sometimes you might be wrong about Y being the real problem, but answering both X and Y doesn't solve that - sometimes the real problem is Z.