Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hamdingers 30 days ago
Then solve the problem yourself? Why are you asking someone who knows less than you?

We need a word for the inverse of being XY'd for when someone asks an XY question but is too proud to accept there's a better alternative to X

1 comments

> Then solve the problem yourself? Why are you asking someone who knows less than you?

you seem to completely misunderstand XY: it's not someone giving you the right solution to your problem which you aren't capable of arriving at yourself. it's someone telling you the problem you're having isn't the one you should be solving. it happens very frequently that some arrogant person is 100% certain X problem isn't possible, or isn't really happening, or isn't really the source of issues and they try to gaslight you into believing you've made a mistake in your reasoning and you should solve problem Y instead. you know... kind of like how you're doing right now...

You are right, we are operating on different definitions of the XY problem. The definition I prefer is the one described here: https://xyproblem.info/