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in reply to Re: To Answer, Or Not To Answer....
in thread To Answer, Or Not To Answer....
To those advocating to hold your tongue if you don't know the answer, a pox.
Goodness, no.
Just about the last thing a novice needs is to be buried in an avalanche of conflicting responses with no way to judge what's correct just because people feel like it's okay to guess at answers. I can talk a good game about the internals, but when someone like Dave Mitchell posts, believe him and not me.
Now tell me how a novice is supposed to know to believe him over me? |
Re^3: To Answer, Or Not To Answer....
by Tanktalus (Canon) on Jul 30, 2011 at 03:08 UTC
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Updated original node just slightly. Although I'm not sure that your opposition changes anything. After all, we already get monks responding with bad and/or incorrect and/or incomplete responses. We get monks asking bad and/or incorrect and/or incomplete questions. (Incorrect questions? Sure. Think XY Problem.) Waiting for perfect questions and perfect answers is just not going to work. Sometimes that incomplete question needs answers requesting clarification. Sometimes incomplete answers provoke more complete answers that may not have come if it weren't for needing someone to correct.
How is a novice supposed to know who to believe as it is? We have nothing but the meaningless XP to gauge how helpful someone is/has been. Of course, by that alone, novices may already believe you over me (probably good), and either one of us over TimToady (probably not so good). If they ignore the XP, perhaps they'll look at the actual text and evaluate for themselves. Will they try a few wrong things? Sure. That's not the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing is probably having your thread completely ignored instead of resurrected by a wrong response.
Perhaps that's merely my take on the subject. I generally prefer answers that might lead me somewhere than silence. The answers might be rough, but perhaps someone else will come along and polish it into a fine diamond. Or maybe it'll remain a turd, but at least the Mythbusters have proven that you can, indeed, polish a turd.
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Waiting for perfect questions and perfect answers is just not going to work.
Which part of my post suggests that I would ever believe such a silly idea?
... we already get monks responding with bad and/or incorrect and/or incomplete responses...
Some 80% of the time I hold my metaphorical tongue because I can't figure out a polite way to say "Please don't post blind guesses without at least testing them; it's very rude to waste everyone's time." The other 20% I manage to respond with what I believe to be at least some degree of gentleness.
That's not the worst thing that can happen.
Read the comments on php.net sometime. Someone without the experience (or good fortune) to judge nonsense from veracity could suffer a lot of damage. This is nothing I want to promote with Perl.
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Indeed. It helps to remember we're humans, not robots, and we're having a conversation :)
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Re^3: To Answer, Or Not To Answer....
by Anonymous Monk on Jul 30, 2011 at 01:02 UTC
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Now tell me how a novice is supposed to know to believe him over me?
If you preface your post, explain that you're not an expert, that you're just guessing -- makes it easier to judge whom to believe
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Unfortunally, 99% of the bullshit answers given here on Perlmonks (and believe, tons of answers here are just bullshit), don't have such a disclaimer.
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Then make the effort and call them on it. It won't change unless someone does.
But distinguish carefully between theoretically incorrect and practically incorrect.
Consider your contributions on the recent thread concerning picking random numbers.
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Re^3: To Answer, Or Not To Answer....
by jffry (Hermit) on Aug 02, 2011 at 17:24 UTC
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Now tell me how a novice is supposed to know to believe him over me?
Make node reputation visible to everyone at all times even before they vote. That is one reasonable way to solve this problem.
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That might help in some ways, but I suspect that scores depend on many more factors than mere accuracy: time of day, existing reputation of poster, tone, chronology of responses, et cetera. It's difficult to draw a useful correlation.
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