You quote Voltaire:
It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.
There's another quote, I don't remember whom from nor the exact phrasing:
He who asks will look stupid for five minutes, he who doesn't will remain stupid for the rest of his life.

Personally, I often find myself favouring silence over posting when others have covered the question well enough that I don't feel I have anything to add. And there are so many folks participating here that this happens a lot.

Funnily enough, I have hardly posted any questions since I joined - maybe this is just my own modus operandi. The questions I did post were almost exclusively requests for comments on style questions.

But if you look at Monks by Writeup Count you'll find that "often favouring silence" is quite relative - I have posted a ridiculous amount of answers and comments. Of those, the times I've been wrong weren't enjoyable, but the most educative. I can say with certainty that the time spent here has been a tremendous boon to my skills.

Don't fear the corrections. If you give a wrong answer and are corrected, you will learn something, and so will whoever posted the question. Also, chances are always that if there's something on your mind, you're only one of many others who're thinking the same. The sooner an exchange leads to a correction and the more people have the opportunity to listen in on the exchange, the faster the everyone will grow.

Don't also fear giving bad advice. There are so many others around that any bad or incomplete advice is likely to be corrected and completed very quickly.

Looking back over what I wrote - what an incoherent ramble..

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re: On Two Years of Silence... by Aristotle
in thread On Two Years of Silence... by tunaboy

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.