I'm puzzled about why people continue to recommend How To Ask Questions The Smart Way.

Sure, the advice given is accurate. It would be great if everyone took it. That isn't the problem.

The problem is that the advice is given in a way which guarantees that the purported target audience will never read and take it to heart. But they will take offence.

This might make sense if your goal is to justify a division of the world into "us" vs "them", where "they" are clearly all idiots. It could well be effective at convincing people that you are a jerk to be avoided in the future. I wouldn't be entirely astounded if ESR had one or both of these goals at some level.

But it is incredibly ineffective as a technique for positive behaviour modification. It is simply awful as a tone to take in dealing with anyone who might suspect, however accurately and briefly, that they aren't in your "in group". Because the first thing that it does is offend the people that you are talking to. And after being offended, they won't hear anything else that you have to say.

For more on why people don't learn from being directly insulted and criticized, see What you refuse to see, is your worst trap.

In reply to How to give advice the wrong way by tilly
in thread Is this the right way to learn? by pg

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.