Comments on Is ‘How would you know to do the next step?’ always a bad question?
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Is ‘How would you know to do the next step?’ always a bad question?
We have a user who keeps posting questions of the form, ‘How would you [tortured synonym for “know”] to [do the next step in a proof]?’ Leaving aside the various other reasons that these posts are bad[1], my question is whether the question is intrinsically bad based on its form alone. (If so, I would assume that the policy should be to close any such question, as no amount of editing to solve the other problems would save it.)
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I don't want those other issues to be a distraction from the central question here. I'm only mentioning them so that people can consider what these posts might look like if they were otherwise written to be exemplary questions: if they showed understanding of or engagement with the surrounding context (well-researched), if they rewrote the central concepts in their own words instead of (or perhaps in addition to) posting large screenshots of the source material, if they were written using a vocabulary that wasn't needlessly obtuse and distracting (good English), and if they were questions about mathematical concepts instead of questions about understanding the non-mathematical parts of what an author is communicating (basic reading comprehension). ↩︎
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I have few opinions on it. I am in a homework helping site (where people says to solve their homework (show their works)).
bad English
It may not be your fault you don't know English well, but it's not my fault either. ~ Olin Lathrop
When I joined that homework helping site, I asked a question with no work (But, I had did some work I just didn't show my attempt) then mod had deleted that post. Then, I asked the same question again with solution attempt. Then, no one directly answered. They said, try it "this way, that way". They never answers directly. They just suggest what to do next. That way the author (I) could learn those things. If those people had directly answered $a=b$ than I couldn't learn why $a$ is equal to $b$.
When an user is keep asking lot of questions without any attempt
Tell him that he must show his attempt what he had tried (say it in few posts if he keeps asking without any attempt and keep ignoring your comment then I will say to start deleting those posts and don't undelete until he improve his posts. If he still asking new questions without any attempt then warn him. And everyone knows what to do after warning (ban him)).
The user was showing attempt earlier but not anymore
Answer his few questions if you can. And if you see that he have asked more than 10 questions without any attempt then tell him to show attempt then, do as I said above.
The user sometimes show attempt sometimes doesn't
I will say this kind of behavior is acceptable. I will say to give him hint for this kind of problems (when he don't show attempt). For this kind of behaviour, we can be sure that the user have idea what the topic actually is. But, when a user keep posting without any attempt that sounds like the user don't have any idea of that he just wants us to solve his problems (Simply called them backbencher).
How would you know to do the next step?
Telling from my experience, we sometimes don't do next step cause we think that our answer will be wrong. While Math CD wasn't active. I was asking lots of questions there. A person had told me,"always try to do next step it's OK if that's wrong". But, sometimes I can't understand what to do next because of "I don't know lot of stuffs" (Since, I don't follow academic books). For that reason, I will say (to author of those kind of question),"when you can't understand next step then just request us to give hint instead of requesting to give the whole answer".
But, if you have any idea how to do that (It's OK if that's wrong) then just do cause that could be correct also. Sometimes, we think that our answer is wrong but it may not be. So, never scare of doing next step.
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