Post History
#3: Post edited
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^[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 points 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).], 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.)
- 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^[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).], 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.)
#2: Post edited
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 (under-researched, overuse of images, bad English, basic failures of reading comprehension... really, it tends to be a painfully long list), 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.)
- 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^[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 points 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).], 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.)
#1: Initial revision
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 (under-researched, overuse of images, bad English, basic failures of reading comprehension... really, it tends to be a painfully long list), 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.)