Anecdotally, when I started at my current job, it was made clear to me that I should ask questions and not think twice about it. They said to ask in our public engineering slack channel (remote work) so everyone could see and have more eyes on it for answers plus future searching. It was such a great experience, and I put a lot of that on the culture of questions my boss put into place.
When we had more and more engineers join, including interns, I made sure they heard the same thing I did and felt comfortable asking any questions. I really love this philosophy, but I found out that you can't just say it once or else people are still a bit skittish sometimes (young engineers mostly). I will repeat it to the point where it's likely annoying during mentoring and onboarding meetings, but people will be very open with their questions, which I'm very happy with. It takes a bit of extra time out of everyone's day to respond to questions, but you're unblocking someone in 2 chunks of 10 minutes (mentor and mentee) which saves the mentee upwards of hours, and this can compound with future situations if they don't have a complete understanding of the situation.
I really appreciate a question friendly culture and I would never want to work at a place that isn't like that again.
> They have a culture that really doesn't like asking questions, which is weird, as they are the raw materials of the site.
I totally disagree!
I have 50k rep on StackOverflow, and roughly a quarter of that comes from the questions I've asked (I have 213 questions, 166 answers). In fact, that is my favorite way to interact with the site; I personally get excited when I find a question of mine that isn't answered on StackOverflow.
That said, writing a good question is an art. The impression that SO has a culture of not asking questions I think is at least partly impacted by the aspects of the culture that came into existence to deal with the huge deluge of really bad questions that it gets literally every second of every day.
Then, even if you put in the time and effort to actually write a well researched and thought out question, it's not uncommon to get close votes and downvotes. This is unfortunate, but it also usually comes from a small fraction of users who see your question within its first 5 minutes of posting. Once that time has passed, and folks start arriving at your question from Google, the upvotes come in as a steady stream.
Well, I guess we'll just have to "agree to disagree," then...
I have "only" about a 4.5K rep, but almost twice as many questions as answers. Most of my rep comes from questions.
My SO tagline is "Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers."
I have become quite good at writing really good, well-researched questions, which usually get ignored. I generally end up answering them, myself.
Instead, simple ones get answered; often with a somewhat passive-aggressive "slap." I've learned to ignore the insult, and still be nice and thankful for the answer.
It's been a valuable resource for me, but is now a lot less valuable.
There do seem to be a lot of angry individuals on there. It's usually on questions that if you have expert knowledge in an area you can answer without missing a beat but would require a beginner a lot of time to find out and it's not just "a google search away". I think a lot of people like to make others feel inferior and that's a huge personality flaw.
I wonder what allowing paid questions would do to the incentive structure on a site like SO? I would be very happy to pay a small sum to get unblocked on a technical problem.
> Once that time has passed, and folks start arriving at your question from Google, the upvotes come in as a steady stream.
Only if your question is common, and possibly common enough to already have an answer. That's rarely the case for me, and this issue is why I've stopped using SO beyond just reading.
Yeah, I would love for there to be a new StackOverflow where newbies could ask questions ad nauseum without being blocked for not having answered enough questions or received upvotes from others.
It has turned into a walled garden where the people who got in early have the credentials to participate and get help while also risking losing the clout that got them there and everyone else has little opportunity to get help overcoming their personal hurdles in becoming competent programmers.
I remember an experience that I had on a LinkedIn group (and is also why I stopped taking them seriously).
A member of the group (it was a Swift Language group) asked a fairly reasonable developer question. It was sort of a "I have this technical problem, how do I solve it?"
This was something that I had actually solved, many times over, quite easily, so I answered it.
Surprisingly, my answer was ignored, even though it was the first one, and nailed the problem on the head.
Instead, a flood of "answers," came in, all recommending some developer tool/site.
They all got acknowledged. Some resulted in a bit of back-and-forth, between the asker and the answerer.
I noticed that all of the answerers were of the same nationality as the asker, and realized they were shills.
This is true in so many systems like MMO games too. I was an avid player of one for a few years, did OK but not especially well, lost interest. A few years later I visited again in a moment of idleness, mainly to see if my account was still live. Completely different experience: other players would look at my account age and flee, assuming that I was packing all kinds of whoop-ass.
I use SO all the time but just search for other people's answers and apply them to my existing problem. To some extent this is simply more convenient for me (I don't have to wait and translating a solution to my context builds my skills anyway), but the institutionalized antipathy to general/conceptual questions make it feel like an unfriendly environment.
I wonder if it's viable to have a site where you pay for asking questions (there are thematic sites like this, we call them "support forums", but AFAIK, no generic one).
Volunteer based answering will always lead to some kind of reputation economy, and those seem to attract assholes.
Say it costs $0.75 USD to ask a noob question. The answerer receives $0.50 USD of that. The asker gets to pick the person who answered them best, and failing that, upvotes would decide whom the spoils go to.
It would be easy to game such a system. Ask your question, get the answer, have a sock puppet account also post that answer, pick your sock puppet as the winner, only pay $0.25 for your question to be answered and stiff the person who actually put the work in to solve your problem.
If it were upvote based, people would have multiple sock puppet accounts to upvote their sock puppet answer.
Adding money into the mix makes it more difficult by a massive order of magnitude. Stack Overflow could open a paid noob question area and profit immensely from it, but a newcomer would first have to build the audience, get participation, and then introduce the payment system while working constantly to guard against sock puppets ruining the system.
People pay for online courses all the time, why wouldn't they pay for tutoring?
Anyway, if you are going with this, billing by the question and gathering your answering team by random are sure ways to break it. You have to somehow limit the amount of questions people can ask, have long term relationships with both sides, and make sure the asking ones won't expect that every single question can be answered.
Personally, I would bet on Stack Overflow being positioned in a way where trying this would certainly fail. It looks way more likely that something like a "Red Hat School" could do it.
(But when one can make a comment saying "I know who can enter this market! It's IBM!" that's clearly a problem.)
If you ever find out how to make that product but not be flooded with newbie questions when you search professionally useful answers you could turn that into a lot of money.
I was a newbie, and SO deleting questions didn't hurt me. If anything, they ensured that the #1 or #2 search results were exactly what I was looking for.
What benefit is it to learners if search results are full of SO threads going back and forth on the exact same topics across multiple threads?
There's a difference in finding a solution that works specifically for your case in your setup rather than finding something that is close but has to be adapted.
Sure, it's better for a new programmer to learn how to adapt solutions to fit their use case, and sometimes you will stumble across gold, but there's still a walled garden that decreases the likelihood that a new user will stay around long enough to be able to utilize the resources.
Not to mention the rampant elitism and dismissiveness of the current user base where new users are frequently spoken to rudely and condescendingly, in my experience. There is psychological punishment around every corner for incompetence even though many people try coming there in order to eliminate their incompetence.
It could be a lot less horrible if people with a bit of knowledge weren't horrible. They like to feel elite or something and look down on people with snide comments on there.
For some reason, public technical forums often seem to develop that way.
The Arduino official forums, for example, are filled with toxic people who are often fairly skilled but whose replies nearly always drip with condescension. It's to the point that when I'm searching for a problem and find a discussion on their forum, I already expect to see it, and I'm nearly always right.
early unix culture was overtly hostile about beginner'ish questions and other fumbling. The advanced practitioner was marked with extra awd sed chops while those questioning poor man pages were essentially spanked publicly. This happened repeatedly in different contexts that I saw.
What do you do when some of these mentees (as you put it) get so used to having every question promptly answered that they stop reading the documentation or putting even a modest amount of effort into figuring out why things don't work as expected?
To be clear, I am not being facetious/sarcastic; I have this exact problem at the moment (in an open source project) and could use some tips. Surely you (or others) must have run into this. My best idea so far is to throttle my replies proportional to the offences.
Keep answering the questions, but include a reference to the docs in your answer.
Your goal is to introduce them to the usefulness of the tool that is documentation, not to simply unburden yourself of trivial questions. If your documentation is good enough to answer their questions, then sooner or later they will start to use it first, because that's easier than asking a question.
The next thing you can do is ask them if they think the documentation can be improved, so that the answer to their question is easier for the next person to find.
Usually, it's not the substance of the answer that they were struggling to find, but the context that would have lead them there in the first place.
When that happens, it feels like your answer is trivial, but that's because the real value of the interaction was encapsulated into the very act of you answering, not the answer itself.
Documentation can be a great way of referencing nouns and verbs. Good documentation will probably answer "what?" and "how?". Great documentation will answer "where?". The trickiest questions end up being "when?" and "why?".
Try the whole "teach them to fish" vs "give them a fish" approach. So give positive feedback for asking, show them how to find the answer online or in documentation, and then over time, your first response to their question will become "ok, what have you tried so far?" and hold them accountable for following the (informational search) algorithm you showed them previously.
Some people have trouble turning your advice into a skill they perform routinely (partly because they don't take notes). So you can help them with that by asking them to make notes on what you are showing them, then getting them to send them to you for review.
And if the things really isn't online because it’s proprietary and it’s not explained in the documentation yet, then you get them to write the notes with the view to making that the documentation. So they take up your time on a task that helps them in the company, they pay it back with another task that helps others by reducing the chances that someone else gets stuck in future
This is what I try to do, and I believe it works out well. Sometimes I can tell that someone is a bit annoyed that I'm not showing them just how to add CSRF protection to a page, but also why we do it and how it works, but I do believe that showing them how to do it and why is where leaning comes in and trumps raw repetition/memorization.
I think a simple "I need you to figure this one out on your own today" or "you and Employee 421 should discuss this, they had a similar problem last week" is probably better than just refusing to reply. Ghosting someone isn't a winning strategy.
Create a template of how a good question should look like. This is becoming more and more popular on Github's issues, not sure since when, but I'm definitely seeing it more often these days. Include sections like "what did you try" and "where did you look and what results came up", among others. Auto-close questions that don't use the template; if it's automatic, you're less likely to become a target of hostility due to this.
Set up a process of converting questions into docs (wiki works). If a question's quality is too low for its answer to be put into docs, delete it. If it is good enough, make an effort to answer and make it easy to contribute it to the documentation. Make sure it's easy to find both Q and A afterward.
Make sure you have a "troubleshooting" section in the docs. Try to assist people with finding the answers on their own as much as you can, but also make sure it's trivial to tell if someone actually read that section and followed the steps outlined there. If you get a question from someone who obviously didn't care to read that, delete it.
Make sure your docs are indexed, searchable, and that you're able to link to specific paragraphs (ideally) or at least headings (but then make sure to actually use headings that make sense). The more precise you are when telling people where they should go, the less likely they are to come back to you to ask again.
In general: make sure good questions (and their authors) are rewarded and make sure people who don't want to put in the work to make their questions good are easily distinguished. Warn the latter once or twice, then punish swiftly and decisively if they don't improve.
Above all else: don't expect your answers to be valued if you, yourself, don't value the time and effort expended to give them. Just because you know something doesn't mean everyone and their cat is entitled to be coached by you. Make it clear that getting an answer from you is a trade: the one with a question has to put in enough time and effort into asking it for you to find it worthwhile to spend your time and effort to answer.
Beware of jerks. Just like you can construct malicious packets that make the receiving server do a lot of work for nothing, it's possible to craft questions that amount to a DoS attack on you. Manage the time spent on answering questions and track it. If servicing a single person takes too much of your time, become suspicious. Taking too much of your time may just be their goal.
Finally: recruit helpers. People who often submit good quality questions probably dislike low quality questions as much as you do. Let them help you filter out the noise.
> Keep answering the questions, but include a reference to the docs in your answer.
If it's something like how to set up a local development tool, I'll post a link to our documentation and tell them it's near the bottom. I also let them know that if they run into any issues, to let me know and we can hop in a call.
> I really love this philosophy, but I found out that you can't just say it once or else people are still a bit skittish sometimes (young engineers mostly).
It's also important to see established/senior/experienced people doing it before less-experienced people will be comfortable doing it. I'm the most experienced person on my team and I'm pretty sure I ask more questions and say "I don't know" more than anyone else.
As you might already know, this philosophy of openly asking questions in a public channel is one of the important aspects of open source development model.
FWIW, many moons ago I wrote an etiquette doc[1] on being a decent community citizen when asking questions on upstream IRC channels (yes, they're still a thing :P) and what to avoid, etc. Many of these guidelines apply in an internal setting too.
This probably works well in already competent organizations, where followup questions are not met with "because we say so". I've worked at orgs where a simple question like "why are we reinventing caching at every new instance?" is met with pretty subpar answers that amount to more of a digging in than an actual enlightening reasoning. Note that many of the customer reported bugs boiled down to caching.
I think the healthiest way to react to that sort of bluntness is to respond in kind.
"I understand this isn't my decision to make. I just want to be abundantly clear that I think it's the wrong judgment call, and here's why. I think it would be valuable, not only to solve the problem itself, but also to improve our working relationship if you show more value in my perspective in the future. I'm not interested in winning or losing. I am here to work with you."
At the end of the day, one of you is wrong. If that can't be communicated well, then you deserve a better workplace.
Or, don't ask the question and do the right thing so you don't go against orders you never received. That is kind of what I'm suggesting works if you are stuck in an environment with crappy responses.
Somewhere along the line in school I realized that whenever I had a question most often many other people did too. I lost my fear of asking questions after a lot of feedback from others: "I'm so glad you asked that question, I was completely lost!"
In my career I realized that nothing had changed, and that asking for more clarity is almost always a good thing.
On my teams, we facilitate this by creating a slack channel called [new hire]_ASKS with a small team of dedicated watchers that set alerts to “all messages”
The new hire knows that there are a group of people whose assignment is to answer their questions.
A friendly culture open to question asking in public is fine if everyone is kind about it.
Having worked someplace where that wasn't the case, and where one might be told, "wow, you really should read the policy about x" in public on Slack (despite the fact one had read it and didn't feel pushing back in public was appropriate), one learns to stop asking questions in public because a) management does nothing after the fact, b) doesn't seem to know or care better, c) is the offending party, or d) all of the above.
Just sayin' - it happens, but if you have a healthy culture, that surely can be awesome.
'Mr Herapath, I understand that you wish to visit the whaler, and you have my permission to go. You are no doubt aware that there is a great deal of ill-feeling between the United States and England, and that most unhappily the Leopard was the cause of some of it: that is why I thought best to forbid the usual ship-visiting, to prevent quarrelling of any kind. You also know the Leopard's condition: one day's use of a forge and the proper tools would enable her to put to sea rather than winter here. The whaler certainly possesses a forge, but as a gentleman you will understand that I am extremely reluctant to ask a favour of the American skipper, extremely reluctant to expose the service or myself to
a rebuff. I may add that he is equally reluctant to come a-begging to me, and I honour him for it. However, on reflection he may feel inclined to exchange the use of his forge for our medical services. You may give him a view of the situation, but without committing us to any specific request - harkee, Mr Herapath, don't you expose us to an affront, whatever you do. And if it should turn out that he would like the exchange, why, I should be very much obliged to you. Very much obliged indeed, for I should be even more reluctant to use force.'
Scanning through this I couldn't find much on the ratio of askers to askees (what the paper seems to call Receivers and Senders, respectively).
That seems like a major factor - there's the classic example of the IT person who's constantly being asked to help with relatively basic tasks. If that's their defined job, that's not a problem - but if they have other responsibilities that are not being met due to constant requests for assistance, it becomes a problem.
A similar example is found in areas with a high concentration of homeless people - i.e. if there is just one homeless person in a neighborhood, people might go out of their way to be helpful, or if they were asking for money people might be willing to give them a few dollars - but if there are 100 homeless people in a neighborhood, then treating them all equally would mean shelling out several hundred dollars, a more significant burden.
Once a problem becomes organizational-scale or societal-scale, then this focus on individual relationships no longer makes much sense. In the former case, hiring a person (or team) whose sole job is to provide technical assitance is the solution; in the latter, some kind of social safety net aimed at keeping people off the street is needed.
I like the homelessness analogy. If a town of 3,000 people had 1 homeless person, there is a high likelihood that said person would ultimately encounter an altruistic person and get some assistance towards ceasing being homeless, yet, in a densely populated area with the same ratio of homed to homeless most of the homeless people will either receive no assistance or very little, right?
At a certain scale the issue requires a altruistic leader to marshal the forces to combat the societal problem, and while there are many qualified people for just such a task, the task of finding such a person, appointing them with the appropriate authority, and then giving them the the tools and resources they need to succeed are themselves tasks that require long unbroken chains of altruism to succeed, even though on a 1:1 ratio the problem is the exact same proportion.
> We show that a failure to ask can occur even when most helpers would help if told about the need, and that even though a greater need makes help both more valuable and more likely to be granted, it can reduce the propensity to ask. Furthermore, when potential helpers concerned about the recipient’s ask-shyness can make spontaneous offers...
I always wonder about that. Maybe the first two are the most important?
Many companies have a policy to give a discount, upgrade or similar if customer asks nicely for it. But somehow majority of people are just rude and they want discount because “your hotel is shitty, too expensive service, etc.” (put some lie or insult). There is no “thank you”. No “please”
My wife is very good at asking questions. She likes to ask nicely about discounts when shopping and frequently either gets a discount or gets good advice about one - eg "We don't have one now, but usually in June we have a good sale, come back in a month".
When people ask my business for a discount I always offer one to people who ask nicely.
In situations like that I always try to remind myself that the person I'm talking to is almost certainly not the one responsible for the shitty situation I'm dealing with. >90% of the time the shitty situation is the result of a policy decision made by someone that neither of us has ever met or likely will ever meet. Both of us are victims of their shitty decision. I find it much easier to be civil when I keep that in mind. And on those occasions when that's not enough I try to remember to say, "I'm sorry, I know you're not responsible for this shitty situation, and I apologize for taking my frustrations out on you." I've gotten an enormous amount of mileage out of this strategy over the years.
Sounds like you’re self aware and actively trying to improve folks situation - you’re a good person, and work to stay that way!
If someone is in a customer service role, they’ll deal a lot with the other part of the population who isn’t (today) in that group, and they’re very memorable.
Thanks for the kind words. It's not just about being a "good person", though I do try to be sympathetic towards my fellow travelers in life. It's more about being effective. Yelling at someone is just generally not a good way to motivate people, especially if they don't actually have the power to change the situation.
I'd also call that enlightened self-interest, which is a good thing IMO. The world needs more of it.
Folks are not usually doing the opposite because they are intentionally being ineffective. It's a matter of either lack of knowledge or experience on how to do better, or more commonly, inability to manage themselves to a better state in their environment, and an environment that doesn't direct them to being in a better state either. It can be very difficult to do. Some people can't do it even in the most ideal of environments.
So kudos for managing yourself to be in a good place in a harsh environment, or good fortune for being in an environment that directs you in a good direction - or likely a combination of both to various degrees. Either way, sounds like a plus for folks you interact with.
I think you are right. Luckily, to fix these worries they can be translated to some principles one can live by if one wants to participate in overcoming this societal problem:
1. Help people without expecting to be repaid for it in any form
2. Practice empathy for shortcomings of others
3. Speak up if you don't want to or are not able to help someone
There's also a potential issue of the "help" being a net-negative, even when provided. If someone has strong ideas about how the work should be done that differ from yours, for instance, accepting their help can make things worse. Unfortunately, you usually can't know whether this is the case until after they've already started.
It’s not uncommon, in say urban homelessness, that shelters or food banks will have conditions that many of the people on the street consider unconscionable or impossible to meet.
Some reflection on them tends to be informative about many of the challenges on both sides, and the nature of the problem.
Some of them include shelters with:
- No dog rules (because many people have dogs which are poorly behaved, lack immunizations, and have attacked other people at the shelters in the past). Many folks have animals for companionship and protection.
- No drug rules, including Alcohol (because many people have gone on drug fueled benders and attacked others at the shelters in the last). Many persistent homeless folks have drug problems too.
- Sex segregation rules (because women have been raped by others at the shelter in the past). The problem is, many homeless women also have boyfriends that provide a significant degree of safety and support, and even with sex segregation, the shelters have predators.
But what else are they supposed to do?
If they don’t make rules to at least protect others in the environment, they’re making a giant attractive nuisance/hazard. If they make exceptions, they’re asking to be attacked or sued themselves. (You’d be surprised how many activists are happy to spend serious money suing over something like that).
They also sounds like a recipe for being taken advantage of or abused in an Urban environment, or if applied naively.
In my experience, do it long enough, and blindly enough, and it’ll end up collecting the worst - in any environment it’s applied to - when the group set is large.
Mostly because of a filtering effect. The folks who need help to get self sufficient will use the help, get self sufficient, then go elsewhere.
The folks who will fall back on bad habits, will use the help, and break themselves again, and then get into a cycle of dependence on the help until either the help is withdrawn (which often causes anger), or they find an even juicier offer of help.
It isn’t a large percentage of people who are like the latter group - maybe 1-2%. But given enough folks and enough time, and it’ll end up collecting a hard core group of people that will be a serious problem.
I see your point. Setting healthy boundaries is important. I also want to note that the most effective form of 'help' is the one that will enable the person in need to help themselves better in the future. As long as that point is not reached, they may find themselves in the vicious cycle that you described.
Also, one wonders why so many big charity donors are anonymous.
Not only asking, but giving is a potentially sensitive act that
sometimes (perhaps from modesty) demands discretion/anonymity.
When giving money to a homeless person I notice I'll prefer to do it
when nobody is looking, and move on quickly, avoiding too much of a
"thank-you".
It's not just that act has to be "Kantian".
There's definitely something about giving that carries the same
barrier, and it's remedied by anonymity. I'll put cash money in a
charity box, but would never use an identifiable card/digital method.
Charities ought to know this if they're wise. that the "cash-less"
society is the death sentence for them.
London (City of London) pre pandemic used to regularly have troops of charity employees hard selling their pitch and only accepting monthly subscription payments via Direct Debit, which is the legal equivalent of granting joint custody of your funds to the extent that the Halifax savings and loan used to refuse to cancel a direct debit payment for the customer, claiming that the customer has no such right, and the severality of granting regulated but effectively unfettered withdrawal authority lead me to think twice about taking them to court. The UK Direct Debit system doesn't even verify the customers name against the account details, wide open to fraud. Anyhow the argument for declining both cash and once off card donations wasn't anything to do with the sidewalk venue, but the charity wanting me to give them my tax deduction as well. They'd be lined up across Cheapside in funnel formations. No wonder that WFH is still so popular.
Sometime in the early 2000s the most of British charity was
transformed (dragged through the mud) by corporate whackjobs, PR
gurus, and Feng Shui design soothsayers to align their ley-lines and
whatnot.
Charity shops stopped having any actual bargains in them, and the
money boxes we used to enjoy putting spare change into vanished.
They made up all kinds of bizarre, frankly unbelievable stories about
how the staff "weren't trained to handle cash" and that robbers would
steal their charity tins (in broad daylight outside Waterloo station
under 200 CCTV cameras... like Jimmy Reckon!)
Then all those charity scandals about abuse and corruption came out.
Heartbreaking what a few clueless, vicious vandals and scumbags in
suits can do to brand reputations earned over centuries.
This is a much bigger issue than people realise in our technological
society.
Once, interaction with any doctor would be considered confidential.
Today surveillance capitalism and so-called "big data" creates a new
problem for everyone, young or old, male or female.
We've long known that many men "die of embarrassment", because they
won't go to the doctor. Pride/shame aside, that now affects everyone.
People stop reporting symptoms because they don't want the stigma or
economic penalty resulting from data being "shared" (increasingly
without consent for "research" etc) - potentially to employers,
insurance companies, and various gatekeepers popping up in the digital
world.
It's ironic at many levels.
The information age should give us better health through ease of
communication and access to data. However, the research benefits to
the many that accrue from big-data are a burden upon the
few/individuals. Searching on Google for medical ailments is a sure
way to let the advertising world know all about your health
complaints, real or imagined, and invite spam, inappropriate and
intrusive insinuations. And, as we know recently, for women seeking
abortions it can lead to violence or imprisonment.
So there is an odd communistic utilitarianism at play that defeats the
very benefits our technologies should bring.
We do need to be careful about medical data sharing. It has risks. However I doubt there are any (or any meaningful number of) cases of doctors and medical data-sharing actually causing stigma or economic penalties. That is outside of the 'traditional' a doctor just tells some friends. But that traditional case happens regardless of big data.
The reason medical data sharing is risky is because _if_ it does leak, it can cause large stigma and economical damage. But I am not aware of any big-data related cases where that did happen. The legal protections (imperfect as they are) have either worked, or have caused the people who abuse them to hide their tracks.
> I doubt there are any cases ... of data-sharing actually causing
stigma or economic penalties.
That's a strong claim.
It took me 10 second to find these 4 stories of leaks of up to 45
million records and many written accounts of distress, lost jobs and
broken relationships as consequences.
But as my sibling poster says too, your unevidenced doubts are neither
here nor there, because it's the (equally unevidenced with respect to
specifics) doubts of ordinary people that matter.
And let's be honest, that mistrust is justified in a time where data
leaks and abuse is rampant.
Medical professionals and researchers may all be saints, but their
halos are only as bright as the company they keep... Google, Meta,
Microsoft, Amazon... and other big-tech cloud infrastructure on which
sensitive data systems are built.
Of course it's a tragedy. Somewhere in that data are cures and
remedies. But we can't have nice things if some are allowed to crap in
the punch-bowl and drive the guests out of the party.
The problem isn't about where data is shared or is leaked. The problem is if it is perceived to be, and if those who perceive it so are influenced by the perception.
A reason why I like to ask large language models a bunch of things, it takes care of all 3 issues. Of course, it's not always suitable, but if it is, I prefer it over burdening a human with my query.
Plus being told it's wrong for the poor to beg. In Chile only the rich are allowed to beg. It goes like this: "hey can I have ten cents!" [poor begging rich] "Get a fucking job you piece of shit!" [rich begging poor]. Telling a poor man to get a job, in Chile, is begging, because jobs they realistically can get all pay less than they cost, it's a gift to the rich man, a donation, charity for the rich, begging. And injure the poor in the process, or demand he betray his fellow man. That's why I always try to come up with something for beggars, they're doing the best thing they could be doing by begging, working would be terrible then they'd get a back injury on the first day, feel denigrating, which addressing (which society dodges, prefers they take that injury and insult to their graves) would cost millions. Just huge waste of money. Better they beg and I give, that has objectively superior economics. Like I talked to one who got a job, told him yeah duh that job is over it was a shit job, he was like uh how did you know? I just know because I just know. And then I gave him a 20000 peso bill, which I first broke for him at the kiosk which I can do but he can't, so he could spend it. And told him "spend it on whatever you want! Whatever you want!" Dude try to preempt him asking me, asking hurts, people insult you, it's degrading, people call you inferior, people beat you for asking just like people piss on people sleeping on the street to indulge their sadism. I've also seen guys take out a 10000 bill (like $10, but big money in Chile), stretch it out, and then laugh their ass off. Dude it's so cruel. Nobody thinks it could be them sitting on the concrete.
And they have all kinds of stories these guys, dude I love talking to Jonathan Ramos here, dude way better than all therapists I've ever spoken to in my whole life combined. He told me "obviously you got tortured, look at the things you say, you lay out the truth for people clearly!" No picólogo could have ever said that! Dude categorically superior to every professional therapist! And that cost 4 dollars!
Hmmm. Instead of modeling human relationships and helping others as debt/reward/cost. I believe it is psychologically healthier to think in terms of circles of trust.
a) Stranger. It is unlikely you will see this person again. It doesn't hurt to ask but don't expect much. We may shy away from asking as they appear rude/busy/angry.
b) Acquaintance. This is a coworker or someone in the neighborhood. We don't want to hurt the relationship. We occasionally ask for small favors and in an emergency we may ask for a big favor. We are tactful in asking for what we want. We reciprocate any favors.
c) Family. This is your best friend or your significant other who may be closer than your blood relatives. We trust them implicitly and will always believe they can never be wrong. We ask a lot of them but are aware of their own struggles and wait for the appropriate time. We are shameless in asking for what we want.
It's interesting that this quote in the abstract points out that the dynamic the authors consider bad actually leads to a good outcome: self-sufficiency.
> “While quite young,... Vronsky had experienced the humiliation of a refusal when, having got into debt, he had tried to borrow money, and since then he had never again allowed himself to get into such a position.” (L. Tolstoi, Anna Karenina)
Self-sufficiency has some downsides and inefficiencies but so does its opposite. A better paper would explore that side also, and the balance.
The flip side sure could be interesting, but studying it seems like a very different task (with a significantly larger scope) than this project. That doesn't seem realistic to be covered in this sort of paper.
It would've been nice to mention it. My sense is that the quote in the abstract might have been a signal from one of the authors who felt the same way.
Anecdotally, I don't think I've /caused/ any pain with the questions I've asked in my career, but I have often revealed pain that was otherwise hidden or being avoided. One of the most important skills I learned in my career was asking good incisive questions. The only way your team or organization can resolve problems is if you first acknowledge that the problem exists, and there are often problems in organizations "that everybody knows", that asking questions about (especially as a newbie or outsider) can help to resolve. It's definitely opening a can of worms, it's definitely painful, but the question doesn't cause the pain, it just reveals the pain that's already there.
I just can't take the maths seriously. As a younger person I hated to skate on a rebellious subject or show my ignorance of what must be obvious to everyone else. As a better person I knew I must be patient, but was annoyed with those that didn't speak up when they didn't understand, or those that wouldn't accept the glaring truth. As an old fart I just try to stop myself letting go too loudly.
This is very subjective, to me there is nothing that reads better than the academic latex defaults. I would also argue that they look beautiful, but again subjective.
I think it has to do with most devices low DPI as these latex documents historically are made for printing most of all.
I like to save these PDFs in iBooks on my mac and get back to reading them comfortably on my iPad. Works great imho.
It is the standard font for LaTeX and a sub-standard choice for modern screens and printers.
CM was designed in the late 70s - early 80s. High resolution raster displays were an exotic item at that time. CM was meant to be used for printing documents on the printers of the era, that suffered from considerable ink bleeding.
See the pictures in [1] to see the difference between how the font looks on screen and when printed on the "right" equipment.
Not exactly, CM was designed for image setters and very high resolution printing. Early laser printers had resolutions in the neighborhood of 200–300dpi and there are frequent issues with generating bitmaps from Metafont at low resolutions (<300dpi). Some printers had asymmetric resolutions usually with a higher horizontal resolution than vertical resolution since it as easier to do precise positioning horizontally than vertically. In addition, there were two approaches to putting toner on the page: Writes-black (which was used by HP and Apple laserprinters), used the laser to apply a charge where the black should be. When the toner then affixed to the page at the charged locations, there was a little bit of “bleed.”¹ Writes-white (which was used by Xerox and some others), first charged the whole page then used the laser to remove the charge where there should not be toner. The bleed impact was reversed and the result was an anemic appearance to the CM fonts on the page. A hack was created in which an extra pixel was added to the edges of the shapes to increase their size, although this was prone to creating errors in the MF run at resolutions <600dpi.
⸻
1. Not really in the same sense as ink bleed, in which the ink spreads from where it is applied, but more just that the pixels created by the charge were slightly larger than the specified resolution.
I have not read this PDF (nor do I intend to), so perhaps this is something it mentions, but a shift in perspective along Stoic lines and identifying some irrational confusions might help. At base, the biggest problems are ego and attaching inappropriate significance to what people think/say or might think/say.
Of the two, ego is the biggest problem, I would say, and the first one that needs to be addressed. The typical reason someone might not want to ask a question is because they are afraid people will think they're stupid because asking reveals you don't know something that you believe is expected you should know. If this something is something you should know, then are you perhaps pretending to be better than you are? Are you trying to prevent people from forming an accurate opinion of you, an opinion that you deserve?
With respect to the second problem, people attach way too much value to what others say or might think instead of the truth. We all think things about each other. So what? Life is a bazaar of ignorant and cranky people assessing, misassessing, yammering, squabbling, haggling, making noise, elbowing each other, and so on, not some preciously arranged crystal palace or the last judgement presided over by a capricious teenager. No one is thinking about you because they're too busy thinking about themselves...just like you're doing by worrying so much about what others think of you.
There are ultimately two possibilities. Someone's assessment of you is accurate or it is inaccurate. If it is accurate, then what's the problem? You deserve it. If it is inaccurate, then it doesn't matter because it isn't true. In either case, if you are treated unjustly, or even uncharitably, then who's the asshole? Not you. As Marcus Aurelius would say, as long as you're going the right thing, you have nothing to worry about. You've done your part. You have no control over anything else, so why worry about it? If you don't ask the question, then perhaps no one will think you're stupid, but you will have failed to done your part by choosing to remain ignorant when all you had to do is ask. You would be guilty of what Catholics call "human respect".
When we had more and more engineers join, including interns, I made sure they heard the same thing I did and felt comfortable asking any questions. I really love this philosophy, but I found out that you can't just say it once or else people are still a bit skittish sometimes (young engineers mostly). I will repeat it to the point where it's likely annoying during mentoring and onboarding meetings, but people will be very open with their questions, which I'm very happy with. It takes a bit of extra time out of everyone's day to respond to questions, but you're unblocking someone in 2 chunks of 10 minutes (mentor and mentee) which saves the mentee upwards of hours, and this can compound with future situations if they don't have a complete understanding of the situation.
I really appreciate a question friendly culture and I would never want to work at a place that isn't like that again.