Is there a rule of thumb for objective questions asked out of curiosity?

Question

Isaac Moses, the patriarch of Mi Yodeya, wrote something that caught my eye the other day:

[...] the general Stack Exchange directive, expressed in the uneditable part of that section of the About page, to "Focus on questions about an actual problem you have faced. Include details about what you have tried and exactly what you are trying to do." In fact, while this directive is perfect for the behemoth programming site that Stack Exchange grew out of, it doesn't fit very well for any of the more intellectually-oriented, rather than practically-oriented sites. [...]

This is something that's bugged me for a while, and ended up prompting a discussion between Anna, Aarthi and me. The gist of it: is there any simple test that can be used to identify answerable questions asked in good faith when the "problem to be solved" is... simple curiosity?

Obviously, this is something that sites like Movies and SciFi have had to contend with for some time, but now and then such questions pop up even on sites where folks are generally trying to solve real problems. While a potentially interesting thought experiment, you're probably not going to use a distributed hashing algorithm to pair socks next time you do the laundry.

Strictly-speaking, problems like that fail the "practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face" test. And yet, I would keep that question simply because I learned something useful from the answers − not necessarily something I would ever apply to socks mind you, but certainly something I might apply to similar problems. I don't believe the question was asked in bad faith or for mindless social fun; yet, I have a bit of trouble stretching the definition of "based on actual problems" to contain it.

Obviously, the fact that we're hosting a growing number of sites dedicated mostly or entirely to intellectual curiosity makes this something of a rhetorical question. The "actual problems" part of the FAQ was added specifically to draw a line between good and bad subjective questions − heading off fantasy battles and their ilk.

But it's a pretty damn good litmus test, and if it's ok to ignore it for some questions − or particularly for every question on a site − then what should stand in its place?

Answer 1

See also: What "practical" physics problems do you "actually" face??

I agree with Isaac here. On science sites, this rule can actually be counterproductive.

Questions asked out of curiosity generally fall in the following types: "I think I see a paradox here", "What would happen if?", and other conceptual questions. All good, because these are generally conceptual, and get great answers. Thought experiments can sometimes be our best questions.

On the other hand, half the questions asked because of a problem that is faced are homeworky, and not so good. The rest are almost always too localized.

So, while this may be a good idea for SO, why keep it a network-wide policy?

And why do we need something to stand in its place? The close reasons for Too Localized generally covers the Gorilla vs Shark cases on most sites (SO included, as far as I can tell). The possible issues with contrived, not-a-problem-you'll face questions that I see are:

• They may be unhelpful to others. Already covered by "too localized"
• They may spark discussion. Already covered by NC
• They may not really be answerable; such questions may fall into the "Need a whole book to answer" type without the OP realizing it (NARQ)

See? Already covered.

As far as the FAQ goes, why not replace the line with the following?

You should only ask practical, answerable questions that will be useful to others. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

Or even:

You should only ask answerable questions that will be useful to others. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

The word "practical" really is meaningless here, and again, may be detrimental to theoretical sites. I'm not entirely sure of this -- the word conjures up an image of hands-on work for me (and is the opposite of theoretical work). I know that it's not intended to mean that.

Answer 2

A strict literal interpretation of the "practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face" clause would eliminate a very large number of questions on many SE 2.0 sites. Many sites just ignore that part of the FAQ, as it was written for SO and just doesn't fit in all cases.

One important type of question that doesn't fit to this problem-focused definition are questions that are based on curiosity, on trying to learn how something works and gaining a better understanding of the subject.

I'll take one question from Biology as an example that I answered myself: Why is uracil used in RNA rather than thymine?. The question is not based on any kind of practical problem, it was asked out of curiosity. It is also a typical question for someone learning biology, I've asked it myself before SE existed. I don't think this type of question is harmful, I think it is very valuable on the science sites and leads to good questions and answers.

There are certainly problematic questions that are asked out of idle curiosity, and I'm not a great fan of such speculative questions and thought experiments as questions on an SE site.

I think that questions that are asked out of curiosity work fine on many sites. What distinguished the "good" kind from the "bad" kind is that the good questions are still focused on trying to gain a better understanding, and are not only based on idle curiosity.

Answer 3

I'm a moderator on Russian, Chinese and Linguistics. My experience "on the other side of the wall" has taught me that not all questions are a result of an actual problem. No wait, let me bring this to the next level: Not all sites (always) face "actual problems".

Let me explain this. On sites like SO, or even TeX (examples), you face a problem, e.g. your code shows an error/warning, so you ask about it and eventually you get the code fixed/suggestions on how to fix the code if relevant; after that your problem is solved. On sites like Linguistics, or even the Language-related sites, this isn't often true. If I wonder how a certain expression would be in another language, first I do my research, and if nothing turns up I ask; that isn't an actual problem I face. I could live on without ever searching it. But is it really important in this case?

Another example is Linguistics: if you ask about loanwords, are you facing that problem? Maybe so, maybe not. Does it make any difference? In other words if the purpose of SE is to add content and valuable info to the internet, what harm is there if I ask? Do people really wonder "hey did he actually face this problem"? I think not. On Linguistics I think it never/rarely came up as a problem and with that rule the site might die tomorrow today.

So I ask a question that doesn't derive from an actual problem but it brings something to the site. It's valuable, interesting, it teaches you something. It brings value, it adds to the internet. As long as my question is on topic, well-asked, intriguing, and intelligent, who cares if I didn't face that problem in my life 5 minutes earlier?

• Is my question less valuable? No.
• Does it harm the site? It fits the rules, so no.
• Did it teach me something? Yes.

And again, how do you know if I'm actually facing the problem? No-one can, except me. Well, in case of code-like questions, you can see it's an actual problem, but not all sites treat code. On the contrary, very few sites do. This doesn't mean that the question should overcome the basic rules (on topic, clear, well-asked, research effort), but the "actual problem" factor is really not important and not influent on some sites.

Sorry for the long post, but my point is: SE sites are different from one another. Some basic rules makes sense being network-wide policy. But some sites have different audiences, different needs, different methods and some rules cannot be possibly applied to all indiscriminately.

About the alternate wording, the one that Manishearth proposed is good. If the "that is useful" is prone to be misunderstood, just remove that part like:

You should only ask practical, answerable questions. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

Answer 4

Personally, I think that curiosity is a perfectly valid "problem that you face", and questions should not automatically be closed just because the OP is asking out of curiosity, or with a hypothetical "what if".

Instead, ask if the question is practical for the site, and answerable by the site's targeted community. If yes, then it's fine and should be evaluated the same way you would evaluate any other question on the site.

For example, don't ask "Suppose the White House petition to build the Death Star was approved. How would it work?" on Physics.SE, since it's not really a practical question for that site, but it's probably OK to ask a question like "How does the Death Star work?" on SciFi.

Another reason why I don't like the "based on actual problems that you face" phrase in the FAQ is that I see it used far too often in cases where users are asking about a potential future action in order to make an informed decision, and their question gets closed because the question is not an "actual problem they are facing right now".

I actually recall a situation on the Workplace a while back where a question asking about the consequences of a potential future action got closed as not-constructive by users claiming that it wasn't an "actual problem being faced", and that if the OP had taken the action first (which would have most likely gotten him fired) and was trying figure out how to deal with the consequences, then it would have been a suitable question for the Workplace.

In many cases, it's a better idea to "ask the experts" if it would be reasonable to take an action before actually taking it, instead of taking the action first and then asking how to fix the mess you gotten into as a result.

How about changing the line in the FAQ to be

You should only ask practical, answerable questions that are relevant to this site's scope and audience.

This implies that the word "practical" is in reference to the site's scope/audience, so I think it would work fine in other SE sites, such as SciFi, Physics, Christianity, etc. In addition, it reminds the user that the site has a scope, and that all questions need to fall within that scope to be considered on-topic.

Answer 5

My previous answer, it's true, did not really address the question.*

After some thought I support manishearth's suggested reformulation:

You should only ask practical, answerable questions that will be useful to others. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

Since it maps well to what we do. So upvote his answer on that basis if you agree.

However, I do want to defend ...

Focus on questions about an actual problem you have faced.

... a little, on the basis that if you care enough about figuring something out, it is in fact a problem to you. You just can't stop wondering why X happens, it nags at you, it keeps you up at night, you're fascinated with learning more about it, you constantly talk to others about it. It's a problem.

Or are you just bored and want to be entertained with some blue sky daydreaming and idle curiosity? If you can walk away from your question and not care too much about the answer, that's no problem at all, is it?

Make us believe your question is important to you, and to anyone else who will ever read it. Because by God, this is a bona fide problem we're all facing here!

Include details about what you have tried and exactly what you are trying to do.

In my mind, there is very little difference between that phrase and asking someone if they have researched their question before asking -- what did you learn? And can you share that with us?

If you can't explain why you are curious about this, why it's interesting, and define what exactly it is you're even asking by framing it in what you already know.. well, the hallmark of idle curiosity is that no effort is expended.

I asked because I was curious.

Is no justification at all, but a get out of jail free card, a recipe for endless no-effort one-liner questions. Explain your curiosity to us. Share what you know, and why you are curious. Convince us this is something we should care about, too.

Why is this problem interesting?

_{** Though to be clear, the SO community has ruled quite definitively that "I learned something" isn't enough to justify the existence of a question and its answers. The question has to support directed, focused learning, not "random list of stuff that someone somewhere could probably learn something from." That's why "hidden features of X" questions are barely tolerated any more, and even "strangest language feature" which was used as a positive example in the blog, is no longer welcome, though they were encouraged at one point...}

Answer 6

I propose:

Answerable questions based on relevant issues that you want an explanation for

Justification:

• Answerable questions, I think we can all agree, sums up what the SE model is built to handle.

• relevant incorporates the on-topic requirement and also points toward "useful to others." Hopefully inspire in this asker's mind the question "Is this relevant to anyone but me?"

• issues is a more general term than "problems" that includes both practical problems and points of curiosity, inspiring the question "What is at issue here?"

• you want an explanation for¹ determines whether an on-topic question is "worthwhile" or not. In practical disciplines, practical problems faced by the asker prompt a desire for an explanation. In theoretical disciplines, interesting-to-that-field issues that the asker is curious about prompt a desire for an explanation. This also excludes questions that couldn't have come from genuine curiosity/need. Finally, "explanation," as opposed to "advice," "ideas," or "discussion," describes questions that can be answered objectively.

---

^{1. This phrasing was inspired by Jeff Atwood's answer to the question of whether SF&F, although not about "how to," can work on SE.}

Answer 7

The current text…

Focus on questions about an actual problem you have faced. Include details about what you have tried and exactly what you are trying to do

…seems to demand that questions are grounded in practical reality, but I suggest that the real benefit is a side-effect. What is good about questions grounded in practical reality? Is it that they are not theoretical? Is it that they are the only kind of questions that fit the format? No, it's that they are not a moving target.

If you ask a question about a problem you faced today, and someone comments asking for more information, you can provide it without ever changing the nature of the real underlying question: you are now merely communicating it better.

On the other hand, if your question was never grounded in reality in the first place, you are free to 'evolve' it as your thinking develops, and this is a disaster for the Q&A format.

I suggest we try and change the wording to keep the 'stationary target' requirement but remove the need to root this necessarily in a historical event ('you have faced', 'you have tried').

There are probably many ways of approaching this, and all might have their shortfalls. It may be better to have a short centralised list of texts from which the most apt can be chosen by each site. Here is my best effort for what it is worth:

Ask questions that are 'real'—that you understand fully now. Getting an answer might make you want to ask another question, but it shouldn't make you want to change your question!

Answer 8

FAQ

You should only ask non-trivial, answerable questions that demand expertise in our site's subject. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

The current FAQ standard, while quantifiable, depends entirely on the judgement of the asker. Long experience suggests that once a person asks a question on a Stack Exchange site, they are no longer unbiased about it. Therefore, it's not very helpful to ask them if it's an actual problem that they face; people will go to great lengths to post-justify a question once asked.

Besides, motivation isn't really the problem here. The problem is described in the second sentence: bad questions displace good ones. In truth, whether the asker is sincere hardly matters compared to whether the question does a good job engaging the sorts of people who provide excellent answers. Simply having a problem is no guarantee that your question will be interesting. Homework questions tend to be poor even though they are "practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face" because they are often trivial for experts.

Before Philosophy.SE was allowed to go into public beta, we had to answer what our site was about. As Paul Graham points out, the entire field has been dominated by "the exploration of knowledge that has no practical use." (As it happens, I disagree with most of that essay, but it does seem true that as soon as a bit of philosophical knowledge becomes practical, philosophers loose interest in it.) So how do you test if an asker is sincerely asking a question and if the answers will actually matter to them? Rather than psychoanalyzing the user, we decided to focus on "domain knowledge".

The question of motivation is pretty well addressed a little later anyway. ("If your motivation for asking the question is...") What makes a Q&A site useful is a group of "experts" who are willing to watch the questions and provide reliable answers. Asking impractical questions on SO risks driving off the folks who answer questions there because SO is about practical programming. People answering questions on philosophy are ambivalent about practicality, but care deeply that questions somehow engage the existing literature. In both cases, questions that don't demand the sort of skills and knowledge that experts have obtained are likely to be a distraction to the core contributors of a site.

About

Get expert answers to detailed questions

Focus on questions you've seriously pondered. Include details about what you have already learned and what you are trying to find out. Putting more thought into questions before you ask will help you get better answers.

The about page is focused more on guiding new users, so instead of focusing on why the policy protects the site, we should try to persuade them to ask good questions for their own good. I picked the reason that is perhaps the most general. But there are plenty of reasons for asking well-specified questions:

• You might find your own answer and not need to ask. (Or better: self-answer.)

• Understanding your own question helps you understand the answers.

• Upvotes.

But hopefully, the proposed text will help askers reorient themselves toward asking questions for the sake of learning from the answers.

Summary

Rather than make the requirement contingent on the asker, point out that people shouldn't ask questions that are boring to an expert.

Answer 9

So long as your question isn't hypothetical in a meaningless "I'm bored, entertain me" way -- that is, it is interesting to other experienced users, that's probably fine.

                                                — Jeff Atwood

I tend to agree. The ultimate motivation between the question lives in the asker's mind, and it cannot be known without telepathy. Let's not worry about something we don't know and have no way to find out. Evaluate the question on its own merit.

Is the sock question practical? Not applied to socks, no. But applied to something else? Why not? Socks are just the way the question is presented. Concrete examples help in understanding a problem and imagining a solution. So yes, the sock question is eminently practical. And it's evidently answerable: it has received good answers. There is a problem to be solved. Not all problems resolve to “solving this will bring on world peace” or “I can make money from this”. “I don't understand this and I want to” is a problem to be solved, and it's one that many other people often face.

Strictly-speaking, problems like that fail the "practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face" test. And yet, I would keep that question simply because I learned something useful from the answers

You don't need to compromise your principles or abandon your litmus test. The test works. You just need to recalibrate your actual-problem-o-meter.

Answer 10

Objections to "Practical" Questions

The objection to requiring practical questions faced by the poster seems to boil down to the idea that it would render everything on theoretical, faith-based, or genre sites off-topic. This is a misapprehension of the Q&A format and the focus of these sites.

Theoretical Science is Still About "Practical" Questions

The scientific method is about forming and testing a hypothesis, making it a practical problem to be solved in the sense that it is seeking a practical approach to testing a hypothesis or proving a theorem. Idle thought experiments without any interest in testing the hypothesis are just intellectual onanism, and not suitable for the Q&A format.

Philosophy, Religion, and Fiction

The rest of the objections to "practical" questions seems to lie in assuming that questions about soft subjects requires a lack of rigor. If that were true, philosophy students wouldn't be required to take logic courses, and religious studies wouldn't require research skills or bibliographies on term papers.

While I think that we can all agree that asking questions about Cylons is not "practical" in the same way as an applied sorting algorithm expressed in working code, it is at least a question can be answered based on specific expertise, accepted canon, or research within the available literature/media.

Note that I'm not saying this is a great question; it isn't, for a number of reasons, including the complete lack of a working hypothesis by the OP. However, it is certainly on-topic for the site, answerable by those with knowledge of the domain, and allows for the possibility of a canonical answer. That should really be a baseline threshold for almost any Q&A topic I can imagine.

Answer 11

I agree with Manishearth. It would be helpful if we had a few examples of questions that should not be closed and this FAQ item is the only reason for closing them (too-localized, etc. don't apply to them).

I might be wrong but as I understand this FAQ item tells me that we should ask a question only if we really care about knowing the answer to the question. Every day we can think of several out of curiosity questions but we don't really care about the answer for many of them. We don't seek an answer to them. And when we don't care we don't spend time thinking about them, we don't try to find the answer to the question by ourselves. It is likely that if we ask a question we haven't spent time thinking about we end up with an unanswerable question because we don't know what we want to know and we don't really care much about the question so we would leave it there.

Answer 12

To play off of Jeff's answer, maybe there's some middle ground, focused learning-by-accident. What I mean by that is while the SO way has been a solid line directed at a goal (vector):

and the all out forums are more like big circles around the goal:

maybe what is optimum is a small slice of pie, a bounded area that keeps close to the straight line, but gives a little flexibility.

So you're not just learning anything by accident, you're learning stuff directly related to your field. I've found many ideas in my life by accident that I was able to use in my coding and other computer work because it's the idea that counts. Once you get that idea, your specific implementation might be just what you needed to improve how you code. Heck, I have gotten a lot of good stuff like that off of Jeff and Joel's blogs.

Currently, SO actually does use a slice of pie, because there is no perfect way to stay on the line, I just think that it can handle a slightly larger slice.

I don't plan on ever sorting my socks that way, but the next time I have a large sorting task, I'm planning on rereading the answers to see if I can do better than I've done before.

Answer 13

Are we justifying the existence of many sites that primarily ruminate over thought experiments? As Q&A sites go, they're a great way to fill the page and time as questions focussing on real, actual problems are shut down for being too localised or not ethereal enough.

If more than a third of a site's questions are "what if?" then you either remove the rule completely and surrender, calling the forums like it is, with smooth voting UI, or actually look at the bubbling overthrow.

Questions missing the right sense of humour and failing to track on social networks are closed justly as the non real questions they are. Not every question will find a home on a Stack Exchange site. Unless it's showered in upvotes and long, long answers. Then it's more equal than others.

When a hypothetical hits the jackpot it gets elevated and projected into the echelons of questions you search for for their own sake and stick around for that reason alone. They are referenced more for their novelty and notoriety than the actual solutions presented. You can learn from them, but is what they present the right fit or is it just a mindshare grab at work?

As more of these are welcomed and branded under the Stack Exchange umbrella the more you become a Ponder & Debate network, not a Question & Answer one.