[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Post is mostly images (15): Multi Var Calc: I think this is Partial Integration? How would you solve this problem? ✏️ by YJ K on math.SE

Please close every answer that has been given so far.

this came in review audit which I failed. I wonder why it was upvoted and answered like that. I have voted to close as PSQ.

Glad to see that participation in this room is increasing. Just when the close queue is getting longer, people have risen to the occasion to control it.

close integral PSQ

close this as "need details or clarity".

@BillDubuque Are you aware that if you mark as duplicate then it is actually automatically protected against auto-deletion (blame the SE system)? That's the reason PSQs should be closed as lacking context. Duplicates that aren't PSQs are the ones that should be closed as duplicates (and not deleted). That is now up for (manual) deletion.

@ParamanandSingh I voted to close not because it is a PSQ but because no context was given for why "(x+y)^2".

@vitamind The posts by alex.jordan and Hvjurthuk are more or less okay. Robert's, however, is wrong and should be deleted (one more vote needed. Derek's is misleading in my opinion, so I did vote to delete, but it's just an opinion.

What? Someone upvoted Robert's totally wrong answer just after I posted here. (And it's not even what the asker was looking for.) Sigh... @amWhy @ParamanandSingh @Peter @RRL: Please help to delete it, thanks!

PSQ almost to close.

@user21820: that answer of Robert is gone.

And the PSQ almost to close is also closed.

@ParamanandSingh: Thanks!

Hello! If I may ask, this is a PSQ, right?

Also, answering PSQs are quite looked down upon, am I correct or is it just my thought?

@soupless Yes, it is a PSQ! Well done for identifying it. Let's go over the undesirable features again : The question post has only a question and nothing else. The author has not participated in one hour, so probably only wants the answer. I will let off the answerer a little, it is a new user, but you are absolutely right, nobody should be answering such questions.

@soupless: it's a damn PSQ! Absolutely spot on! Needs one more vote to close.

Also, if I will comment on that question, will this be okay?

Also this is one those PSQs which can be answered by the asker themselves, but they don't even bother to try.

The comments left on that question are also very appropriate. One of them is a hint that requires a good amount of work, that's great. The other asks explicitly for the work done and the background, that's also great. Hats off to these users.

I occasionally comment on PSQs to request more context. There is no harm in general. But if you see some form of retaliation for your comment, then flag and disengage.

@soupless Worth trying : the problem I face now is that the author could just read the answer below and not respond, after all the question has been answered.

@TeresaLisbon Actually, isn't that question nearly trivial?

This is a clear-cut example of a PSQ: some are more subtle than that.

@soupless The PSQ you linked to is now closed.

@soupless Yes, but we are not the ones who can decide triviality, unfortunately. For example, as I see it this is an exercise in mathematical induction, but I don't know the author's background so I can't verify this. That's why the answer is not an answer : it doesn't know how the question is supposed to be approached. The question is non-trivial to a beginner in induction.

@TeresaLisbon: I have commented to know if the asker has any idea of induction. But as is usual with these questions the askers don't respond.

@ParamanandSingh I sincerely hope for a response. Of course, if we don't get one, we move to another question and delete this one. That way, life is easy. Speaking of which, all the shenanigans in the mods room yesterday were down to this article. Think this could have been content discussable on MSE?

@TeresaLisbon: well, i have no issues at all with such content or its publication anywhere. But we can't discuss it here (as mathse is not a forum for discussion, rather a forum for Q&A). If there is some mathematical flaw in the article that can be put as a question in the hope to fix it.

@ParamanandSingh I see. It's a very creative idea, there's no mathematical idea in there, and I think what the author wanted to discuss was how useful it could be, which is why the author felt MSE could give a good idea of what applications changes, the introduction of such a system could bring about in research.Anyway, we have the answer now : not much.I've still decided I want to tell this to Grimes,because if Grimes tells people to keep coming to MSE we are going to receive more like this!

@TeresaLisbon: in recent past I have deleted an answer (probably by this user) which explained all this pronunciation in base $2^n$.

@user21820 Yes, that's a SE design flaw. Generally I mark as diupe then vote to delete,. Alas, not many others track delete votes in the tools, so many don't get deleted

@user21820 There are some related discussions on meta: Should duplicate PSQs be closed as duplicates? and Closing a poor question as off-topic or as a duplicate?

One thing I would consider in favor of closing as a duplicate - it is possible to leave a comment explaining how the duplicate was found (and thus helping the user to learn that they should search before asking and also how to search).

@MartinSleziak That isn't a reason; you can leave a comment linking to a post and explain how it is found, and it is independent of the closure reason.

@vitamind I think your case is similar to this one.

@soupless This one might be a little more debatable. But first of all, thanks for bringing it up.

Wait, am I helping now?

@soupless Yes, you are. Welcome to the "I am helping MSE" feeling.

Well then, I will give another PSQ. It really is the "I am helping MSE" feeling and it is really good.

@soupless Haha, that is such a good PSQ. Model PSQ.

@TeresaLisbon Will this help? The OP is relatively new.

@soupless Yes. I can see it helping.

@user21820 Now deleted (thanks). The problem with PSQ closure is that it doesn't happen quick enough to stop rampant VLQ FGITW duplication. As you may recall, generally I tackle these problems using diuplication not PSQ since I don't agree that all PSQs should be closed for only that reason.

Another advantage of dupe vs PSQ closure is that dupe closure is more constructive - it helps organize related content, and often sparks improvements of dupe targets (the goal being to eventually obtain "proofs from the book" with enough iterative refinement and feedback). PSQ closure offers no such benfits.

@soupless Here is my tip to you, a honest one : let me first take this opportunity to applaud you and appreciate you for all the work you have done far, both with me and with CURED. I see your reputation, however, and I feel that you are somebody who will be of help to us, while also participating on the site. I think you should find a way, where you can answer questions and find PSQs to close. I see that you have not answered a question in 4 days. Find some good questions,

and go out and answer them. I can give you tips to find good questions, but ideally the best way for you to get the best experience of this site, is to participate on the mathematical part of it by answering and asking questions, and the non-mathematical part of it by helping us regulate the content. If you do this, you can enjoy MSE to the fullest.

What about me? I have already answered so many questions on MSE, so I feel a little saturated. I feel that you are yet to experience the exhilarating feel of answering questions and earning some well-deserved reputation on the site. Reputation is not all that bad , and you will learn a lot of mathematics if you find yourself participating on this site. Do visit here often, but I'd love to see some of your answers and questions in the future as well!

@TeresaLisbon Thanks for your advice, though I find it hard for me to actually answer, instead I find it easier to help. But I will still try. Again, thanks!

(continuing my prior comment) I've lost count of the number of improvements I have made to answers motivated (partly) by making them better dupe targets (and from subsequent feedback in comments), It also nudges one to think more deeply about how certain topics are related, which has led to various insights that aren't typically gained from typical textbook presentations.

@soupless Welcome! See, the reason why a group of 20-30 people like you , me and the rest you see here have to work harder than the others, is because the rest of the 10000+ people do no work. If everybody actually moderated actively while also answering on the site, then everybody will be able to both use the site for mathematics, as well as say "I am helping MSE maintain quality" with great pride. THAT is the hallmark of what MSE should be. I want you to be an example of this motto.

Why? Because I'll tell you this : if you see how much MSE has improved me, then I can write it down for you : five active years on MSE can do WONDERS for your mathematics.

And let's admit it: Most of our dupe answerers and high rep troublemakers, are actually just people who are very very knowledgeable and sharp but cannot bring themselves to behave within the decorum maintained in this forum. So , improving them is going to lead to a sharp increase in the quality of questions on site : but that's the challenge!

@user21820 Fair enough, that is also a possibility. I vaguely remember some user on meta advocating in favor of duplicates in such situations. But I cannot find it now (and I do not remember whether it was a comment or a post), it is possible that I have misremembered it.

@MartinSleziak You probably didn't misremember it. There are about as many different preferences put forth on meta as there are users haha..

@TeresaLisbon After I joined MSE, I actually changed the way I answer. I don't just answer questions without background information such as the origin of the question and possible solutions made. Other things about me that MSE might change is yet to be changed.

C/D often such questions about open problems are heavily downvoted, unfortunately not in this case.

C/D

@soupless It is a gradual process, after all. See yourself in five months' time, and I vouch you will have changed a fair bit!

(Oh, and that PSQ your pointed out : it's gone!)

@Peter Then there's the weird comment "Astonishing that anyone would downvote your query"! Hahaha, people are impressed way too easily.

Speaking of which , this still needs to be deleted.

@Peter Worse still, as evident in the comments there are some users who actively support [semi]cranks.

@user21820 That's why I posted it here. I only found it because I regularly check the prime-number/number-theory questions. With the search of low score questions, this would have been missed.

While looking for a possible duplicate target for Why is E'(x) = E(x) I stumbled upon this answer math.stackexchange.com/a/1079832/42969, which (I think) is awfully wrong (“The derivative of e^x is e^x because f(x) = e^x solves the differential equation y' = y.”).

@MartinR Indeed; it is a circular argument and needs 6 more downvotes. CC @Peter @ParamanandSingh @amWhy @BillDubuque @XanderHenderson @TeresaLisbon

D

@Peter gone!

@MartinR Half of that user's contributions should be up for deletion. Dr Graubner epitomized everything that the site deemed unruly. I must admit very reluctantly that their return on Jun 23 will mean the return of a very big monster for MSE.

@MartinR: wonderful find. One of the prime examples of circular argument. The answerer is currently suspended. We need a few more downvotes before one can get rid of that answer.

@TeresaLisbon: let's still hope that a long suspension period will help change their attitude towards mathse.

@ParamanandSingh Yes, I hope so too.

As simple as it is, in my opinion, can this be considered as a PSQ?

@soupless Definitely yes it is a PSQ.

And we should also delete all posts of the kind "guess the next number" like this

@Peter Should that be migrated on puzzling.stackexchange.com?

That would be a good idea. But I do not think we can do that.

C/D

@Peter Are they talking somehow, about Euler sums or something like that?

Or maybe not.

I think, this is just a case of wrong manipulations with nonconverging series. Seems to be not something about regularizations.

I am not familiar, by the way, with Euler sums.

Although Yves found a formulation that would give such exercises a meaning (see here ), I nevertheless think that such questions are off-topic here.

PSQ, I think

@soupless An extreme basic question which "of course" attracted an answer. Definitely PSQ !

Well, also this one

I think I am giving lots of them, maybe I should stop now...

No, continue to post as many as you can find !

Ok, also this one

And this one

@Peter There's an answer to this question which is about the harmonic series being set to A. The problem is, it seems to be a very good answer to a question that maybe doesn't deserve it.

I remember a proof that the harmonic series cannot converge by assuming that it has value $A$ and deriving a contradiction. This was actually interesting and useful. But I do not see something useful in the answers here.

Moreover, there emerge off-topic discussions (applications of the imaginary numbers in physics, for example)

Finally, again the deleted post is the best because it points out what happens if we rearrange the summands in conditionally converging series.

@Peter Very true. We need three more close votes there. I have downvoted, in case deletion comes into play.

@user21820 Responding to your message about ten hours ago: New (good) answers have been written. I was talking about the answers that were posted at the time.

here we must be fast since the question alrady received 3 reopen-votes.

@Peter How can I prevent a post from reopening?

only by deleting it (at least until it is undeleted)

I don't know how to lock a question

that could be an alternative.

So only a moderator could prevent reopening?

4-2

@Peter Some user has edited the question and pushed it to the top of the edit queue. So more people are seeing it. This is tight!

@vitamind Do you have enough rep to delete-vote ?

@Peter I guess not. But now I understand, thanks!

This is bad. We will have to try to close it again later.

@TeresaLisbon Wait, are edits approved by moderators, the OP, or both?

edited again

I saw another one

@vitamind One thing you can do is go to the reopen review queue, review that post and vote "leave close". Three "leave close" votes will kick the post out of the review queue.

I rolled back the edit since I do not see "long division algorithm" being mentioned by the OP in the post or in the comment. It is not even clear if the confusion is from long division.

@Peter Gone!

@user21820 Thank you very much !

@user21820 You are the saviour. That question was on the verge of being opened. Another user was trying his or her BEST to edit the question multiple times, heart-in-mouth stuff.

@vitamind Oh! Sorry I didn't realize that. Almost all of those earlier posts are now gone.

next project : this 6 times upvoted question

Two days too late, on the 1st April , this would have been a good post :)

@vitamind @Peter @ParamanandSingh: There is now another bad non-answer on that 0^0 thread... Please help to delete?

@user21820 best we delete the question which is opinion-based anyway.

@Peter I agree. We have to wait or get 2 more voters.

For me, $0^0=1$ because of $\lim_{x\rightarrow 0+0} x^x=1$ , but some mathematicians insist that this is no argument, and there is neither a convention. However , many software tools (including PARI/GP) return $1$

@vitamind A moderator cannot "prevent reopening".

(except by locking a post, but that leaves the post in whatever state it is in).

Moderator closed questions can be reopened as normal. The only case in which a moderator's vote is permanently binding is if a moderator deletes a post, in which case only another moderator can undelete it.

@Peter That's an incorrect reason, as explained in the post I linked. But anyway whatever choice you make about defining or not defining 0^0 is a convention and the combinatorial structure is the correct reason for defining it as 1.

@XanderHenderson Okay, thank you.

@user21820 I see no reason that this argument is incorrect, but it is pointless to discuss about it since mathematicians decided not to make a convention about it.

@Peter Quick question: With this argument, would you also set 0/0 = 1?

@vitamind Haha nice one! And it very clearly shows the issue as well!

@vitamind Seems you got me :) But still I consider $0^0=1$

Now let us concentrate on downvoting the golbach-post :)

To make the point clearer (which @vitamind made by analogy with division), both / and ^ are binary operations so it makes no sense to restrict to the equal input case just to make the limit exist and then arbitrarily stipulate the value to be the limit. It's not wrong because one is free to define it arbitrarily. Remember what I said a while back that such silly definitions are necessary if one treats the structure as a plain FOL structure, and that it does not affect the interesting theorems?

here is a very low-quality post. I had a suggestion. Is it possible to design this platform so that when a new user joins then before his/her first post he/she must complete a simple survey of the MathJax?

I mean is it possible to create a simple set of questions about MathJax rendering that must be filled in correctly before posting the first question? I think this would decrease the number of posts without the use of MathJax.

(In other words, it's not wrong but it can't be justified that way.)

@ShubhrajitBhattacharya Not a good idea because many users would not even enter this site then.

@Peter Is this site falling then?

The non-use of mathjax is not the problem anyway. The lack of context and effort is the issue. But users should later use mathjax (if they are more experienced). At the beginning, experienced users can edit the posts which I often did.

Exactly that. Peter typed faster.

Hmm, agreed but many users just hop in and post their hw problems without knowing anything about how to write math equations properly.

@Peter Okay, got it.

@ShubhrajitBhattacharya It doesn't matter, really. Questions with good effort tend to look reasonable even if they don't use mathjax, simply because the asker puts in effort to make it presentable.

@user21820 Okay

Of course, users will then direct these new users to the mathjax quick guide, and they tend to learn fast.

Because who doesn't like the nice-looking mathematics?

@user21820 Nothing to add. Excellent comment.

@Peter The goldbach conjecture proof is basically a quarter page. Seems...legit?

@vitamind Wait, what seems legitimate? That post asks people to check a poof of an open conjecture. That's not suitable for Math SE, as recently confirmed by @XanderHenderson.

@user21820 No I meant it ironic. An unsolved problem that exists for more than 300 years has been "proven" in one quarter page. We don't even have to talk about if this post is suitable for Math SE.

@vitamind Lol sorry it's hard to tell jokes online. To help blur people like me, could you please use a smiley next time? =P

@user21820 Okay :).

Well hidden sarcasm. Not only Sheldon Cooper would have failed to realize it. I failed as well ...

@Peter Lol! And I thought I was the only one.

Can someone explain it? I didn't get it :-(

@Peter@user21820 Well, then I guess I expressed it not too clearly ;). Nice to know that some Sheldon "fans" are in here. (Have to admit, not too surprised.)

@soupless The joke was that vitamind was sarcastic about that post being "legit", but we both didn't get the joke and thought he was somewhat serious.

@user21820 I think I also missed it. I thought it is about the "quarter page".

Hahahaha..

That makes 3 of us now.

@vitamind I give you a chance to guess as well - sarcasm or not : Sheldon Cooper surely would prove the Goldbach conjecture if he would really exist.

I'm never sure what all those modal verbs mean in the end...

@Peter Everything that is not related to the String theory or "super asymmetry" does not lie in Sheldons interest ;).

Question that I am tempted to answer

Also this one, but can I answer this?

I'll try to answer it, please warn me if I shouldn't.

Enjoyed reference to Sheldon Cooper. That's the only show from US which I watched completely (all seasons). There was "two and half men" also but watched only the first season.

Close before someone copies the answer from the comment.

Well, there exists one now.

I was too slow :(...

Wait, isn't that a PSQ?

@soupless PSQ. By a long long long long distance. (Using exponentiation, $\long^4$ distance).

PSQ

Also this

PSQ closed, one answer open for deletion.math.stackexchange.com/a/4079611/9003

PSQ although I did want to show off that I know the PMP, haha. Not touching that one with a fishing pole, though.

PSQ

PSQ

psq, psq

psq

Dupe of one of the biggest FAQs in ENT, with FGITW answers from the usual suspects. Please help clean up (downvote & delete)

psq

@BillDubuque Ready to delete. Also read last user's response, clearly doesn't see the whole story.

@BillDubuque Sorry, what does "ENT" and "FGITW" mean?

@vitamind "elementary number theory" as a tag, and "fastest gun in the west".

"fastest gun in the west" to refer to the PSQ answerers , and who's the fastest to answer the question that everybody wants to answer and nobody wants to leave out.

@TeresaLisbon Many of those who object are mostly answerers, not askers (nor dupe closers), so they rarely (if ever) search for answers, so likely they have no clue just how difficult it is to locate high-quality answers to FAQs (due to them being buried in hundreds of low-quality FGITW answers in search results - like a needle in a haystack). I've been meaning to discuss this on meta, so we can simply link to a thread with good arguments against posting dupes answers to FAQs ad infinitum.

@BillDubuque I will participate on the discussion for sure.

@TeresaLisbon That one seems to have only my close-vote.

@user21820 Indeed, sorry. The reason why that happens is twofold : one is that my first thought is of sending it here. The second is that I am led to the question by tracing an answerer, not the question itself, so I always focus on the answerer's contribution and note it down.

PSQ

Long, drawn out PSQ

Unclear question, and notice a commentor says : "it's not clear" and still answers it

PSQ

@BillDubuque But some of the FGITW have answered the very same question before, and sometimes a regularly, wrt very frequently asked questions, but prefer to get a chance to answer again (perhaps for more rep?) That's not contradicting your statement in the least. In fact, there hasn't been much of talk about duplicates on meta. BTW,

D1, D2, D3.

D4, D5, D6.

PSQ? Or maybe too involved a subject This is a basic exercise in the primer to Sobolev spaces.

D7, D8, D9.

D10, D11, D12.

@user21820 Avalanche

incoming

BTW, @Bill you might be interested in the most recent meta post, which can provide you a great opportunity to address this issue: math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/33406/9003.

@TeresaLisbon That's all, actually, because I got to go.

@user21820 Oh, ok ,see you!

@TeresaLisbon It doesn't matter if it is an advanced topic. It is still a bare PSQ, so we should close.

@user21820 Sure. It's not even from an advanced topic, to be fair!

@amWhy What a coincidence! On the last question I saw Bill mark as I dupe, the OP of that meta post had answered, and went on to say something like what he says in the comments on that meta post.

Delete

Delete

@Teresa, Wow! Now they're asking if they can answer before they vote to close as a dupe, but that's ensuring, possibly, that only they can answer.

Delete it was an active contest question, now it's just a PSQ.

It got deleted once, and then undeleted. Wonder who did it.

Oh, it was a moderator.

Duplicate worth deleting?

@TeresaLisbon Wow, same moderator, @Teresa, who undeleted a certain answerer's answer just yesterday.

@amWhy Oh... ah, yes! Yes! THAT one. Heaven(or wherever that mod lives) knows why this was undeleted.

By the way, Bill is pretty tired with high rep users. He's not added the usual comment at the end of each of the answers in the previous dupe I attached.

@TeresaLisbon We do get tired of repeating ourselves, over and over again, to no effect.

@amWhy It's like flogging a dead horse. Really no point. I sympathise with Bill here. All those users do is answer 15 questions, we delete 12 of them, they end up with some positive increase at the end of the day thanks to what is left over, and repeat the same the next day. To me, it is a lack of respect now. I would earlier say that maybe a user's chase for reputation could obscure the view of their damage : but to disregard another's advice, that's the next level of tomfoolery.

I am truly convinced that we must dispose with the means and deal with the extremes.

And that file of ours, it's growing faster than the COVID cases here.

Now even more so : I'm looking at recently deleted contributions! So we've got a lot to feed into.

PSQ

Delete

This is just something I did not notice : a answerer asked the OP to fix their downvote in the answer here.

Delete

Downvote, delete

Why are people trying to reopen this? One delete vote and two reopen votes.

@amWhy Thanks much for the link. I haven't been following meta for a long time, so I hadn't seen it.

@TeresaLisbon Because six users answered, two or three of them are going to what to reopen it to preserve any rep they earned. But they will no longer be able to cast reopen votes, once they've cast them.

@Jorge Hello. I would like to ask you why you feel that your question is on topic. It has been closed as opinion based, and I can give you an explanation.

which question?

I was just here to see if you where saying something about me

@Jorge This one

We were never saying anything about you. No, we only referred to the fact that you wanted to answer duplicate questions in a meta post. If you wish to discuss that , we can do that here.

Or on the meta post. Maybe that is better.

I don't want to

I was just asking for a list of cases where someone may have had to deal with the definition of 0^0

I don't think it's opinion based, I was just asking for life experiences

@amWhy Yes, no doubt that some have their (math) eqo highly entangled in the SE rep game. But some do not and simply think that answering everything is the best way of sharing their knowledge. They don't understand the damage this does to the site (as a knowledge repository). This is esp true for old-timers coming from sci.math - which as a newsgroup was an ephemeral stream of answers - not a repsitory.

@BillDubuque I used to answer everything because I wanted to encourage students and my knowledge, I get that; it was not a rep trip. But there comes a point when one can't help but notice dupes galore and that there are many facets on the site that need improvement, etc.... In any case, Your first sentence expresses the folks that frustrate me most. Thanks for the input!

"the damage this does to the site (as a knowledge repository)" can you expand on this?

@Jorge When was the last time you tried to search for (high-quality) answers to FAQs?

Probably around 2015

when I asked this question in the meta math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21058/…

Delete reminder

Delete answer

@TeresaLisbon gone.

@amWhy Thanks. Now for a well deserved good night , and our little daily update!

@TeresaLisbon Sounds good!

@Jorge Then likely you don't realize just how difficult it is to locate good answers to questions. One of the primary goals of the site is to be a searchable database of answers to common questions. But finding good answers is difficult if not impossible because we have failed miserably in site organization.

I attenpt to search for dupes for almost every question in my tags. And I often have no luck finding them even though I know they exist because they are buried in a huge pile of low-quality (FGITW) dupe answers. A beginner will have even worse luck. That's likely why few if any search before posting questions. Alas, the site is being used like an ephemeral stream of answers, not a repository. We need to fix that asap.

If we delete all of the duplicates will that make searchability better?

@Jorge Yes, because then the best answers won't be hidden in a pile of crap 100x their size.

Ok, but how do you know anything will show up at all

Also, right now, maybe you'll get crap but it will point to another question and I'm assuming it will quickly point to one of the "good ones"

In fact it makes sense that if something is closed it points to something that isn't closed so it should point immediately

So the dag should have depth 1

Ok I think I understand where you are coming from. If a vast majority of the problems point to nothing then it can be hard to get the whole "interconnection process" rolling

But if most dupes point to something I think it is actually a good thing because it improves searchability.

I will try to help out with closing questions that are duplicates after they reach a certain age.

Again, it takes great effort to locate the best answers. That's why hardly anyone tries to do so. If we organized the site it would be much simpler to locate good answers. Then we'd have some hope of iteratively refining them to get much closer to "proofs from the book".

Ok but I still believe the following: A dupe that has been closed does not impact negatively

I see how a dupe that hasn't been closed can be bad, but I don't see how a dupe that has been closed can be harmful

well, I guess it's possible if the best answer gets added to a question that is closed as a dupe

but then I would argue that that answer would never had existed had the dupe question not been asked

In any case I think that if that truly is the goal, it should be possible to define some sort of process that refines MSE to create a more polished version.

In other words I think it should be possible to work with the "dirty version" and create a more polished version with some kind of iterated automatic process, but without modifying the dirty one

Another dupe with yet more dupe answers adds a handful of redundant answers to search results, making it even more difficult for future searches. And more often than not the dupe targets will not be the best quality because no one had the time to locate the best targets among the huge list of matches.

@Jorge When the question is of PSQ quality, then it does harm the site, and should be closed. It is okay to keep dupes that are okay or good, because yes, they can point to a better question and answers. Sometimes dupes are merged when this happens if both have good answers. But it serves no use to create a confusing web of connections with very low quality questions comprising at least half of them.

On an unrelated topic the ping sound is pretty loud (i muted the tab so it doesn't matter anymore)

urbandisctionary doesnt know what PSQ is

@Jorge And it's a bit obnoxious.

I think searching for stuff seems to be pretty hard because of latex but I'm not sure if this is actually true

things involving a lot of words seem to be easier

@Jorge I highly recommend you do as I do to experience this firsthand. For any question you know is likely an (abstract) dupe (most nowadays), resist the temptation to answer and give your best effort to locate good dupe targets. Only then will you realize just how difficult and endeavor this it. We are robbing our students of the knowledge of some of our best teachers by continuing to obscure their answers by burying them among VLQ FGITW dupes

Ok I can definitely see that being the case. Although I also feel a lot of the people that ask questions aren't really interested in their questions and just want to be spoonfed

And I have mostly thought that spoonfeeding them is a good thing

Although I'm not sure.

Obviously spoonfeeding is worse than them actually learning. But I don't know how getting spoonfed affects the chance that they will actually learn it after.

Anyway this is probably kind of fruitless. I will try to start closing more duplicates. I will read anything else anyone wants to tell me tomorrow

Thank you for the discussion

@Jorge Yes, searching for a (good) duplicate target can be a challenge. When searching for (LaTeX) formulae, I have made good experience with Approach0 and SearchOnMath. See also How to search for a formula/expression on Meta.

Oh, thanks a lot! I'll definitely start using that !

There is also the chatroom In the search of a question for discussions about searching for questions. The author of Approach0 (Wei Zhong) can also be reached there in the case of problems with that search engine.

@MartinR Apporach0 helps when searching on math expressions. For text, I recommend the following. Every time you post an answer ask yourself: how can this easily be located by search? If it cannot then add some keywords that will help you and others to locate it. I do that frequently, e.g. using keywords like: gcd distributive law, mod distributive law, CCRT, unique fractionization, congruence product rule, etc. With a little practice this will become subconscious.

I also heavily link to help enhance discoverability - between specializations and generalizations, analogies, counterexamples, conjectures, etc. Again, this is more for pedagogical purposes but also helps in site organization (e.g. locating dupes).

??? close

close Duplicate

I hope that Holy Easter will enrich your hearts, making them happier and more joyful and able to rejoice in the most important values of life. Many sincere wishes for a Happy Easter to all users of MSE....my best regards.

@JoséCarlosSantos I voted to close, because it is a literal PSQ. I only vote to close dupes if they are worth keeping around, this isn't one of those, the answerers at least two of them, had to know it was a dupe, or PSQ, but answered anyway.

^^^^ I meant, I only vote to close a dupe as a dupe if it is worth keeping around.

@vitamind Good call! Also, open for deletion for users with sufficient rep!

@Sebastiano Thank you! And for you, I wish you the same!

@JoséCarlosSantos I didn't comment to challenge you. The post should, indeed, be closed. Thanks for bringing our attention to it!