The Axon Terminal - 2019-12-18

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12:48 PM

In the meanwhile, I put forward another question but turns out it is also objectionable. I must be missing something big here.

> @IgnatInsarov - it's not just about what you appreciate or not, it's about this site's conventions. In the end, Qs and As should fit the scope of the site, be answerable in a scientific way, shouldn't be opinion based and not too broad. At this stage, the Q doesn't meet these requirements. – AliceD♦ 5 mins ago

Can you folks here help me understand which of the listed requirements my question fails to meet, and why?

I have been around for about two weeks, I conversed with some of the moderators at length, I absorbed a fair section of the Meta, and still I am missing something big. How is it possible?

Should it be mentioned, I have also been reading professional literature about neuroscience, sociology and psychology of language, and I had no difficulty understanding it, so it must be that I have some ability to understand this kind of things and your kind of people.

4 hours later…

5:13 PM

@IgnatInsarov I think the main issue is that you are perceiving feedback as a personal attack. This seems to lead you to defend yourself rather than reflect. I think these are fairly typical tendencies, but it is important to learn to overcome them.

If you've been reading particular literature then it may be helpful to cite and quote from sections that are spawning your questions: there might be context, operational definitions, and choice of terminology that relies specifically on the literature you have recently read, whereas we are all reading your questions with a less specific perspective

@BryanKrause I believe that to unquestionably conform to authority is wrong.

No one is asking you to "conform to authority" - the community here is asking you to make your questions answerable

But they are.

As long as you continue to see it that way, you can't be helped

As soon as I receive sound reason to leave this belief, I will.

Yet when I ask for your reasoning, I receive silence.

5:18 PM

The sound reason is that if you want your questions to be answered, you need to ask answerable questions. Therefore, feedback that is meant to make your questions answerable is meant to support your goals

That is assuming that you are right and I am wrong in our judgement of answerability.

How are you substantiating your righteousness?

The way the system works here is that users, including those who answer questions, can mark questions as problematic. This helps reduce unanswerable questions and lets others find good Q&A

If we are misunderstanding your question, then it is up to you as the question asker to improve it on your own

Alternatively, we can do nothing, your questions will go unanswered, and no one is happy

Not every type of question is appropriate here, and both StackExchange in broad terms and this community in narrow terms have spent a lot of effort determining where those boundaries lie. As you have been told numerous times, these boundaries are not fixed, though they do have a long history

If you want to change these boundaries, the way we do that is through Meta discussions, where people propose changes to boundaries and the rest of the community weighs in on those suggestions. If you want a change in boundaries, you have to convince the community

@BryanKrause What your monologue sums up to is that the way empowered users feel about a question is what decides its fate, and the only way to restore a question is to appease the arbitrary taste of those persons, is that right?

Why do you presume their tastes are arbitrary?

Because tastes are generally arbitrary, as opposed to rational.

5:29 PM

"empowered users" is correct, although the level of participation that leads to "empowerment" is quite low and doesn't really reflect "authority" but rather membership in the community. Close and reopen votes require 500 reputation on this site: psychology.stackexchange.com/help/privileges and also psychology.stackexchange.com/help/stackexchange

Then maybe do not label them as "taste" if you are going to define "taste" as arbitrary

The only way to restore a question is to address the rational concerns that users have about the construction of that question according to the site guidelines

Yes, this is much better.

I am glad we have a shared understanding that rationality is the basis for decision making here.

> One can easily come up with absurd answers that show there is no consistent preference ...
> ... what does "interacting" mean?

These are the concerns you have raised.

That someone can imagine some kind of answers to a question is not a rational reason for it to be closed. The meaning of "interaction" is given by a dictionary quite precisely.

I read your comment maybe a hundred times by now. The rational concern that it raises I addressed.

You advanced your point recently, after the question was closed.

I think you have not, which might mean that I haven't made my rational concern clear enough.

> "Interact" is far too broad to be meaningful.

I am now studying this, and it could be a good reason to close my question. But it has not been made clear.

Which is why I added further examples to help make my point, but maybe the examples and analogies are not that useful to you

The concern I have is that "interaction" is a very very very broad term. So, perhaps, is "preference"

Examples and analogies do not constitute a rational argument by themselves.

5:43 PM

The (rational) reason that questions containing terms with very broad interpretations are not good questions is that the space of answers is too large

Having a large space of answers means a) A complete answer would have to be massive. It would be far far too long for the StackExchange format

Once you have made your concern clear, I have something to work with, and everyone is happy.

b) A good answer may not actually answer the underlying question. A question may have broad terms, but the actual meaning the asker has in mind is narrower than those terms imply.

But your point A is non sequitur, and point B is suspicion.

It is necessary to make a question more specific to avoid (a) and (b). Not all question and answer sites on the internet bother with avoiding these problems

StackExchange in particular identified these as problems with other Q&A sites, and has been successful in large part because of this.

Point A is central to this community. I find it insulting that you consider it a non sequitur

Please notice that I have been around for a while, and it may not be necessary to reiterate the basic philosophy of Stack Exchange.

5:47 PM

Prove it.

Point A has been previously discussed and logically rejected on meta, although I am not sure I can find a link fast. But I can give my own argument.

12

Q: Need "Too Broad" reason to close

I often feel a question needs to be closed because it's too broad to be answered, and it would need many more details to winnow it down to being possible to answer. Like here, I voted to close this, but chose "Not a real question" which isn't really the best reason, none of the choices fit. How...

feature-request status-completed close-reasons

psychology.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask

psychology.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions

"if your question has many valid answers (but no way to determine which - if any - are correct), then it probably needs to be more focused to be successful in our format."

"sometimes we need more information in order to help solve your problem."

235

A: Improving "demonstrate a minimal understanding" close reason

Analogy Time A good question-answer pair is like collaborative problem solving. The asker has a big puzzle they are trying to solve, and are stuck on some part of it. A good question will explain what it's trying to achieve as well as the specific problem they are currently facing ...

The size of a space is the number of points, in this case types of answers, equal up to formulation. There are examples of questions that admit only one type of answer, yet have to be closed because it would be very long. Therefore, the size of the space of types of answers and the length of any single answer are independent. There are also questions that admit many types of answers, yet still admitted to be good.

The example of a singular long answer that I have in mind is here:
https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12587

@BryanKrause Please do not be insulted by my finding something to be non sequitur. We are all humans. You can make a mistake claiming that something is connected, or I can make a mistake claiming that something is not. It is an ordinary situation in any conversation.

I think our ideas of what makes a "long answer" are divergent. I am thinking of textbook length answers, not a page.

In any case, I think I've given you as much help as I can

I am also thinking of a textbook length answer. And the post I linked you to is also talking about a textbook length answer.

5:59 PM

I don't really want to argue about it, I've merely tried to clarify to help you understand. In order to continue, I'd have to feel like you are also making an effort to understand to make my continued effort worthwhile, because communication is two-directional.

Best of luck to you

Jim's answer there would be good to direct towards your interact/preference question here, though I think the question here is further from the border that Jim describes. If you understand his language better than mine then that's fine

"The fact of the matter is that this question has multiple scenarios to consider and there are many corollaries to each one that would require detailed explanations and each corollary changes what the overall answer would be."

I've tried to point out, through my examples in the comments, a couple of those scenarios to try to demonstrate the range of space that the question covers

I understand you well enough to point out that you have a logical error in your reasoning, and to explicate it to you when you asked for a proof.

6:19 PM

Considering the question I put forward, there could be many pieces of evidence, as it is with many other questions.
* Most of them will be as short as a link to a research paper and a quote from an abstract. This refutes your point A.
* Any of them would quite suit me. This refutes your point B.

You could close a question as unfocused if a truthful answer would necessarily be very long. But it is not the case here.

7:08 PM

@IgnatInsarov My pseudoanswers in the comments (the ones I describe as absurd) are answers to your question that do not suit you.

They are absurd. I can compose any number of absurd answers to any kind of question. You will be the first to vote them down. If you composed an actual answer that would be unacceptable, that would be something.

@BryanKrause Notice though that I have updated my question with a wall of text that does not add anything substantial, but makes an attempt to address the (invalid, as I still maintain) concerns raised in comments directly. I would like to know if you think it improves the question or not.

In particular, it shows that the kind of answers you offered are not suitable due to lack of generality.

7:27 PM

My answers were meant to prove that generality is not possible. Since your edits seem to reiterate rather than resolve the breadth of the question, no, I don't think it is improved.

@BryanKrause You cannot prove impossibility of one by giving examples of the other. But I would appreciate if you can explicate why you think generality is not attainable in this case.

Your question asks for "consistently prefer" with regards to two categories. An example of preference for each category is sufficient evidence that preference is not consistent.

See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

One person can still prefer kittens to bricks more, and snakes to sneakers less strongly than another. Your supposed counterexamples do not even explore the situation in question, so they only maybe reduce to absurd a small part of it, but in no way all the question at once.

7:52 PM

They show that it is absurd to think there is a generalized answer to the question of whether there is preference for animate versus non-animate.

You are clearly able to come up with more examples yourself that make it absurd, so simply stating this in a formal answer would not help you

If there is still something interesting in the question beyond that clear answer "No" then it requires revision to surface that interesting part

Arnon and I have now each given you examples of situations where questions that might be related to yours are actually studied in psychology/neuroscience. You might start there

3 hours later…

10:51 PM

@BryanKrause I see. We have a misunderstanding here and indeed I did not specify clearly what I am asking about. What I am asking is whether any given person consistently diverges from the average in their preference, so that it is predicted by animacy. Not that all people simultaneously prefer one or another on some absolute scale.

What do you think? Does this make things clearer?

It took me a while to realize that this misunderstanding is the reason you put forward these examples in the first place.

@IgnatInsarov Ah yes, that is an entirely different question that I think is certainly an answerable question (even if it is difficult to find an answer due to lack of study)

I think another way to state that revised question would be that you are asking whether "animacy preference" is a dimension on which individuals vary - perhaps it would overlap in some ways with introversion/extroversion but could easily be distinct

Now that you've restated it I can clearly see where my initial misinterpretation of your intent came from, thank you for considering and reviewing and I'm glad you've found it :)

11:07 PM

It is really late for me today and it was a stressful day. How about I tweak my question tomorrow and notify you so that you can help me polish it in this respect?

I will appreciate if you can help me about it tomorrow.

I don't want to make a promise I can't keep, so I will not say that I will help on any particular time frame, but yes definitely if you edit your question I will provide whatever feedback I can to help

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Dec '1918

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