@user21820 I don't think it's sampling bias (at least not primarily). In my over 10 years experience in tutoring, at least 50% of my students have problems communicating mathematics.
Nobody doubts that point. I agree that in general students up to undergraduate have difficulty communicating mathematics. But it's not relevant to the issue of PSQs.
Because the criterion for "context" as interpreted by most people against PSQs never did require anything more than some effort shown.
It's very relevant! How can you expect a student to communicate effectively (by writing no less) where their confusion stems from, without having the ability to self-diagnose?
@TheoBendit I also do that! I am perfectly content to leave questions that have even just the slightest bit of effort (including response to inquiries in the comments).
But, I do see questions where the asker has attempted to show their efforts, still being closed because the "effort" was considered too shallow, or not enough. Not to say you do it, but I see it all the time.
I think this anti-cheating culture is really unhealthy for the site, in the sense that I think it will prevent us functioning properly. If we scare away elementary users, we cannot become a resource for people studying at all levels, like we claim to be.
@TheoBendit Why so. So far, I see completely no evidence that being anti-cheating is bad for the site. Physics SE has a much stricter policy revolving around precisely that, and they are doing perfectly fine.
I understand that you don't want this to just becomes a resource for cheaters, but this is kind of what half the users (myself not included) want it to be: a complete resource of mathematical knowledge, in a Q&A format.
I admit, I haven't checked out Physics SE. I wonder if they too struggle to get elementary questions up to their standard?
Also, do they also require students to show their work? Or did they just ban homework? Because these are not the same thing.
@TheoBendit No they simply are harsher than Math SE towards no-effort posts, especially homework. I am not even advocating distinguishing between homework and non-homework. I am merely advocating a more objective stance based on effort to follow the how-to-ask guide, and I adjust that expectation according to the apparent level of the asker.
That's good (and I also do this), but I think you should be even more lenient, forgiving, and patient with beginners. Most are simply not capable of anything other than a PSQ, and some will run from people who probe their knowledge.
I don't think the reputation of MathSE is as good as the answer you linked to suggests.
When I applied for my last tutoring job (basic level 1st year mathematics), and I mentioned that I was a large contributor to MSE, you should have felt the chill in the room!
The assumption seemed to be that I was impatient and demanding of students, and had little tolerance for the weaker students. I had to backpedal hard in order to clear the air.
Sure, you and I are not like that, but I see it as our responsibility to combat this. That's why I agree with Matt about the biggest issue the site is currently facing.
I think that may have misinformed your opinion on how to approach this issue. Just because some people you came into contact with believe a certain thing about this site, doesn't imply anything unless they are actually active on this site.
@TheoBendit By the way, I agree that there is a tension between wanting a complete Q&A resource for mathematics and wanting to maintain some decent standard of quality and/or ethical considerations. Obviously, a resource that has every single question and full answer would help a cheater. That is why I think it is a fair enough restriction to enforce asking guidelines, without discriminating between low and high levels, or distinguishing homework or otherwise.
I do not agree with considering ourselves a world unto our own, because we are human beings and have some responsibility towards the rest of the outside world including for our actions on sites like this one.
user434058
@TheoBendit The HW policy was brought into place just because the folks there didn't want do someone else's homework and spoonfeed the OP without really teaching the OP anything in the process. The policy is good from the quality POV (we don't want barely comprehensible homework dumps on our site) and also from the pedagogical POV (since we intend to teach the underlying concept, which can help the OP to solve all kinds of similar problems).
user434058
5:18 AM
In short, we try to teach them fishing rather than giving them thea fish.
I also agree; I was just challenging your point about cheating being a problem for the site. Remember, I acknowledged how big of a problem it is in general.
user434058
That's why complete solutions to HW questions are often deleted.
@TheoBendit Yes that's why I stated my last point, which is that we are responsible for what we do on this site in relation to how it may affect the outside world.
In fact, on the topic of not being a world unto one's own, I actually think the bigger issue, facing us on the site and mathematics in general, is maths anxiety.
@TheoBendit I do teaching as well, and have been commended by my students. And yet, I have similar approach to teaching in real life as I do here, which includes pushing students to put in their own effort, and rewarding them for that same effort.
The behaviour of certain high profile users, to prejudice askers based on PSQs, is really, really bad for maths anxiety. There's nothing worse than apparently smart and talented people dismissing you as a mathematics student over a line or two of text.
So no, I disagree that the PSQ policy harms pedagogy.
user434058
But for MathSE, it isn't really as similar as PhysicsSE, since physics often involves some basic concepts, knowing which allows you to solve a wide range of problems. Thus it's easier to explain these basics rather than explaining specific problems. But it's not really the same for math,IMO. Math has quite a variety of problems possible. You can't just learn the underlying concepts and expect to solve all the problems belonging to that category.
@TheoBendit Then you need to remove that wrong assumption, because I don't. As I stated clearly above, I do not distinguish between levels and homework status.
@TheoBendit No they simply are harsher than Math SE towards no-effort posts, especially homework. I am not even advocating distinguishing between homework and non-homework. I am merely advocating a more objective stance based on effort to follow the how-to-ask guide, and I adjust that expectation according to the apparent level of the asker.
@TheoBendit I see. It may be a miscommunication. I asked "Are you suggesting that I assume PSQs are from students?" and you answered "I do, yes.". I see that you might have been instead responding to the sentence after my question.
user434058
So, IMO, MathSE rightly has a much kinder approach towards PSQ, and TBH, I often get a bit annoyed and reach for the close button, forgetting that I am on MathSE where neither do I have the close privilege nor are HW questions discouraged :-)
@TheoBendit It's okay. Anyway I want to emphasize that in my approach I am actually more lenient towards questions that appear to be at a lower level, when all other factors are constant.
Because I expect a graduate student to provide a graduate-student level of context. I expect not much from a high-school student.
@JyrkiLahtonen We are a large site for mathematics help, who states that we help people with mathematics. If we call students slightly below average dimwits, and purposely try to push them from the site, this reflects badly not just on us, but the entire mathematics discipline! Some of these students are going to grow up to be politicians, CEOs, or other types of policy makers. We cannot afford to ignore (or worse, flagrantly exacerbate) maths anxiety!
And for me, a big driver for stopping the flood of PSQs is to slow down the associated rep farming. There are exceptions, but for the most part the prolific answerers give the impression of "sitting in an exam" rather than "addressing the difficulty of this particular asker".
@TheoBendit I don't think we should be a large site for math help.
@user21820 Me too. If I were to reform the PSQ policy, I would prefer that the focus be shifted away from askers, and towards answers. Still, be lenient on new answerers, but actively enforce answerers to engage askers with insufficient context in the comments, before answering.
@TheoBendit When there is actual engagement in the comments, I never vote to close. And when a question is rightly closed but the asker is responding in comments and there is no answer, I never vote to delete.
Of course by engagement I don't mean things like "just give me full solution plz", which I have seen hundreds of times.
@JyrkiLahtonen Rep farming is, in my opinion, of low (but not exactly 0) concern. I can't bring myself to care that much about the whole gamified aspect of the site. If it motivates people to help others, then so be it.
@TheoBendit: So maybe you should consider the fact that users against PSQs are not actually blindly against them, but only against the whole package of "bad question plus spoon-feeding answer".
@user21820 Yeah, I guess I should. I definitely think that the perception of our site (and mathematics in general) needs to improve somehow. Talking with you has actually made me feel less down about the site!
@TheoBendit I'm glad to hear that. I'm also glad to have had this conversation with you. It clears up a lot of our mutual misunderstanding of each other's positions.
@user21820 Me too. Also, I just want to say, I think you come across too strongly in the comments under Matt's answers. The "Do you support cheating? Yes or no?" doesn't leave much room for debate.
@TheoBendit Well, I agree I am blunt in my question. It is sort of a reaction to the frequent refusal to actually answer it (the opposite of what you did, which was to immediately answer it). That's what made me in fact very interested to hear your views.
@JyrkiLahtonen Regarding the repository, I think that the formulation of one's own questions is vitally important to the learning of mathematics. A repository of ready-made Q&A helps cheaters more than it does earnest students.
@user21820 True
@JyrkiLahtonen Also, the prepackaged search function is just... the worst. I'd actually like to improve my duplicate-searching ability, because I actually think that's one of the few helpful close reasons. I should practice with Approach0 at some point.
@TheoBendit I agree with that. In fact, I enjoy seeing questions asking how to express something mathematically or to explain intuition behind some mathematics or things like that.
Ugh, it's times like this that I wish I could run for moderator. I have plenty of ideas, and I think my values are not strongly represented in the current mod team, but certain factors in my life mean that I would not be a good candidate.
@JyrkiLahtonen Full repository helping cheaters is why I personally feel very uncomfortable with just having Q&A and nothing else. It's like having a big exam answer sheet online. I hope this isn't too tangential, but I feel the following may help explain my strong feelings concerning cheating:
To tell you the truth, it makes me wince when questions from a layman get closed as unclear. Some users demand of clarity is unrealistic. The absolutely unambiguously formulated math questions largely are from textbooks (or well educated mathematicians). Real life questions are not like that.
@JyrkiLahtonen I always had a hope that MSE would end up being a place where non-math people could ask math questions that come up in real life. I have on many occasions helped my dad with some simple geometry problems when he wanted to build something and needed to work out the correct measurements for example.
2
But it just does not occur to people on the outside to ask such questions, and I don't think they would be well-received now.
(Similarly, either my wife or I often help my mother-in-law to work out how to take in her knitting in the most even manner, which is essentially a modulo problem)
@user1729: Hi. Concerning Matt's nomination, my currently pending question is simply whether he supports cheating or not, and I may or may not have further questions depending on his answer. Until he answers, I won't speculate, and statistics regarding cheating are not relevant to my question posed to him.
However, clear evidence of rampant cheating can be easily dug up. Of all the posts I vote to close, about half of them are obviously homework questions with no effort whatsoever. At the same time, we know that most students (we're not talking about top students or students in top universities here) will not bother trying to solve homework problems unless it will contribute to their final grade. So it is reasonable to guess that likely most of these are in fact cheating according to my criteria.
I'm not saying they all are cheating.
Neither do I know how to rigorously identify them, unless they admit it or in cases of public online contests (which is not homework and is a separate source of cheating).
But, I do know how to objectively identify no-effort posts.
And, coupled with the observation that most actual cheaters do not put in effort (both in real life and online), this approach of forbidding PSQs will in fact prevent most of the currently existing cheating attempts on Math SE.
As for details of TheoBendit's and my opinions on PSQs and other matters, please read the above transcript.
@user21820 So your "clear evidence" is mostly surmise? Although I do not think PSQs are acceptable, I also do not think it is helpful to muddy the water with claims of "clear evidence" like this.
@user1729 There is no such thing as 100% proof in many aspects of human society. About 0.1% to 1% of posts I close have explicit evidence of cheating, and that can be considered almost sure proof. But we're talking about the estimated impact on actual cheaters, not just the tiny subset of provable cheaters.
@user21820 I think it would be helpful if you could compile this evidence so that, as I said, people could view it for themselves and make an informed decision. (I feel that "contest" and "assessed" questions should be treated separately, as although both are cheating they are spotted in different ways and have different outcomes, etc.)
@user1729 Can you give me an idea of how much evidence you would like to have? Preferably, don't ask me to go through thousands of my closures. =)
For example, is it not clear that this is a homework problem? What level of certainty do you want?
How about this and this? All taken from the most recent closures.
I can't find the posts I personally closed with explicit admittance that it was homework (as I said it's only a small percentage), and if you want to disregard contest questions then obviously it gets harder to find PSQs with solid proof of cheating.
I don't go and remember or record such posts. I just close in disgust and move on, and if it gets deleted then it will no longer be searchable via google after a while.
These are simply PSQ, which we all know exist. They are not "evidence of cheating". The whole point of my asking for evidence is that we don't do the whole "what I say is correct because I have seen it happen" thing. It's just another example of bad statistics.
@TobiasKildetoft You're wrong about that. Posts based on real life would be well received. They just have to be upfront about their motivations, and such questions usually are. If you are active on the site enough, you would have seen many such questions, even if they are not the norm because homework PSQs have flooded the site.
@user1729 I didn't say they are evidence of cheating. Read my argument carefully.
@user21820 I read your argument carefully earlier, and as I said at the time it is mostly surmise. In particular, it has the basic assumption that cheating is an issue in mathematics (backed up by some generic links).
As I said originally, I have very rarely seen mathematics student put in a position to cheat, which illustrates my problem with your surmising-argument: it is clouded by your experience. If I was to make the same argument I would come to a different conclusion: noone cheats, because seriously who gives take home assessments?!?
@user21820 I have been plenty active on this site to know what sort of questions get asked. And while you might be correct that they could be well-received with the correct context, they usually would not have precisely the right sort of context for enough people with the result that they end up not well-received
@user1729: Cheating is not isolated to tests. It includes cheating on homework and cheating on contests as well. And arguing that we shouldn't care because it's based on perception is failing to actually address the issue of cheating. We do have clear evidence of rampant cheating on this site, and it doesn't matter whether it comes from the universities you have visited or not. By the way, I don't consider getting help on homework to be cheating, but I do consider dumping graded homework here to get it done by other people to be cheating. — user218203 hours ago
@TobiasKildetoft Give me an example. So far those I have seen are generally all very well accepted, usually getting far more upvotes than other good questions.
@user1729: You should read the conversation TheoBendit and I had in the linked chat-room, before coming to any conclusions about what both of us think. Terse comments aren't conducive for expressing opinions clearly. Concerning graded homework, it tends to be 100 to 1000 times as frequent as real take-home tests. Some people choose to ignore those, but I don't because although each graded homework may contribute to only a small fraction of the overall grade, a cheater can simply dump every homework here and hence get a large fraction of the grade for free. I'll continue in the chat-room. — user218202 hours ago
Sorry my response is broken up.
@TobiasKildetoft They do. I've seen about 5 to 10 this year alone that even reached the HNQ. And I haven't even been looking.
That's why I want to see examples if you have any of what you consider good real-life-based questions that are not well-received.
And as I always say, if a question is closed and you think it was a good one (no matter how low level), post a reopen request in CURED and it will be much faster reopened than usual.
@user1729 I have seen one clear case of cheating on a homework assignment here, where I knew it because I was the person who had set the assignment, and it was copied verbatim in the question.
And I only caught that one because I happened to notice it in the brief window between an answer being given and the question being deleted by the OP (it was fun trying to spot the nervous students when I announced how unacceptable that was as well as the fact that I was in fact able to see deleted questions)
And that reminds me. I too found a cheating attempt of the same type when I was just a teaching assistant. I can't recall what happened to it though. Too many years ago.
@user21820 Regarding one of your examples, it could be closed as a duplicate. This shows that the answer could be found anyway, even on the site. Why not close it as a duplicate then?
@user21820 So you think the answer to this question should not be on the site because someone might be cheating with it, unless you find one version of the question that has sufficient "context" for you to believe it isn't cheating?
@MattSamuel The question should not be on the site if it is a PSQ. It does not matter whether there is an answer or not. What I said about cheating is merely that this policy would eliminate a large fraction of cheating attempts that are currently being allowed on Math SE.
And as a member of the wider mathematical community and human society, I believe we have a responsibility to make policies that encourage integrity.
@user21820 But you seem to be emphasizing that this is mostly about cheating, when if the latter question was initially about cheating the cheater is long gone, so why delete it? The answer is useful content.
@user1729 Which background are you in? I was instructors in top public school in Canada and US, and students cheat all the time, take home or not. I can only imagine the situation to be worse in lower tier school. And we give take home assessments all the time too (in the form of HW)
@TobiasKildetoft, @user21820 This is my favorite example of what happens to a question from a "layman". Admittedly few laymen could write down a parametrization of that curve :-). It may be difficult to see it now because the relevant comments are deleted, but in those comments the asker described a paintmixing "machine" he had made, and asked about the speed of the paddle.
I don't know if the asker was sincere or not. Anyway, people were confused by the idiosyncratic notation and voted to close. That question has shaped my views of what are ok questions. Users in (or barely out of) college wanted to see those well formed unambiguous questions, but such are actually more likely to be homework question. I might allow most questions that are obviously not homework.
About PSQs, more than anything else it's the rampant repfarming that pisses me off.
The cheating aspect is for real in the English speaking countries (where most of them come from). I don't see my students asking homework help here simply because the ones who need the help the most are unlikely to be able to write their questions in English. Anyway, I tend to vote to close those as a courtesy to the colleagues who asked those questions.
And, as I accuse the answering machines for simply "turning the crank" as opposed to "teaching the asker how to fish", me answering that question is a bit ironic :-)
@MattSamuel Having those questions around gives the site a bad reputation. And not deleting the thread rewards the rep farmers. It may be a stretch, but on many a day I equate anti-deletionism with protecting the rep farmers (most of whom cannot be arsed to check for duplicates).
@JyrkiLahtonen Not sure if you noticed, but I personally count context no matter whether it is in the question or in the comments, for new askers. Long-time askers should learn to put context into the question, and should only be penalized if they refuse to do so. Also, that question was rightly closed as "needs details or clarity". This is different from closure for "no-effort", and such posts when clarified mostly get reopened readily.
Ok. Thanks for the clarification @user21820. A concern here may be a layperson unable to clarify- does not apply to the question I linked to. May be it was a bad example.
@JyrkiLahtonen If the asker engages in comments, it's counted as context for me. One can gently advice the asker to summarize and move that into the question itself, as I have done so many times before. In some cases I even do the move myself.
But once someone posts a full solution, all interaction from the asker is already tainted by the presence of the solution. In most cases, the asker just vanishes with the solution in hand and never bothers to respond to any comments.
@MattSamuel As adequately explained by many people many times, the SE system rewards the people who answer and protect PSQs, and if the thread is not removed they will continue to feed the PSQ producers full answers, which in turn will feed the cheaters who flock to Math SE.
If we care about our ethical obligations to the wider community, we need to think very carefully about the consequences of what might appear to be just small policies internal to Math SE. Don't forget the many lies and cheats that contributed a significant part to the scale and severity of this ongoing pandemic. Perhaps some think that laziness in mathematics will not have such effects. I don't think so.
I am in the middle of travel, and don't have a lot of time to interact, but I am going to leave the following here:
@user21820 I don't think that askers should be penalized for asking low quality questions alone; I agree that low quality plus an unwillingness to interact is a problem.
However, I also think that we need to help new users understand that closure is not a penalty (or, at the very least, it not meant to penalize the asker).
Closure is an opportunity for the asker to make their thoughts clear and to improve their question, while preventing others from providing answers which might be wrong.
As I see it, the ideal practice should be [Question posted] -> [Question closed, with comments] -> [Interaction] -> [Question edited] -> [Question reopened].
Regarding context in comments: comments are intentionally ephemeral, so extra context does need to be put into the question, eventually. But the original asker doesn't need to be the one to do that.
(At least, not necessarily).
I still rather believe that questions from new askers should be posted "closed" be default. "You are new to our site. Welcome! In order to help you acclimate to our practices, your question has been automatically closed, pending review."
Worse still, there will be robopeners of new users' questions.
Maybe I shouldn't try to make puns here. For clarity sake, I meant robo-openers (users who just robotically click "open" without checking if it is follows site guidelines).
@ArcticChar My point was not that students don't cheat, but rather that people's perception of cheating - both its prevalence and how damaging it is - is biased by their background. It seems to me that the loud noise about cheating is based around these biased perceptions, rather than on facts.
@user1729 So people who cheat old folks out of their life-long savings are wrongly perceived? That they don't do anything wrong, actually, save that they are being misperceived?
@user1729 Hogwash. Cheating is deceit. And there is no nice way to paint it.
Cheating in sports, is okay too, @user1729, I take it you'd argue? Those who break rules are just misperceived, so everyone should always be allowed to break any and all rules everywhere and anywhere??
@user1729 And I guess, according to your logic, cheating in presidential elections, or elections of any kind, when people object, they are merely objecting because they misperceive the "situation"?
@amWhy I am not claiming that cheating is not bad. Rather, we have to balance the effects of cheating with the effects of going after cheaters. If most people who use this site are cheaters then sure, go after them. But if only a negligible number of questions are people cheating but many, many more questions are closed because we are worried about cheaters then the negative effects outweigh the benefits.
@user1729 I'd like to see evidence about whether cheating on this site ought to be a concern. You're just speculating, and that can be dangerous in the hands of the naive.
@user1729 I'm just saying it is just as likely that it is you and yours who misperceive, by underestimating, the damage done by cheating on this site. Rhetoric is easy to produce, @user1729. Making substantive arguments is a challenge I'd suggest you undertake, instead of posing hypotheses only.
@amWhy Without any data, we are all naive. We have nothing concrete to inform us, apart from our own experiences and those of people we talk to. On the one hand, people say that people cheat. On the other hand, people say that people don't ask questions here because we are too harsh to new users.
@user1729 Who is a "new user", though? What kind of users do we want to include? If someone posts a problem straight out of their textbook and is then never comes back to the site because their question was poorly received, I don't see this as a loss to the community.
@user1729 The merits of those claims depend on the folks making them. If a user comes here to have their homework done for them, I'm happy to know they go on to say that they won't ask questions here because users are "too harsh on them" (i.e., They wouldn't do my homework for me!!!)
@user21820 has repeatedly pointed out that they are quiet lenient towards askers who stick around to answer questions in the comments. I, also, try to help askers who respond. I think that most of the community is happy to help askers who make an effort.
However, in my experience, most "new users" don't make that effort.
Or, worse, they post a question, and before I can post a comment asking for additional details, or complete a search for a duplicate, three or four FGITWs will have posted answers.
At that point, the asker has no incentive to improve their question, and the overall quality of the site declines.
@user1729 I can provide proof of cheating easily for contest cheats. But you said quite early that you want to distinguish the two, thus effectively making it difficult to provide proof, because normal people do not meticulously record every cheater and evidence they come across just so that they can answer queries like yours. It's not that you're not entitled to ask for evidence, but consider the difficulty in obtaining 100% rigorous evidence before expecting others to give it.
I am just speaking for my personal experience. My class (ODE aka Cal4) this spring, like all the others, assigns take home midterms/exams. Of course I know that MSE opens a great opportunity for cheating, so I monitor that very closely. Out of my surprise, I cannot find any cheating attempt here in MSE (A lot of them go to Chegg).
I don't think cheating is very serious in MSE, but that's precisely because we have a strict policy on asking questions. Without that I imagine I would find a lot more cheating attempt for my classes.
@ArcticChar It's difficult to find cheating attempts for your own class because you can't be monitoring day in and day out. To estimate the true rate of cheating for that kind of course, you'd have to multiply that roughly by the number of similar courses across the world divided by the number that you teach. And indeed, if we relax the question standard on Math SE, we will become like Yahoo Answers (where I saw lots of direct cheating from classmates back in school) and r/cheatatmathhomework.
I'm taking my 8th course since the Covid-19 shutdown of universities has forced everyone to come home. When looking up stuff, I have inevitably come across almost all the questions from psets, quizzes, tests, etc posted to Chegg, where I presume other students are cheating. I am 100% sure these a...
@amWhy This attitude is part of what concerns me, and it's shockingly common. How/why are we profiling users like this? You don't know, based on a PSQ or 3, whether a person is just looking for a ready-made solution; they could easily just be looking for help. We should be treating all users with a strong presumption that they're here to learn, even when they post a PSQ.
If we tell users forcefully that the reason we're not answering is because we don't want to do their homework, and imply that their reaching out for help is shameful/unethical, then what chance do you think they have of seeking out the help they desperately need?
@TheoBendit I never claimed anything of the sort. But you cannot deny that there are users who come here to get others to do their homework for them. "Prove xyz and show all the steps too."
@amWhy I don't deny it, I just don't think it's clear when it happens. Even "show all the steps" appears in questions, so its appearance in PSQs isn't necessarily indicative of a will to cheat.
@TheoBendit We can instead, and typically do, ask such users to add context and details, and point them to the meta post "How to ask a good question". If they get offended by that, all I can say is "bye bye".
@TheoBendit I cannot bring up the actual evidence right now (because as said before I don't save such silly stuff), but I have seen more than a few times users who explicitly say things like "if you don't want to give me a full solution then don't comment".
@amWhy I've seen you greet new users with PSQs. The phrase "This is not a do-my-homework-for-me site" (or something similar) has appeared more than once.
My point is, I don't think you're particularly careful about offending them.
@TheoBendit There are many new users who come here thinking we are all paid here to answer anything they demand. So some users do need to be aware that this is in fact not a do-my-homework-for-me site. And rep hunters need to restrain themselves, too.
@user21820 I think it happened once, maybe twice to me? Maybe these askers felt harassed, and didn't want to engage with the Meta question, the MathJax tutorial, and all the people demanding to see their failed attempts (which they feel ashamed about)?
@TheoBendit Well. There are a million logically consistent explanations for the way things are, but I propose that we should select the most likely few explanations and act based on those. I have interacted with so many students that it is clear to me (whether people doubt or not) what kind of attitudes yield what kind of responses and behaviour.
And, of course, there are even clearer instances such as "please give me full solution I only have 3 hours left!!!".
@amWhy Perhaps a few, sure. I think the more common impression that kind of approach gives is "You need to deal with your own homework problems; stop bothering us about it!".
@TheoBendit Too bad for them. You see, @Theo, you are demanding that users here bend over backwards to accommodate users every wish. Respect is mutual. You seem to forgive askers their trespasses, but expect perfection on the part of how users here interact with them. All human interactions, are only successful, when there is mutual investment. Stop demanding users here to help, no matter the rudeness of many askers who come here expecting us to follow their demands.
@TheoBendit I've never said that, and you are twisting my words. Since you cannot seem to honestly engage in discussion, I'm not going to engage your inuendos and mis-perceptions any further.
@amWhy It's not about what you said, it's about how these comments tend to be interpreted, by people other than me. I know you don't mean anything nasty or discouraging by them. It's just that profiling the motivations of users based on flawed measures, like posting PSQs and being unresponsive in comments, can cause miscommunications like this.
In fact, @Theo I respect askers who come here, because I trust they can help us help them, whereas you don't even believe they have the capacity to do that. Pity undermines self-agency. Feeling sorry others may make you feel superior, but it doesn't help those you pity gain agency, and trust in their capacity to do math; you only undermine that. And hence the greatest harm comes from doubting others capacity to think for themselves. It is not I who judges, but the likes of you, because you
treat new users as incapable of doing anything different than when they first post. That's insulting to them.
@TheoBendit How do you know this? Conjecture? You are the one who undermines those users by treating them like children. Folks will behave like children when they are treated as such.
@TheoBendit Ditto for me, and I don't draw the same conclusions you do. Stop treating people like children, and they will start growing up, with support, but not coddling.
@amWhy They're learning. Mathematically, they are children. Many of them require patience and leniency. Mix in maths anxiety, and they also need a safe space to actually gain some confidence. And while you talk about having respect and faith that your comments will cause positive growth, your comments like "Too bad for them" and "I'm happy to know they won't ask questions here" suggest something different.
@TheoBendit You insult them, and fail to recognize what they are capable. If a user does not contribute anything other than a PSQ, and demands a full solution, and gets irate if asked to clarify, then they are not ready to be helped. Handing them a solution will just reinforce the behavior that got them the solution. Cite the exercise, demand a full solution, and get irate if asked anything whatsoever. I'm done here, @Theo, because I don't think you know anything with respect to encouraging...
...to engage. You simply want to coddle, because you feel superior and pity those you see as inferior, and coming from that stance, you are only going to deepen the divide you already imagine.
You're approach is patronizing, condescending, and reinforces notions that only a few are born intelligent, and must pity their stupid brethren. I don't see the divide that way, myself. Who is really insulting users asking PSQ's? Me, who trusts users to meet us even one tenth of the way, or you, who feel pity for them and feel the need to carry them, so they never learn to walk themselves?
@amWhy I don't think you actually understand what I'm advocating here. I'm saying that we should treat the askers with respect, even when we're pretty sure that they're trying to cheat. We should never make a new user feel bad for asking a poor quality question. This isn't the same thing as answering them, or not encouraging them to improve their question. It's not (just) the irate people I'm concerned about, but the people who are shamed into silently disappearing.
Regarding the "cheating" issue user21820 repeatedly raise in both meta and various chat rooms, I do not see any evidence of rampant cheating, which is a false accusation of the site. Yes, you see users posted ongoing contest problems. But so far, the number of such posts is rather small, and we do have contest problem policy posted in meta. To be on-topic of this room, I quote Matt's comment in meta:
@user21820 No, I do not support cheating. You should see my responses to Asaf Karagila's questions on my nomination. I think we should not assume cheating with no proof, but I think if there is proof we should shut down the cheating. I don't think we should automatically assume that a PSQ is cheating. — Matt Samuel8 hours ago
@T.S You haven't been around long enough to know one way or another. And you have a habit of citing only others who support your positions. It is clear to those you oppose and those you support that you have been clearly biased from the get go.
I'm not here to address only opinions. Then it becomes just a war of words, because the opinionated don't know how to argue, and those who want to give rational arguments are met only with more opinions. Respectfully yours, @Theo and @T.S
As opposed to all those well-researched verifiable facts you posted about my secret desire to clip the wings of new users just to maintain a sense of superiority, @amWhy?
@amWhy I do give them guidance, and I try to be careful not to make it more discouraging than it needs to be. I'm still in favour of giving guidance, I'm just not in favour of profiling new users based on extremely limited interaction with the site, and presuming that they are here to learn, until that presumption is well and truly smashed (4 or 5 questions down the line, maybe).
Hi all, I saw that something got flagged from this room. I'm not familiar with the site issues that you're debating (I'm a mathematician and an SE moderator, but not a Maths.SE user), but please try to keep it civil and preferably on-topic.
@TheoBendit While I agree with treating askers with respect by default, I am of the opinion that we are not obliged to give askers more than they give in their question and comments even if our goal is to guide them in mathematics. I treat them in exactly the same way as students who come to office hours. A student who goes into the office and just says "Solve XYZ equation. Plz give me full solution." deserves what?
@amWhy and @TheoBendit, it seems like neither of you are election candidates - does this debate about your different approaches to site moderation need to be here, or could you agree to disagree and move on?
@user21820 I think you are not obliged to give any help on this site to any question you don't want to. If you think a question is not deserving of your time, then walk away. If you want to engage with the asker, then please be encouraging.
@amWhy I have been in the whole SE network long enough to know what is going on. I cited the message because it is relevant to the room and in order to be civil, one should talk base one facts not imaginary assumptions.
@Randal'Thor The discussion here is largely relevant to the upcoming election, but as you can see I ended my discussion with a wave. Theo began long before me, and continues since.
@TheoBendit If a student keeps getting his friend/uncle professor to give full solutions, rather than approach you for actual mathematical guidance, do you just sit back and close both eyes?
@Randal'Thor That seems fair. I do want to point out that the treatment of new users (and whether it is a problem or not) is indeed one of the points that one of the candidates (Matt Samuel) is running on. But I'll end my contribution to the argument here (and I did start it, unfortunately).
@T.S Then encourage your buddy Theo to stick with facts, and not imaginary assumptions. You can't demand anything from one side, that you aren't willing to expect for the other side.
Treatment of new users can definitely be a good topic to discuss during an election, but please try not to make it personal, especially about non-candidates.
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Of all people I'd expect mathematicians to be objective ;-)
@Randal'Thor I am not an election candidate either. However, this issue is a very important one for the election candidates to address (in fact it is one of the topics they have to talk about), and I do think people need to discuss it to better understand the consequences of their vote.
As I said above, and don't expect you to have seen it:
If we care about our ethical obligations to the wider community, we need to think very carefully about the consequences of what might appear to be just small policies internal to Math SE. Don't forget the many lies and cheats that contributed a significant part to the scale and severity of this ongoing pandemic. Perhaps some think that laziness in mathematics will not have such effects. I don't think so.
@user21820 I don't think there's anything wrong with flagging something like that, if I notice a consistent trend that's suspicious. The nice thing is that this is not something the asker needs to know about. I trust the moderation team not to leap to unfounded conclusions about the asker and their motivation more than I trust the average user.
@TheoBendit Flagging does very little. Cheaters just create new anonymous accounts to circumvent question bans. You cannot wait around until there is a problem to deal with it. It will be too big and too late.
@user21820 Yeah, I understand this is one of the major issues of debate on Maths SE in general. Fruitful discussion, and reasons for taking this or that approach, are great; just try to keep it objective and not personal :-)
Moreover, flagging for moderator attention should not be the way to handle everyday closure/deletion of PSQs! The few of them cannot handle the whole lot of junk. That's what community moderation is supposed to be for.
@user21820 Whereas a withering comment from a non-moderator will rid us of this particularly resilient form of cheater more effectively than being personally dressed down by a moderator? Moderators have tools for identifying sockpuppet accounts, so I think it might be more effective than you think.
@TheoBendit Not at all. Have you heard of meat-puppets? I have actually seen many instances where different accounts apparently not sockpuppets (according to the moderators) repost the same identical question, clearly their homework.
@Theo Please give it up here. You keep making claims that are not supported by the evidence, and it gets tiring. Anyway, @Theo, you've sort of shown you just like to be a contrarian. If that's how you get your fun, then feel free to have fun, but I don't engage with insincere contrarians.
@user21820 I see that all the time too. I have no issue with closing them as duplicates. Indeed, I'm relatively in favour of closing questions as duplicates (when there's no added dimension to the question).
@TheoBendit And come on, moderators do not do such dressing down. They are rather conservative with their judgements (lest people criticize them to no end).
@user21820 If they weren't, I wouldn't trust them more than average user to judge these users. I think they should be conservative. I think we all should be conservative when judging our fellow users.
@Randal'Thor Let me just say that I have a pretty good idea of how much they do or do not do. There are users who have been suspended for low quality contributions, having posted hundreds of PSQs and almost nothing else, and yet after their suspension they continue posting PSQs but nothing is done about them.
@user21820 Do you have an example on hand of a user like this? I personally haven't seen such a user, but I haven't gone looking, so there's no telling what I've missed!
@TheoBendit That user's most recent PSQ says "I could not think of any way.". Suspension history can be confirmed by the moderators, though they may not divulge to you. But I saw with my own eyes what I stated.
5k+ rep earned from almost only PSQs. And it's not that they cannot ask good question. They did ask a small handful of good questions, but found that Math SE rewards PSQs with full answers much of the time so they never bothered to write good questions.
@user21820 Wow, that's weirdly impressive. From my perspective, if a user goes north of about 200 rep, I push a fair bit harder for context when I engage them in comments. Anyway, I'm off to bed.
@user1729 I would have to see examples to comment, but I've stated that I don't necessarily see what others would call "PSQs" as a problem. I don't think users should have to prove that they attempted the problem or necessarily give any other explanation if the problem is clear.
@MattSamuel Okay, thanks. Also, I asked in a comment to your questionnaire: How do you think the pandemic, and the massive shift to online learning and take-home assessments, affects your stance here. It is reasonable to assume that there will be a surge in people using this site to cheat, so how would you deal with this (if at all)?
@XanderHenderson I was hesitant to edit somebody's else questionnaire - let me mention here instead that there is probably a typo: "their questioned answered". (I suppose you wanted to say "their question" or "their questions".)
@user1729 I haven't looked at statistics showing there is increased usage, but it would not surprise me. And I suppose it would be logical that with more online assignments it would be easier to copy and paste problems here. With regard to cheating, I don't think my policy would change; we'd keep our eyes and ears open and crack down on cheating if there is proof.
@T.S I don't quite understand this call for "proof". This is not a court of law. Would you also insist that baseball umpires should be able to give "proof" to each and every call they make? The game would slow down to a crawl. Just make calls as you see them when you see the action live. There will be reviews by others. We need to make real time decisions based on some heuristics, not proofs beyond reasonable doubt.
But, we should be more careful (including yours truly) not to make calls on a person. Their posts on this site OTOH.
@MattSamuel a main issue is that "the problem is clear" is not a binary notion. Clear to whom? To somebody? To everybody? Given what effort? (I mean effort on the part of the reader. )
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Moreover an issue with so-called PSQs is that the question is only inferred. The default inference being. "Please provide the answer that is likely expected in the context in which such a problem is commonly posed."
@quid Yeah, but you can be consistent when taking action: not just against a few, but against anyone who behaves similarly. You can't be so selective in who you decide to punish. Anyone who does the crime should do the time.
@amWhy we do try to be evenhanded. Sometimes we might fail. I frequently get accused of it. From opposing sides. Sometimes it seems everyone agrees I favor the "other" side.
@quid I haven't seen that; if anything, some are coddled by mods, others become favorite targets of mods. But that's likely due to the rate of flagging which targets particular users. Just as downvotes and close votes can target users, so can flags be abused in this manner. And mods enable that abuse of flags.
@quid All you have to look at, is what you've acted upon. And in that case, you've acted excessively against me. Rarely is there parity in mods actions on various "sites".
@quid Given my suspensions, I think others' claims I'm coddled don't hold water. But given the absence of suspensions of problematic users, as I see them, I think I have a valid claim to suggest mods coddle the users that never get sanctioned.
@quid And don't even try to argue that my violations have been worse than the many users' violations you've never sanctioned. Anyway, this is not going anywhere, so best we end this now.
