N. Virgo

I mean de facto. Questions on this site to not generally include all of the points in that answer, though they do often include some of them.

I also note another answer to the same FAQ question, also highly upvoted, and also linked from the question. If you would take that answer as being the rules you'd have immediately reopened my original question and we wouldn't be having this discussion in the first place.

@XanderHenderson I am sorry but de facto that simply isn't true. That post doesn't specify a rule, it only gives some hints and tips. It presents a list of things that can "help the potential responders to your question give you the best help you need", but doesn't say or even imply that any of them are required in order for a question to be acceptable. It's quite a nice post in terms of helping people get the best out of the site, but if you're taking it as somehow specifying the site's rules then it's no wonder your moderation actions have never made the slightest bit of sense to me.

And lest you claim there is actually agreement and that the rules are given by the link you just posted, I note that the content of that link is quite substantially different than what you've said in your answer and the other comment threads here.

This particular SE site doesn't make as big a distinction as most other sites do, and this causes all sorts of problems. Not the least of which is the one we're discussing here - nobody agrees on what "context" is or how much is needed, with the result that questions are constantly closed and reopened and no-one knows what they're allowed to ask and what they're not. This is nota good thing.

The fact that you don't think that distinction exists is exactly the problem I'm trying to highlight. Of course it exists. If it didn't, down votes and close votes would not be two separate features.

@XanderHenderson that post makes a distinction between good vs bad posts on the one hand, and whether a post is within the rules or not on the other. You replied to it with a post titled "How to ask a good question?".

@XanderHenderson I do not think your previous comment is in good faith, given the discussion we've had on this topic so far. I invite you to read my post immediately preceding it.

In other words, close votes and down votes are completely different things that serve completely different purposes. A down vote means a question is bad; a close vote means it breaks the rules. We're discussing close votes, so we should be talking about the rules (what they are and also what they should be) and not about good questions vs. bad ones.

@SarveshRavichandranIyer I guess I feel the same as my comment above. The purpose of closing a question is to prevent answers from being posted until the question is edited so that it meets the standards of the site. For that to make any sense, those standards have to be codified in a reasonably precise way. There need clear criteria such that if the question meets them then it's permitted to remain open. That post has a list of things that make a question good, but that's an almost entirely different thing.

Personally I'm very much on the side of the curators, but as I argue in my answer I don't think it's necessarily the case that more content makes a question better from that perspective. Though that does depend a lot on what exactly "context" means, and if anything this meta discussion suggests that there's very little consensus on what that is. From the comments under my question I don't think the people voting to close it were asking for the same thing you describe in this answer.

I had already reconsidered my attitude at the time of writing the meta question, hence having already deleted the section you refer to. I agree with some of the stuff in this answer, but I really wish the discussion on this meta question would draw a sharper distinction between what makes a good question (which is inherently subjective) and what makes an acceptable question, in the sense that it's not subject to closure (which is hopefully meant to be much less subjective).

@ozge what do you mean by "I used a pseudonym"?

It very often is considered a form of racism or institutional racism when that happens.

btw I'm closing this tab now and I don't know how to get notified when there are new comments, so I guess that's so long from me. (So much for chat being better for discussions.)

I think we will have to agree to disagree on this point, for now. I feel that philosophy doesn't lead to the best outcomes for the site but I don't think I can convince you of that. Perhaps I will post about it on meta but I don't think I'll have the energy any time soon.

Yep, that's why we have a system for having meta discussions and archiving them, so that we can build up a suitable body of case law that resolves as many edge cases as possible.

If a policy fails in 10% of cases, I call that a disaster.

Yes you can. That's what meta is for.

I very strongly disagree that policy should only focus on the common cases.

(on the meta discussion there are some comments here that are relevant to the answer though. I'm happy for all of mine to stay here but some of the others could be moved back to support the discussion there.)

Xander, I agree there for sure. We're only having this discussion because of one of the rare edge cases ("question 1" in the answer under which this was originally a comment thread). That's a case where an answer to question [A] arguably exists under question [2] but I would say judgment should be exercised in not closing [A] as a duplicate of [2].

genuine apologies about that other comment, I shouldn't have posted it and deleted it immediately afterwards

sorry that last sentence was meant to say "what was the point you were making?"

Well ok, but you're replying to a discussion where I was saying (effectively) that if question [A] has a relevant answer below question [2] then some judgment still needs to be taken into account in deciding to close [A] as a duplicate of [2]. Your response was that in that situation, "question [A] should be closed as a duplicate of question [2]." So you can probably see why I thought you meant it always should. If you didn't mean that, then what was the point about moving it.

Your use of "if" suggests you treat it as a rule.

@XanderHenderson I'm not arguing against closing duplicates. I'm arguing against blindly applying your approach of "If question [A] has a relevant answer below question [2], then question [A] should be closed as a duplicate of question [2]". It can simultaneously be true that most duplicate questions should be closed, and also that not all should. Usually [A] should be closed as a duplicate of [2], but sometimes both should be left open and sometimes both should be closed as a duplicate of [iii]

@XanderHenderson from the second: "it's OK for duplicate questions to have duplicate answers. While you could argue that the duplicate questions could all be merged into one question with a "master" set of answers, this is kind of irritating from the perspective of the user looking for an answer. Put yourself in their shoes. Instead of finding 'Duplicate Question Duplicate Answer' They have to deal with finding 'Duplicate Question [closed as duplicate of Question] click here to see answers'"

@XanderHenderson direct quote from the second: "...duplication is not necessarily bad. Quite the contrary -- some duplication is desirable. There’s often benefit to having multiple subtle variants of a question around, as people tend to ask and search using completely different words, and the better our coverage, the better odds people can find the answer they’re looking for."

@XanderHenderson direct quote from the first blog post: "That's why we actually don't mind having several versions of every question, where there are variations in wording or circumstances."

@XanderHenderson well, the SE blog posts both argue against closing questions as duplicates based only on the answers without considering the question text as well. The contradiction between this and what you wrote seems very clear-cut. Additionally, Bill Dubuque's "abstract duplicate" link says that you should consider closing both [A] and [2] as a duplicate of [iii] if [iii] is more general than [A] or [2].

@XanderHenderson your last message is contrary both to Stack Exchange guidelines and to agreed policy on this site. Please check the links in the thread above. If your moderation philosophy is contrary to policy you should consider changing it. I agree with your other comment though.

I gotta say I think both these points are pretty straightforward. Certainly they're subjective and a person could certainly disagree, but I don't think there's much to discuss about them beyond that. I sort of wish I'd left them as comments under the question because of that. It would probably be more constructive to propose alternatives that I think would work better instead. I'll think about that and post another answer if I come up with anything.

I do not understand how "it's not a flag" can be squared with "it goes into a queue". Those are the same thing, and "it goes into a queue" is exactly the thing I'm arguing against. I'm saying AI could productively be used to help empty the queue of duplicates but that it should not be used to populate the queue in the first place, and also that putting things in a queue of duplicates without actually checking for duplicates is a bad idea regardless of AI. I believe I've been pretty clear why I think so.

@BillDubuque oh, that's great - that's the policy I felt I was probably missing when I said it's not easy to search meta, just above. Then the question is whether Martin Brandenberg's suggestion of using AI to flag "suspected duplicates" without actually checking for duplicates would be effective in implementing that specific policy. I suspect it wouldn't.

@BillDubuque nobody's arguing for "rampant duplication". The claim is that the question "what do mathematicians mean when they say a result is probably true?" is a duplicate of a question asking [paraphrased] "does there exist a formal method of proof where you give a carefully chosen list of examples and that suffices to prove the theorem?" The answers to the latter cover some of the ground asked for in the former, but should that by itself suffice to consider them duplicates? The links I posted suggest not.

See also official Stack Exchange blog posts here, here where the issue is discussed, in which it's argued that even differently worded versions of the same question shouldn't always be considered duplicates, if they're likely to be found by people approaching the question in different ways.

It's not easy to search meta so I could be wrong, but it seems like this is the closest thing this site has to an agreed policy on duplicates. While it's not completely clear how to apply it to this example (question 1 above) because it's aimed at more precise questions, it's pretty clear that it does matter how closely the questions are related, not just the answers.

And again, I don't think I'm misinterpreting your idea. You want AI to flag questions as possible duplicates based on your intuition that it can pick up a general vibe of duplicateyness from the question text alone, without looking for duplicates. Then you have the idea, which I think is mistaken, that humans would carefully check those flags before acting on them. That you want to do this is stated very explicitly in your question and it's also literally what you put into your test prompt in this answer.

@MartinBrandenburg could you link to the policy on that please? My understanding is that to be a duplicate, it has to be the same question and have a satisfactory answer, not either or.

Question 1 and its supposed duplicate are asking about similar topics, but if you read what they're asking they clearly aren't the same question at all. I think this illustrates very well the problem with this whole "I've decided this is a duplicate on the basis of vibes, now let's find something to close it as a duplicate of" approach.

@PeterM fair enough, I was just trying to be funny

I bet you're glad you said not to mention "timey-wimey" in your post. It's like the old "don't think of an elephant" trick.

As a useful rule of thumb, this question is approximately equal to "how many tanks could you carefully stack on top of each other before the bottom one gets squished?", assuming the loads are distributed very very evenly. I don't know the answer to that at all, but it's an interesting image.

@user7761803 you could post that as an answer, I'm warming to it

@user405662 one can use use biological metaphors like kin and ancestry, but it sounds weird without a phrase to say in what sense they are kin. Similarly, "cognate" only makes sense metaphorically, because that word usually only refers to words, not food.

"easily repeatable as actual experiment" - I mean I guess it would be easy if you happen to have a superintelligent AI that's capable of learning enough about a person to predict what they will do in a specific situation with a high degree of accuracy. Otherwise, not so much.

@MichaelK I think there's some crosstalk - I was replying to Michael's comment after mine above, rather than yours. Maybe the notification system got confused by their username being a prefix of yours

@Michael you still need to reach orbital speeds to dock with the mothership though. Although maybe the mothership could grab it with a skyhook once it gets above the atmosphere - it's not beyond the bounds of possibility. There would still be major challenges though because a New Shepard sized rocket is still vulnerable and packed with explosive fuel, and couldn't be armoured without making it much heavier, hence needing to be much bigger. It would itself have to be de-orbited along with the drop ship and survive the landing.

If you want to get your dropship back into orbit then you're going to need a massive and vulnerable rocket filled with explosive fuel - just ditching the dropship would probably be the least prohibitively expensive option, considering the alternative.