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The XY Problem (2014)

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Re: The XY Problem (2014)

#51

Post by nullc »

nullc wrote: post #47

As I recall from prior XYP threads on HN, many comments appear to be XYP baddies brosplaning from an apparent position that other people online are tools that should subserviently respond to their requests, rather than human beings who have their own perspectives and motivations for responding that need to be accommodated when you want them to perform free labor. Indeed, it's always possible that someone with an XYP…

There is another kind of question that sometimes gets an XYP answer even though it wasn't an XYP: Thats where the asker is trying to get help doing something abusive or anti-social.

"How can I conceal the nuclear waste I put in the trash so the garbage men will take it?"

"Have you considered using a hazardous waste drop off site instead?"

It's possible that the asker hasn't considered that their approach is abusive or that they weren't aware of better alternatives... and even if they fully know that they are asking for help in being a jerk it's often preferable to the respondent avoid the confrontation (and escalation) of calling it out. If the asker really is just confused, responding by suggesting solving a different problem is the right answer. If they're really just a jerk no great harm is done to anyone by giving the benefit of doubt.

In this case if they're not confused about what they're asking they may well be confused about the kinds of activities the supporters are willing to aid and abet.

I've seen this most often online in people looking for help spamming, password cracking, hacking computers, deploying censorship, and committing financial fraud.

Maybe the asker is a sociopath or is simply getting paid enough to discount the harm their actions cause others -- but the same won't apply to the people answering their questions.

Re: The XY Problem (2014)

#52

Post by travisjungroth »

arcanemachiner wrote: post #23
resonious wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the whole premise of the "XY" problem seems like it was written up by someone who regulars Stack Overflow. It's pretty frustrating when the highest-upvotes answer to a question is "actually you don't want to do that. do something else instead".

I think this is because people Googling a question often end up at a SO post that answers a slightly different question. But since the keywords blazed a trail to a certain answer, that's the one that gets the upvotes, even though it's not the "correct" answer. This has happened to me many times.

That’s incredibly common and so frustrating. The title will be “How do you delete a column from a dataframe?” and then they’ll include a bunch of super specific code and paragraphs of context. The only answer will be “You actually don’t ever use that column. Just don’t add it in the first place.”, which is not an answer to the title question at all.

Re: The XY Problem (2014)

#53

Post by marajit »

saghm wrote: post #9
relix wrote: post #8

I often encounter the opposite. I would have a complex problem that I can legitimately solve by something reasonably simple yet I don’t posses the expertise on. Asking how to do Y, I need to spend an godawful amount of time wasting to convince people that no, it really is not an XY problem, and could we just focus on the literal problem description, which you could answer in like 3 minutes, instead of you trying to s…

I like to call this the "YZ answer"; I'm asking Y, which is the actual question I have, but someone else tries to convince me that my "real" question is "Z" because they happen to know the answer to that. Tangentially related, but does anyone else besides me have an irrationally strong dislike of the name "XY problem" for this phenomenon? I feel like that name could apply equally well to basically any problem where y…

[dead]

Re: The XY Problem (2014)

#54

Post by marajit »

relix wrote: post #8

I often encounter the opposite. I would have a complex problem that I can legitimately solve by something reasonably simple yet I don’t posses the expertise on. Asking how to do Y, I need to spend an godawful amount of time wasting to convince people that no, it really is not an XY problem, and could we just focus on the literal problem description, which you could answer in like 3 minutes, instead of you trying to s…

im often accused of xy problem. Thing is, I want answers to x AND y. So when they've answered y, i ask x, and that makes them mad

Re: The XY Problem (2014)

#55

Post by ilyt »

resonious wrote: post #16
relix wrote: post #8

I often encounter the opposite. I would have a complex problem that I can legitimately solve by something reasonably simple yet I don’t posses the expertise on. Asking how to do Y, I need to spend an godawful amount of time wasting to convince people that no, it really is not an XY problem, and could we just focus on the literal problem description, which you could answer in like 3 minutes, instead of you trying to s…

Yeah the whole premise of the "XY" problem seems like it was written up by someone who regulars Stack Overflow. It's pretty frustrating when the highest-upvotes answer to a question is "actually you don't want to do that. do something else instead".

It does happen very often when person trying to fix the issue is not an expert in the domain they are tinkering with and it is just some extra needed for their job and not main part of it.

We see it all the time with developers for example:

"I need sudo access to do XYZ"

"Why?"

"Because I can't access this directory"

"Ok, I fixed permissions and put it in CM, test it without sudo"

"Oh, it works, thanks".

But, of course, on SO you don't have that context.

Re: The XY Problem (2014)

#56

Post by circuit10 »

lelanthran wrote: post #37
relix wrote: post #8

I often encounter the opposite. I would have a complex problem that I can legitimately solve by something reasonably simple yet I don’t posses the expertise on. Asking how to do Y, I need to spend an godawful amount of time wasting to convince people that no, it really is not an XY problem, and could we just focus on the literal problem description, which you could answer in like 3 minutes, instead of you trying to s…

Yeah, it's a false positive identification of the XY problem. The audience falsely identifies your problem as an XY problem. This is, IME, due to the audience wanting to refactor the problem into something they can understand. It's worse in JavaScript probl ms, where, due to the actual inability to do something simple like pause the runtime for 5s, the experts all spend tons of effort trying to convince you that ther…

It’s true that with the way JS is designed, you almost never want to freeze up the entire program like that because it doesn’t exactly have threads so it would freeze the whole page or application even if you could. You can get a similar effect using async functions which can pause for a bit while still allowing events to be processed (or do it the old way using callbacks)

So both are true; yes, you almost never want to do that, and the reason you don’t is because is because of JavaScript’s design, which you could argue is a flaw but it does also have advantages

Re: The XY Problem (2014)

#57

Post by plagiarist »

saghm wrote: post #9
relix wrote: post #8

I often encounter the opposite. I would have a complex problem that I can legitimately solve by something reasonably simple yet I don’t posses the expertise on. Asking how to do Y, I need to spend an godawful amount of time wasting to convince people that no, it really is not an XY problem, and could we just focus on the literal problem description, which you could answer in like 3 minutes, instead of you trying to s…

I like to call this the "YZ answer"; I'm asking Y, which is the actual question I have, but someone else tries to convince me that my "real" question is "Z" because they happen to know the answer to that. Tangentially related, but does anyone else besides me have an irrationally strong dislike of the name "XY problem" for this phenomenon? I feel like that name could apply equally well to basically any problem where y…

On Stackoverflow in particular, there is also a ~YY answer. You explain that you specifically don't want Y, then someone tells you you are wrong and to simply use Y.

Re: The XY Problem (2014)

#58

Post by amoe_ »

I'm going to echo what everyone else is saying in this thread -- the inverse problem (YX) is by far the bigger issue with tech questions on the internet in general (mainly SO and IRC). It's common enough that it puts me off asking anything that's not entirely trivial. And yes, ChatGPT mitigates this to a large degree.

However there is definitely a place for pointing out XY problems in a work context, especially if you have to directly deal with the resulting code. You need a lot of shared context to have confidence that you've identified an actual XY problem.

Re: The XY Problem (2014)

#59

Post by _dain_ »

When this gets posted on HN, most of the comments are about how it's more common for answerers to incorrectly suggest that it's an XY problem, when it really isn't.

I think this is because most HN commenters are pretty good at programming already. Chances are, they're asking about more esoteric issues, and have considered the problem in detail before writing the question. So when someone suggests the question is an XY-question, it's probably not.

But the bulk of people asking programming questions are not very skilled. They're newbies. They have weakly developed mental models and taxonomies, they don't have much experience of independent debugging, they don't know how to effectively read documentation, and they haven't developed the meta-cognition needed to recognize that a strategy is probably unsound. And they don't have experience with "technical forum culture" (e.g. give a minimum reproducible example, or even basic things like how to format code properly). Many of them are literally kids or teenagers asking about homework problems, so on top of the lack of programming maturity, there's a lack of everything-maturity.

That big latter group is where most of the XY problems are coming from. I can tell you from answering lots of questions on beginner-friendly forums, 95% of the time someone says "this is an XY problem", they are right.

Re: The XY Problem (2014)

#60

Post by red_trumpet »

Good read. I don't think Example 2 is an instance of XY Problem though, because Obama immediately figured out Angela's problem. Even in the end his first response is still a legitimate way to tackle the problme. It's just too difficult for Angela.
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