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wedrifid comments on Boring Advice Repository - Less Wrong Discussion
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In certain classes of cases*, the best way to find out answers to your questions is to ask them (rather than doing your own investigation).
Not sure if that's borderline punchy.
*For example, when trying to locate something while driving/walking around, when inquiring about poorly documented local activities, when your solution of some problem/research question may have one of many possible flaws (and thus you would need to look up each possible flaw to investigate it, while an expert may be able to spot the flaw immediately), when your quick google search fails to yield clear results, etcetera. Also see this comment.
[The starred things were edited in to improve specificity in response to comments.]
Usually the best way to find out answers to questions is to do a single google search. If present the search result that includes the domain "wikipeida.org" usually gives decent answers quickly.
The parent would be greatly improved by replacing the 'usually' with a more representative frequency ("sometimes") or including a qualifier.
You're right - and I think this is a common failure mode of the population at large, but my most common failure mode is not finding something in a quick google search then failing to just ask someone else who probably knows while either wasting too much time searching or giving up. At the risk of the typical mind fallacy, perhaps this is the most common failure mode of the average LW member as well. If the grandparent could somehow be changed to target people like me better, I think that would improve it the most.
Okay, well, edited it to be a lot more specific at the cost of punchiness, which I suppose was pretty much the point.