describe your current situation, the cause of your current situation, and what you want to change.
That's helpful. Do you think it works as a general strategy? For example, academic discussions:
I just read article M on X because it seems like a better understanding of X will help with PURSUIT. How would you recommend that I proceed?
Or should the question/what I want to change be more specific?
My advice is geared towards factual questions, so I'm not sure how helpful it would be for more pure intellectual questions. The most important point I was trying to make was that you should be careful not to pre-bake too much analysis into your question.
Thus, asking "what should I do now to get a high paying job to donate lots of money to charity?" is different from "what should I do now to make the most positive impact on the world?"
Many folks around here will give very similar answers to both of those questions (I probably wouldn...
r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.