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Evan_Gaensbauer comments on Stupid Questions (10/27/2014) - Less Wrong Discussion

15 Post author: drethelin 27 October 2014 09:27PM

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Comment author: Evan_Gaensbauer 28 October 2014 08:09:13AM 15 points [-]

[Meta]

While writing my recent post, I was thinking that it would be great if there was a summary of all the best answers received from widely shared 'stupid questions' in Stupid Questions Threads. I'd call this post 'The Best Answers to Stupid Questions', or 'Frequently Asked Stupid Questions, and Answers', and it would be analogous to how NancyLeibovitz summarized conclusions on procedural knowledge gaps. I might include responses from this thread in such a post. I have some questions about how I/we might gauge the best (answers to) stupid questions, aside from upvotes, among others. Would I only include questions/answers that seemed most generalizable?

Also, if I wrote this, how much should I care about privacy? I notice I don't actually have a common sense in this regard, so I'm asking honestly.

  • If someone has already posed a question in a Stupid Questions thread using their account, is it fair to assume that it's fine to share it more widely by profiling it specifically in a post? Is this a non-issue?

  • If it's not fair to assume so, how should I go about seeking consent to include the Q/A in the post? What's reasonable?

Comment author: roystgnr 28 October 2014 09:08:03PM 5 points [-]

The phrase "Non-Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions" seems to be nearly unique despite being a straightforward perturbation of a pop culture reference.

Comment author: zedzed 28 October 2014 09:29:43AM 5 points [-]

I'd call it "Smart Answers to Stupid Questions Repository".

To your privacy concern, I'd say it's a non-issue. If you post in a thread like this, the assumption is that you're putting your post out in the open for The Entire World to read, link to, quote, rebut, etcetera (largely because this is, in fact, the case.)

Comment author: ChristianKl 29 October 2014 11:33:03AM 1 point [-]

Privacy can sometimes be a tricky issue. I don't think this is here a problem as long as you stay within LW.

As far as copyright goes content on LW get's licensed under a Creative Commons license.