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Clarity comments on Open thread, Oct. 26 - Nov. 01, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (106)
How was the xy problem possibly identified?
It's seems like the kind of abstraction that is impossible from object level analysis of others' questions or one's received answers.
I think it got identified because people saw communication going wrong repeatedly in similar ways, and looked for commonalities. It's also possible it's a sufficiently common mistake that people could look back over their own history and realize they'd made it.
It's simply about having a decent mental model of other people. If you look at the example of a user asking for the last three characters of file names, it's not hard to understand what the user wants to do.
In general a lot of social interaction works in the way that people don't outright state what they want. That makes life difficult for autists but most people can cope.
Maybe this is a deficiency specific to me. I don't know what the user wants in the example you give for instance. Out of curiosity, what is it?
A file is named:
Having the last three character means that you get the type of the file. You can decide whether a file is a mp3 file or whether it isn't. At least that's true with standard file endings. However there's no gurantee that the ending is 3 characters long.
Putting myself in the mind of an answerer confronted with someone's specific question, I can easily imagine myself hitting on the general/abstract problem through sheer exasperation: "AAAARGHHHH. IF YOU'D JUST SAID WHAT YOU REALLY WANTED TO DO IN THE FIRST PLACE, WE WOULDN'T HAVE HAD TO WASTE TIME ON SOMETHING BASICALLY IRRELEVANT".
Of course, this does not help very much with the question of how to identify Q&A failure modes. "Study specific cases of bad Q&A sessions until I'm so annoyed that my mind spontaneously summarizes them together" is probably an unreliable method.