Unhelpful help

If you make things you have little or no prior experience with, sooner or later a web search will bring you to a forum of some sort. Where you will find a prominent post telling you that your question you wanted to ask is stupid..

Much of the time your question will indeed be stupid. Perhaps you are trying to solve a problem in a way that is known not to work. Or you have misunderstood something fundamental and you need a bit of help in the right direction. But sometimes, people who ask silly questions are actually on to something. Sometimes you can actually learn something from them. If nothing else, then because they may force you to re-think what you think you know.

This post came about after having read a bunch of really rubbish threads on a busy forum. In particular a thread where someone had indeed come up with a solution to a problem they were trying to solve, but just needed a bit of help to make it work. The next 5-6 responses categorically claimed variations of “can’t be done”.

Then followed a couple of responses pointing to how two different people had successfully solved the problem in exactly the way the original poster tried to. Turns out, it wasn’t a bad idea at all.

In the aforementioned thread the original poster had an interesting set of constraints they needed to solve for. The approaches suggested by the first 5-6 respondents would have provided sub-optimal results at best – but mostly wouldn’t be usable under the constraints given. They just weren’t good enough listeners to understand the constraints, and not knowledgeable enough to make the approach of the OP work.

When someone asks you to help them solve a problem in a particular way, first try to help them do that. Try to have some respect for the question. You do not necessarily know why people try to do things in a particular way. If you can answer the question, and you know a better solution, by all means, but answer the question first – then offer a different approach.

Showing why something won’t work is a valid approach. But that requires you understand what they are asking. I’ve often sat down to prove someone wrong only to find out that, actually, they may be on the right path after all.

First, try to answer the question as if it were valid. If you can’t then be open to the possibility that you’re the problem.