are medical questions above chatfilter?

April 12, 2009 5:58 PM

Just curious and trying to understand the norms here: would this ask me medical question be chatfilter if instead of asking for reader's reactions to a given medication, it had asked for something else, say, "your experience with going to Stanford"?
posted by peter_meta_kbd to etiquette/policy at 5:58 PM (79 comments total)

No.

Now that that's done, can we talk about waffles? I like mine with strawberries and maple syrup.
posted by grouse at 6:09 PM on April 12

Would this MeTa make any sense if it were completely different?
posted by Dumsnill at 6:10 PM on April 12

I'm not a real big fan of waffles. I went to my parents' for dinner tonight and a miracle happened: my Mom made more deviled eggs than I could eat.
posted by marxchivist at 6:11 PM on April 12

well, people at Stanford are nicer than they're given credit for, and although there's really a ton of pressure academically, I think there would have a lot of peer support. I eventually chose Carnage Mellon. I simply couldn't afford Standford, and Carnage was closer to home.
posted by boo_radley at 6:12 PM on April 12

Oh, there was still a ton of academic pressure at Carnage Mellon so that might influence you one way or the other.
posted by boo_radley at 6:13 PM on April 12

Speaking strictly from AskMe observation:

"Going to Stanford" might be chatfilter because the answers could range from "great pizza" to "avoid Dr. Smith in the physics department" to "it's full of fuckwads avoid it!!!11! "Those aren't the breadth of answers you'd expect for a question about medication side effects. "Your experience with parking at Stanford" might be a less chatfiltery question.

Also, I've heard really mixed things about adverse effects to Stanford, for what it's worth.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 6:15 PM on April 12

No. Um, what?

Hold on. Does this have something to do with the chatfilter entry in the FAQ?

This isn't a case where everyone's answer is equally valid, because only people with experience taking mirtazapine would have a valid answer. Ditto your Stanford example. Similarly, if someone writes in asking if anyone has any experience using a Nikon D90, I can answer that, because I have that camera, but if someone writes in asking about a Canon 50D, then I can't.

All answers are not equally valid (not everyone is taking mirtazapine). The poster can't answer his/her own question (he/she has just been prescribed it). There is a problem to be solved (how to deal with taking mirtazapine). It's not hypothetical. It's not rhetorical. It's not a rant. So it's not chatfilter. (For whatever my opinion's worth.)
posted by mcwetboy at 6:19 PM on April 12

One of my best friends is at Stanford. I really should go visit him at some point, but it's like 6600 kms. Incidentally, google maps thinks that Newfoundland-Palo Alto can be done in slightly less than 3 days. I really wish they would stop measuring time as km/100 hours.
posted by Lemurrhea at 6:23 PM on April 12

thank you mcwetboy for taking the time to respond intelligently.
posted by peter_meta_kbd at 6:24 PM on April 12

"Carnage Mellon" would be a decent band name, but I'm not sure I'd want to go to school there.
posted by RogerB at 6:25 PM on April 12 [2 favorites]

everybody else, GFAR
posted by peter_meta_kbd at 6:27 PM on April 12

Experiential queries aren't a problem in principle, no, whether it's a medication or a specific school environment or any number of other things.

There's, as with basically everything, solid and not-so-solid ways to ask this sort of thing.

Depending on the subject there might be a greater or lesser need to provide explicit context in the question. In the case of a question about meds, there's a good bit of built-in context from the get-go (the use of a given prescribed medicine to treat a given condition has a pretty specific and narrow scope even without any other framing). A question about Stanford might need a little more framing to make it clear where the asker's coming from—high school student trying to plan for college, matriculating student hoping for an environment that differs from their current school, professor looking for employment, etc—but with some of that to make it clear what the question is about, it's fine.

There's no clear and unambiguous way to rewrite the question you linked such that "it had asked for something else, say, 'your experience with going to Stanford"'—it's apples and oranges, and giving a general policy call on that kind of counterfactual is pretty much useless.
posted by cortex at 6:30 PM on April 12 [2 favorites]

RogerB: The matriculation process was brutal.
posted by boo_radley at 6:30 PM on April 12

everybody else, GFAR

Your track record in metatalk is pretty bumpy lately, and I want to emphasize kindly here that you seem to not really be getting Metafilter very well so far and hence may want to take into account your own culpability in producing a lot of the responses you're getting. Not everyone around here is going to exercise the forbearance required to give you the benefit of the doubt when you don't seem all that inclined to exercise the same yourself.
posted by cortex at 6:34 PM on April 12 [8 favorites]

Go fuck a rainbow?
posted by box at 6:37 PM on April 12 [21 favorites]

boo_radley, I imagine chainsaws were involved? But it's still nothing compared to the work they assign at the Massacre Institute of Technology, or even Cal Schreck. They really make their students suffer; more than noses get put to the grindstone.

Melon carnage (warning: loud, dumb)
posted by RogerB at 6:38 PM on April 12

Oh no--I'm not getting Gallagherrolled again.
posted by box at 6:39 PM on April 12

Global Forum on Agricultural Research?
posted by marxchivist at 6:39 PM on April 12

Go Find A Room? Misspelled GWAR?
posted by boo_radley at 6:42 PM on April 12

No, most formulations of that sort of question that were clear that there was a problem to be solved, would be okay. We have a few litmus tests

- does the OP seem like they just want to talk about the subject, or are they goal oriented?
- is it the sort of question where anyone could answer [i.e. "what is your experience with soap?" less good unless there was some mor explanation of why they wanted to know]?

That said, it's case by case and if you're not comfortable with this, and you have a question, you could run it by one of us first if you wanted [use the contact form]. And I'm right there with cortex, MeTa is at its best when it's not people asking questions and then starting fights with answers they don't like.
posted by jessamyn at 6:44 PM on April 12

Gennifer Flowers a robot?
posted by box at 6:49 PM on April 12

Go Find a Rake
Get Four Angry Rabbits
Give Friends A Ring
Grate Foods Above Rubbishbin ???
posted by CarolynG at 6:50 PM on April 12

Go Fucking Achieve Renown!
posted by Science! at 6:51 PM on April 12 [2 favorites]

Go For a Ride?

Get Fucked and Rot?

Go Free a Runt?

Gosh Folks Are Rude!
posted by katillathehun at 6:52 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]

I kinda like the "Go Fuck A Rainbow" one. We should settle on that.
posted by Science! at 6:53 PM on April 12

Science, you could have "Go Forth and Achieve Renown".
posted by boo_radley at 6:56 PM on April 12

Grapefruit fails as racquetball.
posted by box at 6:58 PM on April 12 [2 favorites]

It's Go Find A Room, of course.
posted by peter_meta_kbd at 7:03 PM on April 12

Of course.
posted by gman at 7:09 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]

Stick with the kid, baby.
posted by boo_radley at 7:11 PM on April 12

Seriously though I would like to find a way to fast track Go Fuck a Rainbow to funnyjokeland as soon as possible.
posted by jessamyn at 7:19 PM on April 12 [9 favorites]

German Fascists Acting Repulsively
posted by thescientificmethhead at 7:29 PM on April 12

NOT-LEPRECHAUNIST
posted by salvia at 7:30 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]

Speaking of which, I actually saw the literal end of the rainbow (to the extent that tricks of light have "ends") and there was no pot of gold. Those on neighboring seats in the bus agreed. GFAR, indeed.
posted by salvia at 7:31 PM on April 12

Mm, waffles!

You know that whole chicken-and-waffles phenomenon? They don't do that where I'm from. I only just found out about it, and I found out that there's a place that serves chicken and waffles not far from me! I was really excited until I found out that it's only chicken and waffles on the side, not like chicken wrapped in a waffle or anything.
posted by Ms. Saint at 7:41 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]

I have a bit of contempt for people who post photos of themselves meditating next to statues of the buddha, especially when it seems to be earnest.
posted by Burhanistan at 7:48 PM on April 12

"go fuck a rainbow" led me to a lot of weird Malice Mizer and Gackt fanfic, and that was with safesearch on.
posted by boo_radley at 7:51 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]

The chicken and waffles thing has been puzzling me for a while. A building near me has a sign up that says "Coming Soon, Chicken and Waffles" and I keep seeing this and wondering the same thing. Is it a chicken leg served on a waffle? Is it breakfast? Dinner?
posted by readery at 7:54 PM on April 12

It's fried chicken and waffles man, and thank god not a sprig of cilantro in sight.
posted by Science! at 7:55 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]

'Go Funnyjokeland', Advises Referencer
posted by ormondsacker at 8:23 PM on April 12 [3 favorites]

Checking urbandictionary, asking for experiences with "going to Stanford" is definitely chatfilter.
posted by Pronoiac at 8:30 PM on April 12

Stanford rules. Great times, great friends, took an entirely different direction from where I started. Graduated in the middle of the dot-com bust, so that sucked a bit.

Wait. Was that hypothetical?
posted by shinynewnick at 9:16 PM on April 12

Chicken and Waffles are so good. Eat them here. I prefer syrup to gravy, personally.
posted by Bookhouse at 9:38 PM on April 12

MetaTalk RulesLawyering II: Electric Boogaloo was even less fun than the original. We give it no stars!

My advice is to skip MetaTalk RulesLawyering 3 in 3-D because there won't be a laugh in it. Also, the red-and-green glasses will give you a headache.
posted by Sidhedevil at 10:12 PM on April 12

It's Easter: God Fell And Rose.
posted by !Jim at 10:16 PM on April 12

Crazy anthropomorphic infidels.
posted by Burhanistan at 10:18 PM on April 12

Rainbows have nothing to hide.
posted by salvia at 10:23 PM on April 12 [2 favorites]

peter_meta_kbd: It's Go Find A Room, of course.

This is Metatalk. We can make out wherever we want, man.
posted by koeselitz at 10:24 PM on April 12

boo_radley: "go fuck a rainbow" led me to a lot of weird Malice Mizer and Gackt fanfic, and that was with safesearch on.

That's disgusting.

Why on earth would anybody have the safesearch on?
posted by koeselitz at 10:25 PM on April 12 [3 favorites]

Well there's a mildly interesting Meta-question here: can you use a conditional to limit an AskMe to a tiny part of our membership? Would this be OK?: "If you have taken mirtazapine, did you have to take time off work during the first few days you were taking it?"
posted by nicwolff at 11:09 PM on April 12

People, you're giving my undergraduate degree from Carnage Mellon a bad name. No wait, I am. I named it Feliz. I can't spell so good. I blames me my school.
posted by allen.spaulding at 11:26 PM on April 12

Melon carnage (warning: loud, dumb)

For a second there I was afraid you might be referring to this.
posted by TedW at 5:02 AM on April 13

Metafilter: everybody else, GFAR

Am I the only one that doesn't know what GFAR means?
posted by 6550 at 5:44 AM on April 13

Oh, go find a room. Or fuck a rainbow or something. I swear I did a page search for GFAR.
posted by 6550 at 5:48 AM on April 13

Well there's a mildly interesting Meta-question here: can you use a conditional to limit an AskMe to a tiny part of our membership? Would this be OK?: "If you have taken mirtazapine, did you have to take time off work during the first few days you were taking it?"

Yes, that's fine. The narrower your question, the fewer answers you are likely to get, but that's just part of the deal. Questions don't have to be answerable by any minimum plurality of mefites to be okay.
posted by cortex at 6:28 AM on April 13

[And here's a response from anonymous.]

I did wonder both about the chatfilter aspects of my question and whether the subsidiary question about work was too specific. I asked another anonMe question about medication some time ago and learnt from that to keep my question brief. The answers to my previous question became quite discursive because of the amount of detail I gave in my question. The discursivity was useful to me but I didn't think it would be useful to people who weren't in my exact situation, and therefore in framing questions since I've tried to focus not only on the question I wanted an answer to but also in phrasing it in ways that might make the answers helpful to others.

I think we have discussed before the issue about getting people's experiences about things in situations where other sites (like crazymeds, but this would apply to non-medical situations as well, such as IT problems) also allow people to discuss experiences, and this has been felt to be ok. Many of us trust the quality of responses at AskMF more than other sites we know less well, and in some cases when specific people respond we know something of their background, which can be helpful.

posted by cortex at 6:30 AM on April 13

Cortex = Zuul
posted by kuujjuarapik at 6:45 AM on April 13

Why on earth would anybody have the safesearch on?

Because turning it off could lead to disaster.
posted by SpiffyRob at 7:27 AM on April 13 [1 favorite]

SpiffyRob, that's why it's important to always protect your searches by appending google's "keyboard:nomilksies" directive.
posted by cortex at 7:38 AM on April 13

People say "Go find a room"? Surely the expression is "Get a room!", no?

So you could just say GAR! Which, at least if it's misinterpreted, it could be read as, "Whatever, GAR!" or "Whatever, Giant fish capable of serious injury against a human!".

And while it doesn't actually make any sense, at least it's got a vaguely threatening feel to it, which is more than can be said for GFAR.
posted by quin at 8:42 AM on April 13 [3 favorites]

People say "Go find a room"? Surely the expression is "Get a room!", no?

Maybe there was an implied politeness, almost imploring the reader to locate a room. But I guess it'd then be PAARAYNC, which obviously is "Please acquire a room at your nearest convenience. "
posted by jerseygirl at 8:47 AM on April 13 [1 favorite]

The alligator gar... man, I wouldn't want to run into one of those bastards in a dark alley.
posted by box at 8:57 AM on April 13

Oh that's very cute.

Being unnecessarily combative in MeTa threads that you started is one thing. Posting passive-aggressive callouts of other users on your user page vaults you into the Gargantuan Fucking Asshole Realm.
posted by googly at 9:05 AM on April 13

"The chicken and waffles thing has been puzzling me for a while. A building near me has a sign up that says "Coming Soon, Chicken and Waffles" and I keep seeing this and wondering the same thing. Is it a chicken leg served on a waffle? Is it breakfast? Dinner?"

The answer to all your questions.
posted by klangklangston at 9:17 AM on April 13

Oh that's very cute.

Being unnecessarily combative in MeTa threads that you started is one thing. Posting passive-aggressive callouts of other users on your user page vaults you into the Gargantuan Fucking Asshole Realm.

Dude quotes Buddhist theology as well. Is this the peace the Buddha sought?
posted by Burhanistan at 9:25 AM on April 13

Gargantuan Fucking Asshole Realm.

I like it. GFAR, nearly GAR.
posted by CunningLinguist at 9:26 AM on April 13

Dude quotes Buddhist theology as well. Is this the peace the Buddha sought?

I have a theory that some, not all, of the people drawn to Buddhism are attracted by the idea of being able to be dispassionate about so many things that they are, perhaps, overly passionate about. I know an awful lot of very angry Buddhists with good intentions but bad followthrough.
posted by jessamyn at 10:18 AM on April 13 [4 favorites]

What is the sound of one finger raising?
posted by kuujjuarapik at 10:32 AM on April 13

I have a very angry Buddha belly this morning. Too much grease in my hash browns.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 10:39 AM on April 13

"go fuck a rainbow" led me to a lot of weird Malice Mizer and Gackt fanfic, and that was with safesearch on.
posted by boo_radley at 10:51 PM on April 12 [1 favorite +] [!]

~~ ALL Gackt and Malice Mizer fanfic is weird....

and in answer to the question, I don't think medical questions are above chatfilter as long as they are questions posed in such a way as to be answerable. It is the difference between the linked question and this:

"I feel mirtazapine (Zispin, Remeron) are ruining this nation, do you agree or disagree with me?"

that would be chatfilter in my opinion.
posted by Julnyes at 11:25 AM on April 13

I have a good friend you teaches at Stanford although he never uses this as a line to pick up chicks.
posted by ob at 11:42 AM on April 13

you=who
posted by ob at 11:42 AM on April 13

Yoo-hoo=a chocolatey drink
posted by Pronoiac at 11:49 AM on April 13

You pays you money, you teaches you Stanfords.
posted by cortex at 11:51 AM on April 13 [3 favorites]

Grapefruitmoon Finds Apricots Repulsive.

Well, no that's lies.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 2:31 PM on April 13

I transferred out of Carnegie Mellon.
posted by OmieWise at 4:11 PM on April 13

salvia: I too have seen the end of the rainbow.
And though there was no pot of gold, it was simply the most stunning sight I've ever seen. Dipping into misty green hills as the storm clouds broke.. we were lost, but the last few rays of sun poking through and giving us this gorgeous rainbow meant we didn't care.

If were to pick a rainbow to fuck, that'd be it. Where to find such a rainbow? New Zealand.
posted by nat at 9:22 PM on April 13

I went to visit a friend at Stanford once. Their dining hall food is fucking fantastic.
posted by contraption at 4:45 PM on April 14

Do they have waffles there?
posted by grouse at 4:48 PM on April 14