I don't have kids, but I DO have your answer...

December 31, 2011 7:51 AM

What do we call the phenomenon we see in this thread?

The one where the asker says "I'm looking for information about $topic from people who are $quality" and instead gets a hundred responses all along the lines of "I'm not $quality but I have something to say about $topic."

This seems to happen almost any time an asker tries to limit the field of responders, particularly on topics people love talking about (like books, or parenting, or pets). Do these responses get flagged as noise? Do they ever get deleted as such? Or is general policy that the asker doesn't get to decide in advance who can answer their question?

And this particular ask is obviously not the most egregious example. It's a situation that I've been struck by before and not made a MeTa about because I didn't want to seem to be calling out someone in particular or poking an already active beehive.

posted by 256 to Etiquette/Policy at 7:51 AM (40 comments total)

Chatfilter.
posted by spitbull at 7:59 AM on December 31, 2011 [6 favorites]

particularly on topics people love talking about

I think this is the core issue. It's easy for folks to get excited about a topic they like and feel like they might have an answer to. From there, you read through a question and at some point you have an a ha! sort of moment when a possible answer occurs to you, and you skip on down to the comment box to chuck that answer into the thread without finishing off the question text itself and giving your answer a proper vetting against the full constraints of the question.

That'll manifest itself as someone answering "you should read X!" when X was an example given by the asker late in the question; it'll manifest as well as advice from a not-Y person when the question specifically asked for answers from Y people.

Missing-the-constraints type answers get flagged sometimes; they get deleted sometimes. Now and then we'll hear from an asker wanting to know if there's anything that they can do, or should have done, to try and keep it from being an issue so much. Letting us know when things are going wobbly is a good idea; gentle clarifications or restatements of the key constraints are fine as well.

And it's tricky because while we want to have folks get the answers they're looking for and will definitely help try to keep things from going off the rails, there is also a certain amount of flexibility and realistic expectations we want people to have when they ask a question. The askme community is large and among its biggest strengths is its ability to yield answers from a wide net of people; with that comes a degree of likelihood that some answers will be more in bullseye territory and some maybe a few inches off from the side of the board entirely.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:59 AM on December 31, 2011 [3 favorites]

I agree, that question is kinda chatfilter-y, but I don't think that's the answer here. Folks kick the phrase 'Male Answer Syndrome' around sometimes, but I don't think that's exactly it either (related, but not quite it).

I like to give folks the benefit of the doubt, and assume good intentions and stuff. There's a quote from a famous librarian along the lines of 'I can't have information I know would be of interest to someone and not share it.' People want to be helpful, they want to answer questions (and, sure, they also want to talk and comment and participate), and it's pretty easy for 'know would be' to shift to 'think might be.'

And many people around here don't like it when the OP directs discussion too much, and they don't like feeling like they've been silenced all their lives. Both of those things, I think, contribute to the dynamic where, when the asker says "I'm only interested in answers from cat-owning Canadian Anabaptists," people chafe against the restriction.

But yeah--in answer to your question, I don't know if there's a name for the phenomenon. As a rough draft, how do you feel about 'answer creep'? Too bad about the word 'creep' in there, though.
posted by box at 8:07 AM on December 31, 2011 [3 favorites]

That particular question read, to me, like the asker wanted to know what was on average people's bookshelves in the 70s, and the "were you an adult in the 70s?" seemed to be more of a callout to those people if they happened upon the question, than a constraint that meant "children of the 70s need not reply."

Maybe I read it that way because the books/nostalgia combo was irresistible to me, but I've definitely refrained from answering plenty of questions where the asker was more explicit about who they wanted to hear from.
posted by headnsouth at 8:10 AM on December 31, 2011

Yeah, I think there are bad examples of this happening, but this one didn't seem to be one of those to me. I see it as sort of an XY problem, people ask a narrow question feeling that it's the best way to get the answers that they want, but it may not be. People who actually read the question and think they understand the outcome the OP is looking for answer anyhow even if it doesn't meet the criteria. Usually it works out okay, sometimes it goes badly.

More importantly, if people are trying to use AskMe and get only one subsection of the population to answer ["Divorced dads only!"] that just may not work, realistically. We'll definitely axe answers that are way off base or by people who didn't seem to read the question if people are flagging them and the OP is more than welcome to pipe back up in the thread and try to get the answers back on track if there are problems.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:19 AM on December 31, 2011 [1 favorite]

The one where the asker says "I'm looking for information about $topic from people who are $quality" and instead gets a hundred responses all along the lines of "I'm not $quality but I have something to say about $topic."

Not being snarky, but I would call that conversation. Trying to limit people to X is a bit of fool's errand, particularly on AskMe, so it's best to just go with the flow, IMO. You're asking a room of people for information and that room happens to span the entire globe. You're gonna get some not quite on topic answers.

More importantly, if people are trying to use AskMe and get only one subsection of the population to answer ["Divorced dads only!"] that just may not work, realistically

Exactly. Children, siblings, friends, lovers, parents and co-workers of divorced dads may have some knowledge about a divorced dad's perspective without exactly matching the OP's criteria.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:25 AM on December 31, 2011 [1 favorite]

I think it's just part of the natural "I want to answer this question" impulse. I've asked questions asking for specific things and gotten "well, what you really want is THIS", an answer which lies completely outside the scope of my question. Even when I pipe back up in the thread stating why I'm asking for X and not interested in Y, I continue to get answers which say "well, you really want Y".

*shrug* It's just part of the process. I tend to then mark as best answer all the ones which pertain to my actual question and leave the others hanging there unhighlighted. I think it makes it clear to anyone then reading the question thread later what I was ACTUALLY asking about.
posted by hippybear at 8:27 AM on December 31, 2011 [1 favorite]

I am trying to get an idea of what different people's bookshelves looked like then.

This appeared to be the ultimate goal of the question. The requested type of answerer seemed more like "this is the type of person I envision being able to answer this question" rather than necessarily restricting the question to only that type of person.

I was a kid/young-teen in the 70's, so I'm old enough to remember a lot of books my parents had on their shelf, as well as those of other adults I knew, as I loved to read grown-up stuff and would always scour anyone's bookshelves given half a chance. I thought my answers might add to the discussion.

Other times I have popped in because I assume the asker most importantly wants info on the subject, even if it doesn't necessarily come straight from the horses' mouth.

It occurs to me that I'm not exactly answering the question at hand right now... but I sure do love to hear myself talk. Or type.
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 8:28 AM on December 31, 2011 [1 favorite]

"Must Answer Syndrome" preserves the acronym, removes the gender framing. Here's one previous.
posted by Edogy at 8:31 AM on December 31, 2011 [1 favorite]

I think in this case, $topic and $quality are not precisely defined. So people elaborate.

It's a bit different to asking "Why is there an half an inch of water in the passenger side foot well of my 2002 Ford Focus SE after heavy rain"?
posted by carter at 8:34 AM on December 31, 2011

Here's one previous.

It's a good example of how a question and a answer can be seen in different lights, particularly when it comes to parenting. Do they want to solve this one particular problem to their satisfaction or do they want to solve it while continuing to build the foundations for the benefit of the child?

Part of the problem, if there really is one, is that we all have blind spots or miss the obvious. Having someone answer a question in a way that isn't expected can be educational for the OP, while still leaving them the choose to ignore that advice also. Gaining a new insight or point of view is good.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:44 AM on December 31, 2011 [1 favorite]

Also - in this case, the 'questions' at the top of the original post are not the actual question being asked inside. The actual question being asked is: "I am trying to get an idea of what different people's bookshelves looked like then." But it isn't phrased as a question (for instance as "What would adults have had on their bookshelves in the 1970s").

So you can address the OP's actual question, without correctly addressing the two questions - "Were you an adult in the '70s? What books do you have, that you bought during that time period?" - that are at the top of the post.
posted by carter at 8:52 AM on December 31, 2011

The question as asked is a bit open ended, leaving people like me some wiggle room in interpretation and how we can answer it. Also, define adult in the 1970's (I was 21 in 1978), and what time in the 1970's does the OP mean, really, because people are giving answers that include books published in 1978. I think a lot of people (me included), interpreted the primary question in the group of questions asked to be this: I am trying to get an idea of what different people's bookshelves looked like then., rather than necessarily being restricted to What books do you [still] have, that you bought in the '70s?
posted by gudrun at 9:17 AM on December 31, 2011

The last time I checked, no one was being paid to answer these questions. So, I assume most respondents are motivated by a desire to help in what way they can.

It always seems strange to me to complain that the efforts of an unpaid, unacknowledged army of volunteers don't meet your precise criteria.
posted by SPrintF at 9:22 AM on December 31, 2011 [2 favorites]

I thought the "Were you an adult in the '70s?" restriction was kind of dumb. I was a child in the '70s, and I remember many of the books my parents had on their shelves then (books published in the seventies, so they must have been purchased in the seventies), so I am capable of giving an accurate and responsive answer to the question. But the questioner imposed that arbitrary restriction.

If you don't carefully think through the restrictions you place on who can answer, you shouldn't expect answerers to carefully think through their answers.
posted by jayder at 9:27 AM on December 31, 2011

All you can do is start the question with your stipulations, state the question very specifically, and hope people read before they start blorsting. For the example, something like this might have worked better:

I have a question for Americans aged about 55 or more (younger folk and non-Americans can sit this one out): if you were an adult in the 1970s, what books did you have on your shelves?

If you want to know why: I am writing a novel set in 1970s America. One of the characters is a middle class white woman born in 1947 and teaching elementary school in 1977 Detroit. I want to describe her bookshelves. I hope to get some good ideas from your lists. I know how to Google. I want personal memories from adults of that era.

You'd still get answers from guys who quote the bestseller lists they found on a web site and from Brazilian high school students who hate books, but I think the response generally would be a little more in line with the intended question.
posted by pracowity at 9:49 AM on December 31, 2011

The attempt at answer restriction here felt a bit odd to me. Paraphrased, "How can someone help feed the most kids in America, and don't say vote Democratic?"

Is that a standard answer to that kind of question? I mean, I guess someone might theoretically bring that up as an answer, but it seemed a bit non sequitur & troll-baity, something you'd include in a post on a political site, not AskMe.
posted by Edogy at 9:51 AM on December 31, 2011

Asking questions in this way is useful if only for the fact that it gets people to state up front if they are $quality or not. As an asker it becomes much easier to sort through the chaff and get to the answers they're really interested in.

If the asker is so inclined they can also look at the pearls of wisdom dropped by other people.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:53 AM on December 31, 2011

Is that a standard answer to that kind of question?

Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes when people ask for the "most effective" way to do X, Y or Z, people will tell them that acting globally, or within the electoral process or whatever is the best way to make wide-ranging changes. Or "convince other people to eat vegetarian" is another popular one. And that may be helpful for problem-solving and looking at big picture aspects of the problem, but it often sends the thread down a long winding argument about how to create effective sustainable change as opposed to the OPs question which is about food insecurity.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:10 AM on December 31, 2011

If the phrasing of that question had been more specifically limiting ("Please, no answers from folks who were not adults during the '70s"), would the out-of-bounds answers have been deleted?
posted by cribcage at 10:11 AM on December 31, 2011

Given that the OP starts off with "What books do you have, that you bought in the '70s?" but then clarifies "I am trying to get an idea of what different people's bookshelves looked like then", I'd have to call this "answering the question" for the most part.

I understand the kind of thing you're talking about, but this isn't a particularly good example of it. Sometimes 'I'm exactly the sort of person you were expecting an answer from, but this bit of information might help' answers can be actually helpful, sometimes they're not. Anytime someone asks a question, they can expect some of the answers to be more helpful than others, and they'll have to weed through the answers to see who actually read the question and seems to know what they're talking about and pick out the responses that are useful.
posted by nangar at 10:23 AM on December 31, 2011

Interesting. I had not noticed that before. Thanks, jessamyn.
posted by Edogy at 10:23 AM on December 31, 2011

Bookplating ... ?
posted by zomg at 10:32 AM on December 31, 2011

would the out-of-bounds answers have been deleted?

Not usually, no. I mean it's a judgment call and one of the things we'd have to deal with on a case by case basis. We had one that I remember recently where someone was asking for a certain kind of movie and was looking only for PG or lower ratings and the movies suggested were a lot of R-rated stuff and a lot of "I don't know what the rating is but..." stuff which was agitating both to the OP and to us. So at some point the OP restated their request and after that we'd just axe answers that didn't seem to have read or cared about that aspect. It's tough though because sometimes the OP puts restrictions on a question that aren't really necessary [or maybe don't seem to be if you read the rest of the question] and people sort of try their best to be like "I know you said no ________ but how about __________ because of _______?" Other times the OP asks a specific question and people just ignore parts of it, or don't read that they've said they already read the book the answerer is suggesting which sort of irks me. There's a small subset of people who seem to do this a lot and I'm never sure what's going on there.

And at some level if we have to do the extra work [going to IMDB to check ratings] to see if answers are "accurate" it's just lose-lose all around and we don't like to do that. We try to make AskMe have a pretty high utility for askers, but sometimes things just fall apart for various reasons and it's a little rough if either the asker or the answerers get really bent out of shape about things [I am keeping a close eye on the "dating a guy in the process of getting a divorce" right now for signs of THIS IS NEVER OKAY answers which we often see] and I sometimes feel like people's inabilities to let questions or answers go is a larger issue than just something happening in AskMe.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:32 AM on December 31, 2011 [1 favorite]

I believe it's called SDB Syndrome. But don't worry, SDBs aren't contagious.
posted by scalefree at 10:55 AM on December 31, 2011

What do we call the phenomenon we see in this thread?

Genuinely, I think we call it "the human impulse to make conversation." I know it's hard to override and quite often in an Ask question, should be overridden, but the fact remains that that impulse is there. It's pretty strong - it's how marriages, wars, products and treaties are made, after all.
posted by DarlingBri at 11:10 AM on December 31, 2011

marriages, wars

But I repeat myself.
posted by scalefree at 11:14 AM on December 31, 2011 [1 favorite]

By the time marriage has occurred, somebody has already been invaded and conquered.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:34 AM on December 31, 2011

is general policy that the asker doesn't get to decide in advance who can answer their question?

Bingo!

We're done here, close 'er up.
posted by Chuckles at 11:44 AM on December 31, 2011 [1 favorite]

What do we call the phenomenon we see in this thread?

I'm leaning towards Must Answer Syndrome.

Shall we have a vote?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:57 AM on December 31, 2011

It's sort of a funny question - "books I bought in the 70s and still have on my shelves" is probably a very different list from "what I had on my shelves in the 70s." My answer on behalf of my parents (in their twenties in the late 70s) does accurately answer the first part, but not the second part. Meh.
posted by naoko at 1:10 PM on December 31, 2011

Tell Me No Lies: "I'm leaning towards Must Answer Syndrome. Shall we have a vote?"

We're talking about situations in which people proffer answers who are outside the particular of responders the asker requested. Calling this a "syndrome" is bad for a lot of reasons; the biggest is that it implies that answering a question when you weren't specifically called on is always bad.

I know there's a tendency to talk sarcastically about people answering questions on the Internet, but I think we should resist that temptation.

Moreover, using a 'syndrome' as a slang pejorative casts a shadow on people who have genuine syndromes - are they worthy or denigration, too?
posted by koeselitz at 1:52 PM on December 31, 2011

worthy of denigration
posted by koeselitz at 1:54 PM on December 31, 2011

This question didn't seem like such a bad case of it, but sometimes I think it happens when the question is very complex. If the person is asking about a THING that happened at a TIME, but only of a certain COLOUR, and only if it was really POPULAR, and only wants answers from people in a certain CATEGORY, it's easy for someone to lose track of one of those constraints while reading the question, and then give an answer that isn't quite right.

Also I think it can happen when the readers don't see a good reason for the constraint given. That's more what was happening here. They presume that the asker wants the answer for a certain purpose, e.g. here they might think he/she is writing a novel or making a film set in the 70s and wants the character's bookshelves to be representative. So they don't think it matters whether they were an adult then, as long as they know what is representative of 70s bookshelves. But in reality, the asker might be trying to do a stealth survey of how many mefites were adults in the 70s and enjoyed reading (okay, less likely), in which case those answers are useless.

I expect askers could avoid this problem more often if they clarify why they are asking their question (what they plan to do with the information) and why it's important to limit the answerers to a specific group (beyond the presumption that this group will have more knowledge).
posted by lollusc at 5:58 PM on December 31, 2011

koeselitz- let me say as a dude with two separate syndromes going on that for me at least there's absolutely no issue with people using the terms Male/Must Answer Syndrome.

"Syndrome" is such a general term that it seems kind of weird to get het up about particular usages. It's just "Must Answer Syndrome", not "Must Answer Reye's Syndrome" or "Must Answer Down Syndrome" or whatever.

Of course, if other people with syndromes mention that they're bothered, then I'd respect their wishes, but I figure that bridge can be crossed when we get to it.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 6:16 PM on December 31, 2011

Little known fact: Male Answer Syndrome is actually a corruption of the title of an unpublished Robert Ludlum novel, the Malanser Syndrome.
posted by villanelles at dawn at 6:31 PM on December 31, 2011 [2 favorites]

As for my part, I determined in my most recent AskMe that I would include jargon as a filter.

People who could understand the jargon/technical language were welcome to answer the question (and probably had enough knowledge to do so) - people who could not stayed away.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:57 PM on December 31, 2011

> I thought the "Were you an adult in the '70s?" restriction was kind of dumb. I was a child in the '70s, and I remember many of the books my parents had on their shelves then (books published in the seventies, so they must have been purchased in the seventies), so I am capable of giving an accurate and responsive answer to the question. But the questioner imposed that arbitrary restriction.

I was confused by this as well. If you want to know what books adults had on their shelves in the 70s, well, it's totally not limited to books from the 70s. I mean, FFS, The Stranger was published in 1942.
posted by desuetude at 11:21 PM on December 31, 2011

Some questions are on topics where anyone with passing experience feels like an "expert." Other times, the question requests a level of competence on the given topic that people believe is unnecessarily high and proceed to answer with less capacity in the belief that what they have to say is sufficient for the supplicant's needs.

Sometimes, the general response is correct. Questions where the answers are not necessarily binary and have room for interpretation may lean this way. For example, I did not post an answer in that thread, but I could have had a valid response despite having been born in the 80s by virtue of experience seeing my parents' bookshelf which suffered the expected stagnation which comes from spending less time reading books and more time cleaning up my vomit. However, my response would also lack the nuance necessary to explain which books came about at what time, what cultural factors prompted the purchase of those books, and how the literature was interpreted at the time.

The trouble is, it's difficult to pose the question too narrowly since it may seek multiple stages of an answer. If someone wants a list of items, why those items are there, and what it means to have those items in such combinations, the answer will gravitate towards several lists without consensus and never develop into a deeper interpretation. On the other hand, jumping in with an incomplete list or an inaccurate list can also derail the question from the beginning with an XY problem of a faulty list to interpret in the first place.

This is why questions with more concrete answers are easier to handle. We love to answer questions, but there's a tendency to be less focused on the right answer and more focused on an answer which isn't wrong. When answers are strictly categorized as right and wrong, you're more likely to see fewer answers of which most are either the right answer or a clarification/expansion of the right answer. When the answers are nebulous and "right" is difficult to discern, there's really just going to be a lot of answers which are not wrong but usually insufficient.

On the upside, a question that is somewhat open ended can result in the most fantastic answers which transcend any uncertainty in the question and provide information which clarifies a subject far better than could be expected.

On the downside, some questions require being a little open ended but search for specific answers and attract all manner of insufficient responses or even well-meaning but truly incorrect answers. It's unbearably frustrating to watch and we've lost some really good members over this issue in the past. At the same time, it's a bit tough to prune those tendencies without altering the entire culture of Ask. Mods can delete clearly irrelevant or irresponsible answers, but they aren't experts in everything either and it can be a little troublesome for the handful of people qualified on a given topic to come in time and again to correct misconceptions. Meanwhile, the OP is in a position where they either may take bad advice or end up frustrated and threadsitting because the answers are horribly off-track and they're aware of that much.

I won't even get into my rant about not reading the question and providing answers that would actively worsen the situation and cause the problems the OP wants to avoid. I've expressed loud disagreement at my monitor over the Internet being wrong before, and I'm sure I've been guilty of it a few times myself. I fear it is simply the price we must pay in exchange for a widely skilled variety of users who are willing and eager to answer questions.

I have to poke fun at myself here a bit since I went off for so long without answering the actual question, although that's really just how the grey works. I'd call it "Frustratingly natural."
posted by Saydur at 2:49 AM on January 1, 2012 [2 favorites]

I don't have a name for that phenomenon, but I do have names for other phenomena.
posted by resiny at 12:45 PM on January 1, 2012 [2 favorites]