Asking dumb questions doesn’t make you stupid, it means you lack common sense. Why on our blue and green Earth, would someone dare to ask a Mechanic a question that a doctor would be better suited to answer, or a Chemistry teacher about how to get out of jury duty? For legal queries, one should better call Saul. While it may seem harmless to ask a question out of generality, it’s not the first person who asks, but the nth person that ends up wasting precious time. Smart questions, as stated by Eric Raymond in “How to ask smart questions”, should be clear and precise, thought provoking, and most importantly relevant to who you’re asking.
Let’s look at two examples of a not so smart question and then a smart question: Starting off with a bad example; in this post asked by user Vladimir B, with his header “text to speech using Google instead of Samsung configuration”. Unfortunately, Vladimir B’s question was closed due to not having met the specific requirements of Stack Overflow to be considered a good question. Given his name and sentence structure, one can assume that english may not be his first language, so he deserves some slack. He gives some context about his predicament and posts some lines of code. However his posts ends with him just asking a simple question “So question how to set TTS engine in Microsoft.Maui.Media TextToSpeech prior to calling SpeakAsync?” When typed into google, Microsoft kindly provides information about his direct issue.
Moving onto the second post by Akib Azmain Turja meets more of the requirements of what is a Smart question, or at least enough that it isn’t taken from Stack Overflow. His header is question that’s asks right away what he needs, followed by a clear concise explanation of what he’s trying to accomplish, what he knows and has tried so far. He doesn’t post all his code, just the lines he’s having an issue with, and doesn’t end the post open ended but by asking “How can one create a stream with custom functionalities?” With all the thought and effort put into his post, user Akib Azmain Turja isn’t given the direct answers but is given directions on from other user’s such as John, user20574, and Antonio. Akib later responds to his own question, in detail, and is told by another user Tanveer Badar that he posted an amazing explanation. This post leaves behind something that later viewers might learn from or apprciate.
After browsing through Stack Overflow for some examples of bad questions and receiving a massive headache, I think Raymond might’ve had a point. I asked myself who ever said, “There are no dumb questions”? After a quick google search, I found out it was coined by Carl Sagan. Like many qoutes that have had their true meanings gutted, the actual phrase is “There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.” Knowledge is so easily accessible these days that people need to know how to look for it. It’s hard to make an argument for illiteracy and competency because those should’ve been learned at a young age. So the next time an intellectually deprived individual comes asking an irrelevant question, kindly say “Your questions aren’t dumb, you lack common sense.”