Five W's and an H
25 Jan 2024Growing up, I’ve always heard of the saying There’s no such thing as stupid questions”. I’ve come to realize that, maybe, that just isn’t true unfortunately. I’m sure everyone is guilty of asking such a type of question where after 30 seconds of asking the question, you’re literally face palming because of a sudden realization that maybe that shouldn’t have been asked. I, myself, am guilty of such questions and thats ok. I guess its better to ask and learn rather than not ask and always wonder.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3905734/how-to-send-100-000-emails-weekly#:~:text=Short%20answer%3A%20While%20it’s%20technically,that%20you%20can%20sink%20into How to send 100,000 emails weekly?
Questions should pose some kind of progression; it should paint a picture to the person you’re asking what exactly is your goal of learning the knowledge to your particular question. Questions usually invoke the 5 W’s and an H: “Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How”. While perusing Stack Overflow, I’ve come across an example of a question that just raises more questions: “How to send 100,000 emails weekly?”. Now, I personally barely send 10 emails a day; what on Earth does a person need to be able to send 100,000 emails for if not creating spam for a particular individual. This question, sure it provokes thoughts like “How would one go about it?” but; it doesn’t have progression. In other words, why would you need to be able to do that for? What would such a task improve? Like it states on Stack Overflows website, questions should be able to be answered with facts and expertise; meaning someone out there specializes in whatever you’re trying to learn about. I have no clue why anyone would want to specialize in sending 100,000 emails a week unless they were working for a spam company. The answers for the question were all speculative meaning no one knew for sure how to do it without running into any issues.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processing-a-sorted-array-faster-than-processing-an-unsorted-array/11227902#11227902 What is Branch Prediction?
On the same website; there exists questions on the opposite end of the spectrum which is posed as a “smart” question. The question was: “What is branch prediction?”. I immediately thought “ Yeah, what is that?”. Unlike the answers for the previous question, this question had answers with mathematical and scientific reasoning to back up an answer. None of the answers were speculatory; there are people out there that actually specialize in such a topic because it’s used daily everywhere in the world. A good example given was a railroad and how trains needed to start up and slow down and they needed to know prior to when such actions needed to be taken. This, I feel, is alot more useful than knowing how to send 100,000 emails in a week. This particular question got about 34k upvotes while the previous question had -44k downvotes. The people have spoken! Some questions are just “better” than others because of direction of goal, thought provocation, and overall impact of learning knowledge for such a question.