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@jericson
Created October 4, 2013 23:11
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Good answers prompt new questions.

Good answers respect their questions

If you have a few minutes to be philosophical, take a moment to read A Day at the Park. I find it very useful to the question at hand. A key line:

My favorite kind of answers are those that my questions give birth to.

Both of the original answers to this question are solutions to the same problem: sometimes answers destroy curiousity. Bring your own framework addresses concern that novel approaches may lose their place at the table if room is only allowed for "standard" answers. We would then be left with the answers that have already been accepted by various orthodoxies. Avoid truth assertions contends that answers that fail to qualify truth statements crowd out honest scholarship and alienate other potential answers.

I was more than willing to post both of those answers because I believe in them both. They identify pathologies (slavery to orthodoxy of some flavor and arrogant assertions) that could ruin a Q&A site. Their medicine (taken in moderation) will prevent great harm. But sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. If we create an orthodoxy out of qualifications or allow disrespectful frameworks to dominate our site, we will be no better off (indeed, much worse off) than before.

Therefore I propose that answers which fail to serve their questions or attempt to push curiousity aside must be downvoted, edited, or deleted as appropriate. To be clear, no ruleset can make these decisions for us. We cannot know beforehand what strategies answers might assume to destroy curiousity. It is inevitable that we will disagree on proper treatments and even diagnoses. If we adopt one or the other of the intial proposals, it will certainly help the site, but neither can promise to prevent problems that we have yet to discover. We must, instead, trust each other to be flexible and wise.

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