XY Problems (tangent, related to common discussion issue here)

[chad <yandros@gmail.com>]

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This exchange between two incredibly seasoned, experienced contributors to
emacs provide a near-textbook example of what another contributor recently
brought up, "an XY Problem". Eli's recent message highlights the issue
pretty clearly;

On Sun, Nov 12, 2023 at 2:18 AM Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> > Now, by contrast, you're saying all but part of the font locking stuff is
> > tangents and inessential.
>
> That's not what I said.  I said that debugging the jit-lock mechanism
> doesn't bump into the problem of being unable to Edebug font-lock
> invoked by jit-lock.
>
> IOW, I'm trying to keep this discussion focused on specific issues,
> rather than let it degenerate into another futile dispute, by lumping
> together unrelated issues and tangents.
>
> > > So you want to debug window-scroll-functions, not font-lock?  Then why
> > > did you start by talking about font-lock?
> >
> > Must you be so aggressive, Eli?
>
> It isn't aggression, it's frustration.  I have, as you might imagine,
> very little time to waste on pointless discussions, so I get
> frustrated when, after no less than 3 messages of me trying to help
> you solve some problem you seem to be raising, it turns out you have
> something very different in mind, which you didn't clearly state until
> now.
>
> Please try to describe the issue more clearly and comprehensively next
> time, and save me and others from wasting efforts on looking up
> solutions for problems you seem to raise, solutions you don't really
> mean to use, because you are actually looking for something very
> different.
>

While I hadn't heard the term "XY problem" until João referenced it
recently, I've seen the problem itself many times. At heart, the issue
comes out of some variation of:

* a user encounters an actual, concrete problem in practice
* the user diagnoses the problem as the result of some cause
* the user formulates a plan/strategy/etc to resolve (or at least
thoroughly investigate) the diagnosed cause (critically, *not* the original
problem)
* the user appeals to external resources for help *with their attempt to
resolve/investigate the diagnosed cause.

From what I've observed, this problem is significantly more likely to occur
when the people involved are higher skilled, more expert, and more
knowledgeable, both in general and in/near the fields in question. (I
myself saw it happen multiple times a week over several years of working
with the various technical support groups for MIT's campus computing
systems, many years back; I also saw it happen frequently in more
widespread on-line help systems (Usenet, internet fora, mailing lists), and
I think we all can agree that it's happened on emacs-devel some non-trivial
number of times).

In my experience, the *most* common response from the hypothetical original
user above after being told that their original diagnosis was mistaken is
refusal to believe. (There is apparently a bunch of psychology that helps
explain why, but little dispute around whether it happens or not.) The most
effective methods we found for dealing with it were A.) develop the
expectation that the first steps in providing technical support is /always/
to start as close as possible to "what are you trying to do?", and B.)
encourage everyone involved to remember that this is fundamentally an issue
of communications, not skill, knowledge, acumen, etc.

I want to be clear that I'm not trying to call out anyone in particular
with this message; this is a pernicious pattern that is very common, and
there are well-worn psychological and cognitive science principles that
make it much easier to fall into this trap than to avoid it.

Thanks for reading this far; I hope that it helps,
~Chad

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