Well sure, but what about the oven? You’re likely using a gas or electric oven in your kitchen. This is wrong. You need to cut and split mature hardwood. Season the wood for at least a year, but not more than two.
The wood is used to fire a brick-lined stove dug into a thirty to thirty five degree east facing slope in your yard. You’ll find your baked goods vastly improved if you follow this method. Play around with the amount of wood and the baking time until you get a perfect batch.
I have a big old pecan log quartered and aging just for this purpose, Building the brick and mud oven planned for this summer.
I think the magic phrase you needed to use was “two-stroke engine oil”. Then he might have finally clued in to what you were talking about. In conversations with my wife I learned that both she and I, despite both nominally speaking American English, had terminology differences that needed to be taken into account.
I notice a similar phenomenon with internet searches. To use a porn example, at one point I was looking for pictures of African-American women. One might think that the term “black women” would work; but no, it returned endless matches for white women with black men, white women wearing black lingerie, etc. Finally I learned that the magic word was ebony to get what I was looking for.
In that particular case, was your question on facebook a rhetorical one? Do your FB friends have good reason to suspect that you probably already knew the answer? Because the perfect answer seemed to have been common sense baking, and I’m certainly no baker.
This is a problem that I have, too. I always try to say exactly what I mean, but I’ve been forced to understand that sometimes other people have completely different world views and frames of reference, which causes them to reply with what to me seem like non sequitors or ridiculous nit picking.
On the tech support side of things, I once had an amusing interaction with a customer. He called to ask for help ftp’ing a document. We’d given him step by step instructions in the past, that he’d used successfully several times. So when he called to ask for help I was a bit confused but tried to walk him through it over the phone. At each step, he said “yes, I know that part. What I want to know is … how do I ftp the file?” Had a bit of a “who’s on first” routine going when he said he understood each step I suggested but was still not sure what to do, but he couldn’t verbalize what his confusion was. He finally admitted, “You know what, I don’t know what I’m trying to ask you. Let me go ask someone and call you back.”
He never did.
Intuitively I felt I knew the answer but sometimes things are not what they seem so I was kind of looking for confirmation. When I commented that he answered the question perfectly I shoud have said you addressed the question perfectly because I had no way to really confirm if either one of us actually had the truely correct answer.
I often give verbose answers, and I think it’s because of how my mind works. It’s almost like I’m thinking visually. I sometimes need to build up the whole environment around the question so that I fully understand the problem and can give the solution.
So for something like that chainsaw question, I would build up the parts of the chainsaw and how they work together and what fluids go where. I would likely be talking through the process as it is getting built in my head. I probably would do that same thing with the chainsaw oil explanation. It’s like I need to get that issue resolved (explained to you) before I can go on.
This also happens with computer questions. I often help my in-laws and I need to go through that discovery process of their issue in my mind before I can fix their computer. But often they don’t understand that and just want the answer. It frustrates me when they get frustrated because it’s my process of how I get to the answer to help them. If they don’t like the way I get to the answer, they should go ask someone else for help.
that happened to me more than once:
Me: Do you know how to get to Fenchurch Street station ?
Passerby : Yes, I do .
awkward silence …
:smack:
I think a big thing is actually mentioned by Sunny Daze. There are a LOT of people that think their question is very simple because they don’t really understand what they asked. Then they get mad when you need followup to give a real answer. Such as:
Some Guy: How much will my taxes be if I made $50,000.
Accountant: Well, are you married, what state do you live in, did you have health insurance, do you have a mortgage, how much…
Some Guy: JUST TELL ME HOW MUCH I OWE!
Accountant: :rolleyes:
I’m a software developer, i get this all the freaking time.
Some Client: When will the website be fixed?
Me: …What is wrong with it?
Some Client: Just answer the question!
Me: :rolleyes:
Now, I will note that software can often have a lot of “not answering the question”, because there are a lot of know-it-alls that get questions from a lot of idiots. But that still means you get a lot of:
Some User: How do I do X?
Some Guru: Oh, you never want to do X, you really want to do Y, which you do this way…
Some User: I didn’t include the entire situation, all the backstory, and the weighing of consequences, but it turns out I really do want to X, and Y will not solve my problem
Some Guru: You should try Y first.
Some User: :smack:
For years I’ve used the term “engineer’s personality.” By that I mean someone who has to answer a question or explain something precisely and in complete detail, and can not conceive of any other way to do so.
Using the OP as an example, the engineer’s personality would first want to know whether the oven was gas or electric, cold or pre-heated and whether the thermostat had been checked for accuracy. The next set of questions would include the freshness and base temperature of the ingredients, the temperature, humidity and altitude of the kitchen, and whether the baker had experienced these problems before. There would also be a definition of what “results” the OP considered to be acceptable. Only after the situation had been firmly established could we possibly examine possible solutions to the problem.
After all, why would anyone not examine the problem thoroughly before attempting a solution?
What I actively hate is the borderline trollery kind of answer you get in some public forums. Like:
<me> <question asking how to accomplish fairly clearly-stated desired end state given fairly clearly-stated current situation>
<troll> <irrelevant answer>
<me> “That’s not what I asked”
<troll> “Not my fault you asked the wrong question.”
<me> <question asking how to accomplish fairly clearly-stated desired end state given fairly clearly-stated current situation>
<troll> “You don’t want to do that. Why do you want to do that?”
<me> “Of course I want to do that. Otherwise why would I be asking this?”
<troll> “You must be a loser. Only losers want to do that.”
Certainly, there’s a good term for an answer generated on the terms contrary to what you’re describing: “wild-assed guess”.
Engineers don’t guess. If you have an question with significant unknowns, you’re kidding yourself if you think you can get a meaningful answer without resolving them first.
Often, there’s significant information asymmetry between the asker and the answerer, which sometimes means either that the question asked is not the right question (because the asker doesn’t know enough to ask the right question) or that the answer is more general (because the answerer doesn’t know enough to realize that the asker knows what they’re talking about).
Sometimes, it’s hard to figure out who has more information! I work with some fairly complicated software products, and we regularly get into pretty technical complicated discussions with customers who are actually trying to do something that’s pretty simple. But they don’t start with their goal, they start with a mental model of how things work and ask specific questions to fill in the holes in their mental model. And since we both know a lot of technical detail, their specific questions make sense and are valid, but eventually we clue into the fact that they’re doing this The Hard Way™, and step back to ask what they’re really trying to accomplish.
This happens with non-engineers and non-technical subjects too. When you read a question from someone, you use your theory of mind to figure out what it is they’re trying to do, then you try to be helpful. It’s pretty easy for something to go awry in that process and result in an answer that’s not very useful.
Yeah, sounds familiar 
In a lot of cases you want the person answering the question to simply assume you have the unknowns already under control.
I didn’t ask about two-stroke engine oil because I didn’t know it was called that.
There’s been threads about this common situation before.
Of course, the threads end up being full of people trying to justify not answering questions! And then it goes meta: people responds to questions within the thread with irrelevant answers, etc.
Some people just value what they have to say much more than actually responding to the question at hand.
I really have no idea what’s going on in the minds of people that can’t answer a yes/no question with a yes or a no.
I really have no idea what’s going on in the minds of people who can’t fathom (or accept) that sometimes a yes/no question really isn’t one.
There’s a pretty old joke about an engineer and a manager that explains this phenomenon quite well.