Ummm, yeah…that was syupposed to be a response to the gaspode…yeah I’m a dumbass.
Not only are some of us PhDs homeowners, but most PhDs have spent years living in crappy apartments on a budget. That breeds a certain familiarity with various domestic repairs.
Far too often, the OP in GQ does not give any evidence of knowing how to do a Google search. What’s more, often it’s the case that someone who knows a bit about a subject can do a much more effective Google search than someone who knows nothing.
When I answer a question in GQ, I almost always do a bit of on-line research to back up my recollections of the subject. I’d rather have someone do that and give some cites than have them give me a completely off-the-top-of-the-head answer and have to guess whether they’re an expert or not.
I could be wrong Arnold, but I got the impression the OP was Pitting a certain few posters that always seem to be one of the first posters in a GQ thread, and typically either post a google hit or superficial googled info. There are some people around here who for some reason like to come across as experts in EVERYFUCKINGTHING. It gets old.
I think good form requires that GQ answers be made on the basis of personal knowledge. When we ask here we are looking for more than superficial searchable info. This is a board made up of people and we seek their insight. Not their googlefoo.
Sure askeptic, I can see that. But if someone goes to the trouble to do a Google search on your question and bring up a link, then I think they deserve credit if they do find a link that’s relevant and discusses your question in an intelligent fashion. Let’s face it, some people are better searchers and/or spend more time going through search pages than others. Also, the person with good general knowledge on a lot of subjects but no in-depth knowledge of any particular subject might still want to participate in this discussion.
I guess I feel sympathetic to the searchers because I remember, when I first joined the board, being one of those people that would go to the altavista search or whatever and try to find information to answer the question even if it wasn’t my area of expertise.
Those sorts of answers can be a great opportunity for fighting ignorance, if one is in the mood - but I’ll admit it can get old. And I’d imagine that when dealing with medical issues there’s more of an urgency to get one’s one own, and more proper, response onto the board before someone takes some seemingly dangerous advice. (I know I about freaked a few times seeing what I thought was dangerous ‘advice’ in some threads.)
I’d also like to back up the other posters who’ve responded to Helen’s Eidolon - If I see, even a very basic and general question in a field I find interesting - I’ll follow along, because often the follow-up questions get fascinating.
You hit the nail on the head, here. I occasionally like to get long-winded and pontificate on subjects on which I know something, and bore folks who already have some knowledge while perhaps educating the teeming millions, but I don’t want to feel I have to police the damn board and intervene to prevent harm, when someone says (mock example follows. At least I hope it is mock) “yeah, it’s fine to combine aspirin with your blood thinner, since your ulcer hasn’t bled in over a month now”.
Hear, hear Karl.
It happens all the time in the legal threads, too. Very frustrating.
I’m…I’m not really a lawyer. I just google really, really, really well.
Whoo! Glad that’s finally off my chest! Feel better already!
Yes, yes, yes! I’ve seen a lot of threads lately (not necessarily on those topics) where I thought, “I can answer that”. But then I open it and read response after response that just…aren’t…quite…on, and the sheer number of misapprehensions and faulty assumptions I’d need to address just makes me tired, so I close the thread.
And, dammit, it’s the children that suffer! Think of all the brilliant responses I could have put out there…for the children!
Yeah, drives me nuts… I’ll see a query that I know I can’t answer, because it’s outside my area and would take me hours of research to come up with a halfways decent response…then I’ll see that someone whose knowledge of law is confined to having once caught the last half of an episode of Perry Mason has, with total confidence, responded with something from Google that is not at all relevant. Very frightening, in some of these cases.
Hey Karl, I clicked on one of the sponsored Google links at the bottom of the page, and here’s all you need to help you understand apoptosis!
Glad I could help. 
Either I don’t get into GQ enough, or I’m not as much of an expert as some of all y’all (well, okay, I know I’m not as much of an expert as most of y’all here on most things), or I’m one of the perpetrators of this, because I really haven’t seen this as a problem here. I do know, however, that when I have gone Googling for answers to stuff, I usually come away with a brain full of new knowledge.
The problem with Googling for answers to stuff is that one must remember to be a very skeptical reader when considering what one gets from one’s Googling.
I consider myself a well-educated tech, but not an expert in matters dealing with nuclear science and nuclear power plant technology specifically. I can do a simple Googling for things related to that topic, especially toxicity regarding nuclear waste and usually eight of the first ten sites that a broad-based Googling would bring up will be rather incindiery. And sometimes it’s hard to tell, without paying very careful attention to who’s hosting what information, which are the biased sources. Sometimes, one has to be involved in the issue already to see where the misrepresentations are, too.
I tend to think that for any subject where people may get excited about an issue related to it, you’re going to find similar signal to noise ratios.
I know I was horrified when the first result Google gave me when I looked up Munchausen Syndrome a couple of years ago, was a group calling itself MAMA - Mothers Against Munchausen something or other. A quick look at their website horrified me. While there is the famous case of the mother who’d been mistakenly diagnosed with that because two or three of her children ended up with a metabolic condition where their bodies were producing anti-freeze (Or at least one of the chemicals in anti-freeze, or it’s metabolic products.) on their own - that’s also the only case I know where a Munchausen by proxy diagnosis had been overturned. And the odds involved are such that I can’t blame the medical and prosecutorial persons involved for going with what would seem the simpler explaination.
But getting back to what I was saying, MAMA was making a huge argument based on this one case that all Munchausen by proxy diagnoses were bunk. And they were the first (I think several.) results Google gave me.
Google is a powerful tool. As is the internet itself.
And never has caveat emptor been more appripriate. (Or should that be caveat lector? 
)
I don’t agree with this. There are many GQ posts that can be answered through careful web searching, such as this thread. Even given the breadth of collective knowledge here, a lot of questions would remain unanswered if we limited ourselves to matters of personal knowledge.
My favorite Q.E.D. moment is this one: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=6920903&postcount=5
He answers a request to know what “Comment allez-vous?” means (misspelled by the OP since obviously you’re not likely to get French spelling right if you don’t speak it) and offers “Como talle vu?” as the proper spelling. Q.E.D. apparently doesn’t have the knowledge you’d have after two weeks with a phrasebook before your trip to Paris - but it sure didn’t stop him from answering. He’s got to be one of the worst offenders for answering questions he doesn’t know anything about based on Google or Wikipedia or (in this case) whatever the voices in his head are telling him.
He’s obviously not the only one who does that, but yeah, there’s lots of people who leap to answer questions they don’t know a damn thing about, or leap to offer personal opinions disguised as answers. Most fields of knowledge involve some specialization. I was recently annoyed in this thread http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=368171 because so many people just decided to offer up their opinions without even really understanding what the question was. When it’s a topic that lots of people find interesting, you’re less likely to find useful answers because a lot of people will simply be running their mouths off. In this case, there’s certainly been research done to answer the OP’s exact question, but a number of people popped up to spout off the view - seemingly a modern dogma - that women are just as kinky and sexual as men. Regardless of the fact that the OP actually asked a very specific question and hardly anyone was bothering to try to answer it.
I’m really irritated by this. I’m not sure what it is - people who are so uninformed about a subject that they don’t even really understand the question? (I think the thread I just cited was an example - a bunch of people stupidly seemed to think that “fetish” and “kinky sex” are synonymous, so they simply had no idea what the actual question was.) In other cases, it just seems to be people who want to try to answer every question they can, regardless of whether they know anything at all about the subject, as with Q.E.D. And I’m sure there are some people who simply aren’t capable of recognizing the fact that they don’t know all that much about some things. It’s really getting old.
I agree that the person should mention where they searched (online and off) to find the information they are after. I also think they should mention the specific search parameters they used. Sometimes, the person isn’t using good search terms, and another person can find the information by looking in a different way. I can think of at least one instance where someone posted their search parameters in their OP, and people were able to find the information using different phrases. IOW, if Google/Wikipedia/the default tome used to teach the subject is useless for your purposes, (or even worse, inaccurate) say so please.
And I had to go look it up to see if I ever did get a helpful, non-snotty answer. Nope.
Thanks for the compliments!
BTW, I suppose the complementary chicken fingers would come from the other hand (or foot, or claw, or whatever).
As I’m sure you know, a very high percentage of Google hits for “acoustic sonority” mention Pandora. It seems to be used in highly technical essays on linguistics, and would therefore need at least an amateur linguist in order to paraphrase it.
From The Syllable and Phonotactic Constraints an entry from Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology.
I read the above statement (in relation to Pandora) to mean that a song that Pandora defines as having “acoustic sonority” means one that has lots of long, open vowels and a good degree of energy behing them. Coldplay’s music comes to mind.
I am a musician, but I have no background in vocal training whatsoever. I got the above results from Google with a little refining and searching.
Now, was this helpfull at all, unreliable because I have no background, or harmfull because I have missed the mark entirely? I ask this question of everyone reading this thread, because I want to know if the GQ threads that I’ve replied to in this manner are the kind that inspire threads like this. If so, I’ll stop.
I think a reply like that is fine. It acknowledges what you don’t know, where you looked, and didn’t involve a knowitall claiming that this information was just lying around at dictionary.com.
It’s baffling to me why Pandora thinks it’s a valuable thing to match tastes on, but what the heck do I know?