Ruse to get a question answered

[jc-8FIgwK2HfyJMuWfdjsoA/w at public.gmane.org (John Chambers)]

dan wrote:
| Win Treese, my friend and colleague, said about
| a decade ago approximately this: "On the Internet,
| no one will answer your questions; you can ask
| but nothing will happen.  If, however, you make
| a false claim, people will come out of the woodwork
| to tell you why you are wrong.  The art, then, of
| asking a question on the Internet is to make a
| false claim the corrections to which approximate
| the answer to the question that no one would answer
| if you asked it as a question."

I've occasionally made a similar  observation  in  support  of  flame
wars.  The idea is that you have some task T and a set of tools X, Y,
..., and you want to know which tools can handle T.  If you ask  "Can
you use X to do T?" you'll just get variants of "RTFM, n00b!" You did
RTFM, of course, and it made no mention of T.  So what you do is post
the  claim  "X is better than Y because X can do T but Y can't." This
elicits replies from users of Y explaining how to do T with Y.

If you want to know how (or whether) the other tools can  do  T,  you
send  a  message from another id saying "OK, we know that Y can do T,
but X can't." This gets replies from expert users of X explaining how
to do T using X.  You have now exploited the "flame war" mentality to
get answers for "How do you do T?" from the X and Y  fanboys.   Maybe
you  also  got some sample code that you can turn into a benchmark to
compare X's and Y's performance for T.

Win's comment is, of course, a variant of the same observation. I'd
guess that this has been independently discovered by many people.

(I wonder if one could get a "business method" patent on it ... ;-)



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