The XY Problem

Asking about your attempted solution rather than your actual problem

See Also: Asking Smart Questions. What is it? The XY problem is asking about your attempted solution rather than your actual problem. This leads to enormous amounts of wasted time and energy, both on the part of people asking for help, and on the part of those providing help. User wants to do X. User doesn't know how to do X, but thinks they can fumble their way to a solution if they can just manage to do Y. User doesn't know how to do Y either. User asks for help with Y. Others try to help user with Y, but are confused because Y seems like a strange problem to want to solve. After…

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• Katherine Huang
• Brandon Wang
• Qi Xuan Ding
• Quinn Ha
• Vihaan Sondhi

related reading

• XY problem - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
• See the problem before you solve ittheoverlap.substack.com
• How To Ask Questions The Smart Waycatb.org
• Bad Problems Don't Stop Being Bad Because Somebody's Wrong About Fault Analysis — LessWronglesswrong.com
• neverjustneverjust.net
• How to Solve Your Big Problems, by Solving Your *Real* Problemjasonfeifer.beehiiv.com
• The XY Problem - Sketchplanationssketchplanations.com
• Brooke Joseph on X: "One of the best pieces of feedback I’ve received was about asking good questions. The advice was to start with a brief overview of the issue, share what I’ve tried, and then ask a specific question that will solve the ix.com
• The Shadow Question — LessWronglesswrong.com
• Mini Blog Post 7: Problems are for Fixing - Neel Nandaneelnanda.io
• How to ask your mentors for help | Derek Siverssive.rs
• Problem solving is often a matter of cooking up an appropriate Markox chainmath.uchicago.edu