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