Please seat comfortable and take some time. I will not be synthetic, but it will be interesting, try to read it completely and see if you like.
Try to judge only after reading the whole document :-)
Have a look to this question: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251758/why-is-stack-overflow-so-negative-of-late
It got 5 hundred upvotes in a really few time by both the people who thinks that SO is too much harsh and restrictive, and the people who would like to have a more strict rules.
The reason is that this discussion doesn't express an opinion. Doesn't make a suggestion on how to solve the problem or why there is a problem. But allows everyone to express his own idea.
Here a famous write well explain how to speak to win and influence people. For curious men, the reason is bound to self-esteem. You can Google for: confirmation bias, rationalization, psychological self-defense.
According to scientific evidence human tries to find / see only the evidences which confirms their own opinions, this is a self-defense mechanism for protecting the self-esteem. This mechanism is made through Rationalization.
- This means that human prefer to be asked their opinion instead of listening
- Means that human prefer to confirm their idea instead of revising them
- Means that they try to see only the evidence which confirms their own ideas
These are not theories. All this stuff is completely supported by tons of search made by brain fMRI and so on.
What does all this stuff means? Why I'm saying that?
Because it's really important to understand that human being should not completely trust themselves. We have a strong bias towards confirming our own ideas. So we should always make a strong effort to deeply listen and understand if other people opinion is in someway right, and if ours is in someway bad.
Another very important stuff which you should think of. Is that when an individual is put inside a flow of ideas, like a community, he will tend to polarize in that direction and look for confirmation that all that ideas are completely correct, good and so on.
Most of individual will stop trying to see alternative possibility. It is called Conformity.
Now, according to what I said from Dale Carnegie it's not convenient for me to express an opinion which goes against the beliefs of other people. Because this would wound their self-esteem.
But I'm not good at this, and I hope you to be mature enough to deeply think on what I reported here. I'm pretty sure to get dozen of downvotes, and this is not a good signal, but hope is the last stuff to die.
The question is:
The main objective of SE is to spread knowledge or to classify which question are of a good quality and allowed?
Are we here to learn or to instruct a neural network how to recognize 'good' (better to say allowed) questions?
Both are objective, but which is the MAIN one?
My question is probably against many rules. At the same time it strongly spreading information (for the definition of information spreading look at Information Gain).
Also this question was a bit against the rules but it was spreading some information.
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/236941/learning-r-and-related-concepts
Have you ever deeply thought on all this stuff?