Rereading those notes on seeking help I wrote—gosh—six years ago, I realise how things have changed. The advent of AI has added a whole new tier to the help desk: an automated FAQ that discusses your problem in a reasonably human mode. In many cases this is an improvement on the old low-wage Tier 1 hired help working from a script. But I’d no longer recommend a company’s help desk as your first port of call.
And I’m starting to feel much the same about forums. They’re a mixed bunch and you need to approach them critically. If you find one that’s responsive, where well-shaped, intelligent questions are answered on point, you’re lucky. Sign up; stick with it. The big mistake you can make is forum tourism. You plug your error message into Google search, get a string of hits from a dozen forums and find yourself burrowing through a warren of rabbit-holes.
How so? What happens is something like this: Your “problem” is something you think of as “out there in the world”. But if you’ve read the Tested Technology piece on “Keeping the Kit Happy”, you’ll understand that there are very likely two main components to any problem. There’s the what’s-not-working-out-there component but there’s also the what-I-don’t-understand component in your own head. The internal WIDU component.
You’re human. And so are the folks discussing your problem in the forums. The chances are high that those who’ve run into the same external component of the problem have much the same WIDU as you.
This pretty much guarantees that any problem you hit will be echoed across the Internet by solution seekers who all have a similar WIDU mind-set. Which is how the “this product is complete rubbish” wildfire so easily rages over the World Wide Web.
You’d be right to stop me at this point to remind me that this WIDU has been the engine of modern science since the days of Isaac Newton. But there’s a very important distinction between the WIDU you know and the WIDU you don’t know. Knowing what you don’t know is how the science gets started. When you don’t know what you don’t know—WIDU²—the deep rabbit-holes open.
So googling your problem is less likely to produce an answer than to confirm, yes, it’s a real problem that everybody seems to have. There’s a strong element here of what statisticians called “Survivorship Bias”. You’re seeing an overwhelming number of complaints about the problem. What you’re not seeing is an invisible, perhaps vast, majority of people for whom it was never a problem, or who have encountered the problem and so easily solved it that they would hardly call it a problem. If you’re very lucky there may be the odd forum member who has had enough difficulty solving the problem to recognise that it’s worth reporting about.
What do we do about this? The advice in “Data Sheet: Help!” remains true: understand your problem as thoroughly as you can and share it with as much relevant detail as you can muster. This is the best way to engage the interest of other forum members.
But there’s another approach you can take, which I find I’ve been using more and more this year. It’s something I touched on in the opening paragraph. Companies may now be using AI as their Tier 1 defence. But we can use it, too. Directly and effectively.