Why are we challenging the premise rather than answering the question (question on potential sexist remarks)?

Question

I find the reaction to this question quite unreasonable. The responses were overwhelmingly negative and focused on trying to prove that OP is wrong in assessing whether a given situation was possibly sexist or not. The reaction was similar to what happened to an older, very similar question. That one was much better received, and the meta post about it also indicated questioning the premises in the question was not the right way to go.

(Quite ironically ff524 was the first to question the premises in a comment, while she was the "victim" of a similar treatment 2 years ago.)

In the case of the first question, edits to the question to remove possible ambiguity were even less favorably received. I don't really understand why. I think one should stick with answering the question, possibly pointing out a potential false positive, and not just questioning the premises.

To that extent, how should we deal with these types of questions/situations in the future?

Answer 1

Should we ignore the premise?

Let us consider the following, exaggerated, cases:

In the first, a question is posted, reading

If someone's life is in imminent danger due to a threat of a third person, am I justified in using lethal force agains that third person?

and in the second case, the text posted is

Today, I overheard someone saying they wish my friend didn't come back to teach next semester. The person saying this looked as if full of anger. I feel like this person is going to assassinate my colleague any moment, and I think I need to take drastic steps to prevent my colleague from harm.

In a general setting, if someone's life is in imminent danger due to a threat of a third person, am I justified in using lethal force agains that third person?

The first question is already an extremely complicated one, and even though it is commonly discussed in law classes in a general setting, no one answer could provide a complete and unambiguous solution. This is why courts of law are needed.

Now, in the second case, one might argue that the question is exactly the same, since the first paragraph is entirely irrelevant to the question for being introduced with the words "in a general setting". Clearly, though, the person asking the question did not think the story in the first paragraph was irrelevant, even if claimed otherwise, since if it really were, there would have been no point in including the background story. Providing background to complicated problems, especially problems involving people, is a useful thing to do, because it allowes answers that are better suited for the situation which is actually at hand. It also allows people to point out that the question asked may not be "the right one to ask", given the background. The question has not been asked "in a vacuum", but in the context of a real-life situation.

Also, since people are involved, one has to acknowledge that the answers given may have very real consequences to one or more parties. Pretending to not know about the real situation at hand is naive at best, in my view.

So, if you, the reader, are convinced that the background should be ignored, since what is asked for is a general answer, would you think it right to ignore the fact that the situation at hand in no way warrants use of lethal force, and answer in the second case with "Yes, if someone's life is in imminent danger due to a threat of a third person, one is justified in using lethal force"? Provided one knew this was the case in the applicable jurisdiction, of course.

What should we do about that particular question and its answers?

If we ignore for the moment the question whether answering just the generic question is doing the asker any service, one may argue that there is now a disconnect between the edited question and the answers. I would agree, but propose that the solution is not to delete/edit the answers, but rather to roll back the edits to the question. If someone is indeed interested in an answer to the generic question so much, another question can be posted, without destroying the valid answers that have been given so far.

After all, if I edited this meta question to be about the best sushi in town, you wouldn't delete the answers given here and demand discussion of sushi, would you?

Answer 2

For future similar questions, in my opinion we should put the question on hold immediately (with reason "unclear what you are asking"), so that it can be edited and improved by the OP without receiving inappropriate answers. Sometimes putting it on hold only means putting it on hold, not closing it, and this is one of those cases.

(As noted by @djechlin, it is a good idea to state explicitly in the comments that it is only a temporary closure while we wait for an edit, not to discourage the OP.)

The alternative is doing some major edits on the question ourselves without waiting for OP: this is appropriate in some cases, but it is a more dangerous practice to suggest in general, because there is always the risk of turning the question into something completely different than what the OP was trying to ask.

Answer 3

It would be a mistake to reason from this to some sort of general rule about answer scope or challenging premises, because that's not the real issue here.

It is widely accepted at Stack Exchange that we should be free to try to solve the underlying problem rather than answer the question as asked. Sometimes this leads to disagreements or disputes, and occasionally the premise of a question may be challenged inappropriately. But overall, I think this is a very good principle that increases the quality of the Q&A resource. It would be a mistake to abandon or weaken this principle in hopes of addressing a perceived problem in a single question or small group of questions.

Anyway, I don't think the challenges to the premise are really the problem. The simple fact is that this question was about a politically charged issue, and unfortunately that will divide people and bring out the worst in almost any forum. This site is no exception. There is no easy solution to this. In fact, not everyone will even agree about what the problem is, or that there is one.

I think the best options available right now are:

• Remove content based on being "not nice" where appropriate. In this case, the top answer challenges the premise, but is quite reasonable in tone. There are a lot of other answers that are much more antagonistic, while not really adding anything substantive. I see nothing wrong with deleting some of those answers.
• Edit questions to make them less controversial, and focus on a clearer answerable question, when possible. This was done here, to be about a hypothetical, unambiguous situation. It didn't really work to reduce the controversy, though, perhaps partly because of the combative way the OP responded to criticism in the edits and comments.

p.s. I find the criticism here of everyone who challenged the question's premise to go a bit far. The original question really did present a situation where reasonable people could disagree whether it was sexism. The OP's rationale for believing the student was sexist was given, so those challenging her were not simply speculating. And it's not clear to me that all of those challenging the OP had bad intentions. Keep in mind that an accusation of sexism could have harmful consequences both for the OP and the student.

Answer 4

@RQM's answer (and my guess as well) in a nutshell: people were questioning the premise because they were worried that if they were to answer the question literally, their answer would be misapplied to a situation that doesn't fit it. I find this a reasonable worry given the original post, and would probably have done the same.

Lots of answers on various StackExchange sites question the premise of the question (e.g., a student posts their homework, but the question makes it clear that the student doesn't understand the underlying definitions). This happens particularly often when the question is ambiguous and muddles up different issues. What we've seen here is a case of muddling up, although the political forcefield surrounding the issue has expectedly poisoned the discussion (though, compared to what we've been hearing just a few weeks ago, this was an exceptionally constructive debate).

Answer 5

You should challenge the premise because that is what intelligent people do.

The OP gave background to a situation. She had nothing more to add when questioned about this background. So to those answering the question we took the background as complete and fact.

The question "how to deal with sexism?" is not a question, or at least one appropriate for this site. You would need to have an example of sexism in the workplace to be able to relate it to the standards of this site. There are hundreds of ways to deal with this at a school, each different depending on the circumstances.

The OP never delivered though. She had a chance to convey to the readers why she thought there was sexism - (maybe there is and she doesn't explain things well). So to answer the question correctly you would have to state your opinion about the OP's situation. And my opinion was there was no sexism described and the OP's behavior seemed sexist.

The OP still had a chance to add information or dispute anything. Instead she started editing and taking away the facts of this case. But even without the facts in the last edit, we still know what they are so we answer the question as complete as we can.

To the contrary of others I think the question originally was valid. It was a microcosm of a teacher/student relationship and where things can go wrong. Now the question is so vague it is unanswerable. The question's edits should be rolled back. This is like someone asking on math stack - what is 2x6? and then editing it to say- what is 2x ? We know the answer is 12, editing the question doesn't help us unknow what was there.

Answer 6

Really simply the issue was this:

OP: "So something sexist happened. I'd like to ask a question about dealing with sexism in general..."
Everyone: "That really wasn't a sexist thing that happened." [lots of answers]
OP: "Actually I don't want your opinion on whether it was sexist, I was hoping we could just look past. So given that..."
Everyone: "that wasn't sexist, you sexist idiot." (Peruse the answers if you think I am exaggerating.)

The tone really did lower here. And lower, and lower, and lower. Disagreement with the OP's stance toward the situation became justification for really denigrating tone.

This is somewhat of a hole in what the philosophy of requiring context can provide. Sometimes you just don't want to have to justify the situation in the first place, especially on a sensitive topic such as sexism, and you just want to get to the advice of anyone who is willing to see the situation your way.

But this is addressed pretty thoroughly in another question on meta:

I think that examples in potentially subjective questions encourage people to pass judgment on the examples.

As a proposal, create a subjective-example tag, with description something like

This tag is for situations where discussing the specific situation or example would invite unconstructive criticism of the example itself. Questions should generally include descriptions of specific situations, but there are exceptions where details would invite excess speculation or criticism. When using this tag, question askers are encouraged to use their judgment for what details to omit and question viewers should take care to honor this judgment.

Answer 7

I think the answers to the original question were appropriate to the specific situation presented: it would be a bad idea to assume sexism was the reason for the student's actions.

Now the OP has a different question: what to do when there is sexism.

The best way to ask that is as a separate question, not an edit of the old question. A new question could be phrased something like:

I've had some interactions with a student (link to rev1 of old question) that I'm worried are signs of or due to sexism. If future interactions with this student provide clear evidence of sexism, what should I do?

I can't yet confirm or rule out sexism, but I'd like to be prepared in the unfortunate case that my suspicions are confirmed.

Answer 8

As originally written, the question was:

So I am not necessarily soliciting an answer specific to my situation, but in a more general setting. If you witness a student engaging in a sexist behavior, would you call him/her out? How would you do this without making the student feel intimidated?

If this were the original question and no other context was presented, it would be difficult to answer because it is so open-ended in the "more general setting". What is "sexist behavior"? How was it "witnessed" (did others see it)? Did the student make direct remarks? What is physical? The context in which this occurred would be very important for moving forward. Depending on the severity of the remark and the context, different actions might be appropriate. Sexist behavior of any kind should not be tolerated but there is still a (debatable) scale, perhaps:

implied sexism > direct verbal sexism > institutional sexism > physical sexism.

Each of these cases should be treated differently. So when the question is asked without context, I would have asked context to be presented. Without the context, the answer may not be applicable to the real life situation.

In this case the background was originally given. The background of the question suggested to me that, on the scale above, it was implied sexism and even then, perhaps not even true based on the details given. Therefore, it seemed necessary to (politely) inquire into the nature of the context or question the premise of the question in more detail.

While the post itself was well-meaning, there were a few comments in the background that made me question the premise. First, the question author states:

It feels sexist to me (I am female).

This suggests that the remark might have been sexist but the author is not sure. However, the next few comments:

I feel that I would be bullying the student if I were calling him out on his sexist remarks

(which, he is probably not aware of)

even the young people can have sexist views, and that this will probably happen again in the future

If you witness a student engaging in a sexist behavior

All of these suggest the post author has already made up their mind which does not seem like the best conclusion given the story. We weren't there, of course, so all we can go off of is what is written in the background. It seems reasonable to me to question the premise because it suggests the author has gone from "there may have been sexist remarks" to "there were sexist remarks". We should never discourage individuals from reporting sexism but we should also not encourage false accusations of sexism. False accusations are not professional. In an attempt to ensure that the author receives the best possible outcome to the situation, questioning their underlying assumptions is valid to me. This situation would be far more straightfoward if the student directly stated a sexist comment.

I do not approve of attacking the post author or aggressively trying to change their mind. But I see nothing wrong with politely engaging in a discussion to clarify the context. Additionally, the post author referred to the all posters as "collectively dyslexic" and was also aggressive with their comments and edits (some of which were later removed) which inflammed the situation further.

In conclusion: The premise is being challenged because if the premise is incorrect, it may not be necessary to take action at all.

Answer 9

What is happening with that question about handling a potentially sexist behavior?

Briefly: People don’t read or are incapable of sticking to the actual question. It’s a problem that we see an all sorts of question. Sometimes it’s not even a problem, because the asker clearly needs something else than what they asked for – but this does not apply here.

Quite ironically @ff524 was the first to question the premises in a comment, while she was the "victim" of a similar treatment 2 years ago.

In this case, addressing a problem with the premises in the comments is exactly the right way to go in my opinion. It does not address the actual question (hence it should not be an answer), but it points out potentially relevant information to the asker. Whether this information is actually relevant is something the asker has to decide¹, but we cannot just leave such a problem unmentioned.

However, given that the asker is now obviously aware of this potential problem and has entirely removed the respective parts from the question, all comments pertaining to this should be removed.

I think one should stick with answering the question, why not while pointing out a potential false positive, and not just question the premises.

For answers to this question, I agree. Every answer that does nothing but addressing issues with the premise should be deleted for failing to address the question. Note that this is not deleting an answer because it is bad or incorrect; it’s deleting an answer because it does not even attempt to answer the question at hand – it may be an answer to another question, but then almost everything is.

I wish to state that this is not a chameleon question – the question was clearly stating that it was not about this specific situation:

So I am not necessarily soliciting an answer specific to my situation, but in a more general setting.

Thus, everybody posting an answer addressing the premises was entering the risk of having their answer deleted anyway.

---

^{¹ after all, it could just be that the asker forgot to report a detail relevant to her allegations (but not to her question) as her report was intended to be “without disclosing too much of it”.}

Answer 10

I feel like the combative answers (and the ensuing combative replies by the OP) are more problematic than the original question. If you look at the original un-edited post, its tone is fairly neutral and it describes the author's specific situation and then very explicitly asks a general question:

So I am not necessarily soliciting an answer specific to my situation, but in a more general setting. If you witness a student engaging in a sexist behavior, would you call him/her out? How would you do this without making the student feel intimidated?

It also seems problematic to me that we're potentially retroactively identifying this as a question worthy of being put on hold. It's not unusual to see bad questions on hold within hours, if not minutes. This lends further evidence to me that the problem is in the answers, not the post. Also, from the help center:

But if you give us details and context, we can provide a useful answer.

Context is explicitly encouraged. However, it's not necessary to attack the OPs perception of the situation while still addressing both the actual question and the problems entailed in the context, which I tried to do in my answer.

In the future I think it would be useful to:

• Flag and delete answers that only address the context, and not the question
• Point out early in comments to the OP that context in a situation like this may distract from answers to their question. Or maybe that should be in the help center?

And then the bigger problem seems to me the way we moderate comments. I rarely see comments subject to much (perfectly possible I'm just missing that, so correct me if I'm wrong), other than getting moved to chat when there are too many. And yet here, most of the mess is in comments - there are only a handful of answers that ignored the question and only talked about the context. Just looking over our own guidelines, I feel like there's grounds to delete a ton of these comments.

Answer 11

I know I don't have much rep here, but I look up to this site as I work my way up college, and it was honestly pretty embarrassing to see the comments on that post. I left a few comments, but they're gone now, as they probably should be.

What frustrated me was two dozen people don't need to question the OP! I know it's nice to think that academia has no problems with sexism, but we all know that's not true.

Yes, it was easy to point to the older professor and say "Oh, well he was older, that's obviously 100% of the reason why the student respects him more than you! No sexism!"

But what annoyed me was that so many people felt the need to weigh in and make comments like "Wait ... where's the sexism here?" It didn't read like people questioning the premise in a rhetorical sense, it read like a bunch of people getting very defensive of accusations of mild sexism in a university probably hundreds of miles from them.

I know it would be frustrating as a man to be accused of sexism - especially when it is absolutely not clear the student was being sexist - but that's how the community should have responded, by politely pointing out other factors, not by dogpiling on the OP in an effort to prove how absolutely unimaginable it would be that a little bit of sexism occurred in the ivory tower.

Answer 12

It's not about academia!

The question is stated in some academic context, but that quickly becomes a backstory of the sexism related problem in the question. That is fine.

Sexism as a concept is not the problem. Differences in opinion are not the problem.

Sexism is hard to discuss

It is all about communication, discussion of differing opinions on the topic. And sexism is a topic that is hard to discuss, with a long, well known tradition.

So we can assume that the academia-related parts of the original question were actually meant as a context to express the communication in, a backstory.

So the original question is not much about academia, but about communication of a difficult topic in the first place.

My proposal is to move the question over to Interpersonal Skills SE.

They routinely help solving communication about sexism. Not only the one in the question, but also the much more intense one in the comment discussion. That flareup will not even start there. In part because they are beta, and somewhat small. But with high density of competence.

There, communication about sexism is one of the easier topics. They routinely handle things like family problems between three persons.

Answer 13

The more I look at this question, the more I think that plainly deleting answers or parts of answers that do not address the actual question won’t suffice to resolve the situation.

Most answers have been voted upon on account of their attack of the premises instead of the solution they provide to the actual problem (if any). Hence the mess could only be resolved by resetting all votes (which is not possible even for moderators and would yield more confusion and disturbance than anything else).

I therefore suggest the following course of action:

• Let the asker re-post the question in its current state (without explicit premises).
• Under all answers addressing the actual question, leave comments inviting the authors to re-post their answer on the actual question.
• Delete the original question after locking it for a week or so for reference.

For future similar questions, we should take care to emphasise the focus early by editing the question accordingly and deleting non-answers quickly.

Answer 14

The general question

If the question had no context, it would be Too Broad and need to be closed immediately. I cite the What types of questions should I avoid asking? page:

Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.

I consider this to be self evident. These kind of open ended posts don't make good questions for SE's Q&A format.

Asking, "How do I handle sexist remarks in general?" is as vague and open ended as going to DBA and asking, "How do I index my columns, in general?" or to SO and asking, "How do I parse files in general?" or to SciFi and asking, "How do Sith win battles, in general?" The only reasonable answer you can give is, "It depends on the specifics."

The specific question

So the general question is unanswerable, but the user decided to provide some context anyway. On the other hand, the specific situation described is answerable. So as an SE user, you're left with two possible actions:

1. Edit out the specific situation and close the question.
2. Edit out the general question and answer in the specific context.

The first option throws away a perfectly good question. The second option salvages the question and creates a useful resource, but if you believe no action should be taken in this case, it probably requires a frame challenge. At a bare minimum, you'd have to say, "You shouldn't do anything because there isn't sufficient evidence of sexism here. Taking action is likely to be detrimental to everyone involved." But that isn't much different than the frame challenge.

So the answer to, "Why don't people stick to the question?" is, "Because they were trying to salvage the question and make it a useful resource." The only real failing on that front is that no one dared to edit out the "general" bits. Any issues with rudeness or arguing are a completely separate matter.