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He may be on to something...
I think this is a good thing, and a bad thing. On the one hand, people recognize MO as a great source of knowledge for mathematics. This is great. On the other hand he says "I could post my question to a site like MathOverflow—and in the half hour before the question was closed for being off-topic, I’d get vastly more reliable answers than the ones the NRC took fifteen years and more than four million dollars to generate" meaning that perhaps people don't respect the editorial policies of MO enough, because someone will answer off topic questions before they are closed. This is a bad thing.
@Bill: I think you misread what Grétar wrote.
Moreover, Scott Aaronson is well aware of what is an isn't appropriate at MathOverflow, and was making tongue-in-cheek fun of our stodginess (which he, I think, implicitly approves of).
@Bill. I think I wasn't clear enough. I agree, that this is not a topic for MO, my point was that MO can't get a reputation for being a site where people can ask questions that are not research level, and get good answers before they are closed.
@Scott. I know that Scott Aaronson was being tongue-in-cheek, but it might reflect upon how other people view the site. I mean, we are still getting obvious homework problems as questions, and they are still getting answered before they are closed.
But unless we make clear to those who do answer homework questions, many of whom presumeably don't read Meta, that this will be the policy, I can imagine a whole bunch of whining about "what happened to my answer?"
If we were to clearly post this policy somewhere obvious to see, I fear that it would partially defeat the purpose: some new serious users may be apt to think that this is not a community policy, rather a strict enforcement by a minority of moderators who are tight a%%es. (As in, the purpose of "lead by example and not by iron fist" will be compromised.)
Since I am a moderator and reading this, I thought I would just chime in. At the moment, I don't feel (and I haven't gotten any strong sense from the other moderators about this) that the the amount of HW being posted is problematic, or that it requires a more active response than we are taking right now. On a given day, close to 100 questions are active (asked/answered/edited) and about 3 or 4 are closed. I still kind of wonder who the people asking these HW questions are, but on the internet, there are alway a certain number of people who can't get with the program; it comes with the territory.
Kevin, I see no problem with flagging, for those who are willing to put in the effort to click and type a bit. I have been deleting obviously spurious answers whenever I encounter them, so this would not be a substantial change. Those of you with 10k+ points can check out (tools) -> (links) -> (recently deleted) if you're really interested. I usually leave a short comment explaining why I am deleting the answer.
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