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Is this question acceptable?: Questions for importance of concepts

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    Some questions for the importance of concepts seem to be well accepted, e.g. Mike Shulman's question http://mathoverflow.net/questions/49483/why-are-profinite-topologies-important, also search for "important". Others trigger lengthy discussions what the OP might mean with "importance", boiling down to the fact, that there is nothing fruitfully definable as "importance", e.g. my question http://mathoverflow.net/questions/51682/reasons-for-the-importance-of-planarity-and-colorability

    What makes a question for importance acceptable and well received?
    • CommentAuthorRyan Budney
    • CommentTimeJan 12th 2011 edited
     
    By and large I interpret "why is X important" style questions as being lazy. "Important for what?" is the natural retort. "What do you value?" might be another.

    I think traditional ways in which these posts are redeemed include: Perhaps the OP knows the idea is considered important by someone else, but doesn't know why. Perhaps the OP has a sense the idea is useful, but hasn't found a concrete formulation of why. Or perhaps enough of the people reading the post know what the OP values, so they can fill in the blanks regarding "Important for what?".

    I think if enough of the above fail, then people start asking for more details from the OP.

    I think questions of the form "what is the right definition/way to think of..." have similar issues.
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    Your question is not of the form "why is X important?" It is of the form "could we have predicted that X is important for objective reasons internal to mathematics?" which is quite different and I still don't really understand what it means. If you had asked "why is planarity important?" then your question would have just been closed as a duplicate and there would have been no argument in the comments.

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    I fixed it.
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    @Qiaochu: I would have liked to enter into a discussion on your comment (I intended the two questions - in the subject and the body of my post - NOT to be quite different), but I am afraid that not even MMO is the right place for such a discussion. That's a pity for me, but maybe lucky for you ;-) Who knows?
    (Forums are great, but only up to the point, when a personal conversation would save lots of time and misunderstanding. I am afraid that I cannot clear up such meticulous misunderstandings by forum posts.)
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    Dear Hans, I left fairly detailed feedback on that question of yours and personally, I am still not sure whether you actually know exactly what kind of answer you were hoping for when asking the question. I think that the asker not knowing exactly what he is looking for is not a good omen for the question.

    I would recommend you to be less worried about asking questions that are well received, but simply ask questions that you really want to know the answer to. That includes knowing precisely what it is that you actually want to know and knowing what kind of answer you are looking for. By the way, I think that meta.MO is a perfectly good place to address the latter question.

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