Volume is Not Precision
29 Jan 2026
Something that I’ve learned through life, work, and relationships is that communication isn’t key, good communication is. In my experience, theres one idea that consistently improves communication: conciseness. When you’re concise, you avoid overloading the person you are talking to with information, and conciseness also signals that you actually understand what you’re saying or asking. This principle maps cleanly into the rules that are outlined in Eric Steven Raymond’s essay “How To Ask Questions The Smart Way”. One of its most important points is summed up in a single line: “Volume is not precision”.
It was actually hard to find a “not smart” question on Stack Overflow so instead, I had ChatGPT generate one for me. A “not smart” example might be something like: “Python not working. I’m trying to count the lines in a text file but it doesn’t work. What am I doing wrong?” It’s impossible to answer reliably because it provides no code, no error message and no sample input. This question may be short, but it isn’t actually concise. It saves words by simply deleting information so its brevity actually turns into ambiguity.
A good example of a smart question on Stack Overflow is this one I found titled “Why does HTML think ‘chucknorris’ is a color?” “Why does HTML think ‘chucknorris’ is a color?”. It is focused on one behavior, includes a tiny reproducible snippet, and provides a comparison case that changes the outcome. This all shows that the original poster tested, observed, and did his homework. What I really like about this post is just how short it is. Three sentences were all this person needed to communicate the behavior and demonstrate with a minimal example. There’s no filler and theres just enough context to make the question immediately answerable.
<body bgcolor="chucknorris">test</body>
Observed result: 🟥 red-ish background
Conversely:
<body bgcolor="chucknorr">test</body>
Observed result: 🟨 yellow-ish background