[Quick tip]: Asked for advice on IH and not sure which advice-givers to listen to?

I was thinking about this at the LA meetup I went to last night. People were presenting, it was impossible to give good feedback without asking a ton of questions first. You never really know what someone's goals are, what they've already tried, what constraints they're working under, etc., unless you've asked.

The entrepreneurship center I run at the University of Miami, our entire model is built around socratic method (asking you questions). 9/10 you don't know what questions to really ask, or you've never asked yourself these introspective questions. So we focus on getting the entrepreneur to ask why they made these assumptions a lot, or how are their competitors approaching the problem, or how do people solve the problem now.

I run a local mastermind with the same 10 founders or so. Each month 3 founders gets 20 minutes respectively to ask a burning question or get help on a problem.

More often than not the founder has a muddied thought that's not really a problem or goal but a proposed solution, e.g. "should I do X?". We have a tendency to jump straight to "solution-eering" saying "here's how I did X" or "don't do X, try Y" vs. asking follow up questions.

Next month I'm going to try a bit more structure to the discussion with a simple rubric:

What is your goal?
What are the problems standing in the way of you achieving that goal?
What is the root cause of each (top) problem?
What sensible plans can you implement to work around or overcome each problem?

I got this from Principles by Ray Dalio.

It's hard to remember to ask follow-up questions (think critically) in general and even more so online or at informal meetups.

Would be interesting if there were ways the IH forum's design could somehow encourage getting to the underlying goal behind someone's request for feedback and asking follow up questions.

Well, yes and no. I am talking often to beginning developers and they ask me some basic questions. I often first give them "semi-answer", like check X and Y.

Does that mean I am full of shit? Well no, it means I have vastly larger experience than him, I most likely was stuck at the similar problem before, and I use probability to answer a question using least resources I am willing to provide at such an early stage of Q&A. IF this won't work or asker will give more information, I will dive in, but without that, let's him first check basics, and then let us consider more in-depth problems. Let's him do more work if he wants more work/advice from me.

What I want to say is, that for some people with vastly larger experience, those questions are generic and most likely will get fixed with one sentence answer, but the answer should encourage asker to either providing more data, being more precise or taking actual action.

I agree that a lot of people are BSing their way of wanting to be seen as "guru". This ratio decreases with age, fails, and experience though. If you see 21 yo (no offense to 21-year-olds) giving you long term advice on stock market, you might disregard it, since he probably did not live through any stock crash and his advise is based on most recent knowledge he acquired (which can be invalid, but he does not know it, because he is yet to fail and learn). And I see this on IH often as well - people with literally months of business experience give feedback like they are from Wharton.

There are different groups of people, and different people process information in different ways. Some will use statistics, math, fact-checking, while others will use probability, imagination, and empathy. The first is more precise (but often too precise and time wasting), while second is more efficient (but allows occasional error to pop up).

Agree, both on the OP and response from @csallen

Just wanted to point out that feedback and advice aren't the same thing :) And often times, we aren't clear about which of those we're asking for (not to mention whether we ask in the best medium).