Weird question, maybe pointless, and yeah, kinda petty I will admit, but eh, there’s no stupid questions and I kinda got curious after an interaction (see after the dots if your curious).
IDK, everytime someone hits someone else with “figure it out yourself” to a question, all I hear is: “There’s nothing to figure out, but I’m just gonna disengage while trying to save face”. Of course, it’s not for 100% of cases, but I mean, if you can’t even muster up a basic laconic explanation, and instead go “figure it out” to a question that’s being sincerely asked…IDK, man, it really makes you think on who needs to figure what out lol
Is that just me or nah?
…
Some background: I made the mistake of actually engaging with a Youtube comment today. I know, I know, rookie mistake, but some of them can lead to intetesting convos. It basically went something like this:
Random: (talking about Baldur’s Gate 3’s Character Creator) It’s 2023, a game shouldn’t need modders to add things you can do in unmodded Skyrim. They failed
Me: There’s a lotta things you can do here that you can’t do in Skyrim and vice versa, not just in character creation. That’s…kinda normal, so what’s the problem here?
Random: I like how you say BG3’s character creator’s better but never offered any examples. Continue to not understand basic concepts.
Me: Listen. I’m not picking a fight, just trying to understand the complaints here. Also, never said it was better, just that there are things that you can’t do in Skyrim that you can in BG3 and vice versa. But if you want a list on things you can do: gives list and other examples, even on what you can do in Skyrim but not in BG3’s CC. There’s differences, but yeah, not every game’s gonna try and emulate Skyrim or Witcher “but better” (and even if they do, they’ll always be something they won’t do as well).
Random: your opinion is subjective, so is mine. I dismiss your points and subjectively choose mine.
Me: And that’s valid, man! Hey, so, about those basic concepts i couldn’t get, what exactly were they?
Random: figure it out yourself
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I did say it was petty lmao
Either “I believe in you. You can do it!”
or
“I don’t have the time or crayons to explain it to you right and you would probably eat the crayons.”
Even the “I believe in you” could seem kinda like the second one lol
You’re probably right that it can depend on the context (I even stated it myself), I’ve just never seen a “kind” “Figure it out for yourself” in the wild. IDK, I’m the type to explain it even if it’s stupid obvious, unless it’s something like “why is everyone mean to me after i insulted them and the thing they liked?” where it’s very obviously a troll, then I’ll be snarky and go “you tell me”
Removed by mod
The flipside is that unless you’re hired to be someone’s teacher, nobody is obligated to explain things to anybody else. There are also “the journey is the destination” type questions where the answer doesn’t matter as much as the process of figuring it out yourself. Like science experiments in school where the answer is already known and the point is to teach kids certain ways of thinking or how to use certain tools. So yeah, there are legitimate reasons to say that, but a lot of the time it is indeed a cop-out. And your example is absolutely one of those times.
Yeah, that’s them saying they are done with the conversation.
That said, I’ve seen people open with it as an argument here on Lemmy, so what you went through seems tame.
I only use it when people ask me for sources that are readily available through any search engine. Like bruh I’m not filling an entire comment with hyperlinks when you can just switch apps and find all of them
Yeah, but I’ve also seen in cases where I’ve provided sources and the other person says to do my own research even after providing resources.
Yeah that happens a lot on TikTok. I replied to a guy and gave him multiple sources and he just kept acting like they weren’t right there
In this case, I think your interpretation (“I’m just gonna disengage while trying to save face”) is spot on.
I can see it going the other way, though. I might finally respond with “figure it out for yourself” after a sealioning pedant has exhausted me, and I would rather end the conversation than explain my point for the third or fourth time.
As far as I’m aware, I think just walking away from a sea lion is the best course of action. Except, well, I wasn’t sealioning.
I gave him the chance to explain what I was missing was ONCE(and literally going “I’m not picking a fight or being a smartass, just curious of where my screwup was”), and he just threw “figure it out” at me …tbf, I did basically prove his original statement wrong, so it could’ve been that