"... including any attempts you have made to solve it."

Question

Me again. Blind application of that criterion "ideally including any attempts you have made to solve it" just seems silly for some problems.

Consider this question. Seems like an excellent question to me - surely it's at least curious that such a bad question got four upvotes?

I mean I understand the point to the "missing context... include your attempts to solve it" thing - we want to discourage students from thoughtlessly asking routine questions that can be solved by standard methods covered in class. But this question is not that - if someone asked this question in class I'd be infinitely pleased to have such a thoughtful student.

Seems to me the difference between this question and the typical PSQ question that deserves to be closed is that MSE is a better place with this question than without it.

The "context" is clear from the, erm, context: We know that if $f$ is continuous it has an antiderivative; what sort of weaker result can we obtain under weaker hypotheses?

And regarding attempts to solve it, it's an actual problem, not an exercise - I spent all morning yesterday thinking about it and there's more or less nothing I could say about my "attempts to solve it". I mean I didn't "attempt" to make $F(x)=\int_0^x f(t) dt$ work because it's immediately obvious that the integral need not exist. And I have no idea what else I might "attempt".

Hence, to satisfy the people who are going to ask what my question is:

Question: Can anyone give me a hypothetical example of something the OP might have said about "attempts to solve it"?

If yes that would be great, might help me solve it. If, as I suspect, no, then closing it for that reason just seems wrong.

(Before making insulting conjectures regarding my motivation here you should note that I saw the OP had accepted my answer before seeing the question had been closed, and my reaction was to comment that the answer really shouldn't be accepted, since after all it didn't actually answer the question. Of course my saying that leads to the question of what the point to my answer was. The point was to point out that a counterexample must be fairly hairy, to save people from wasting time trying to construct counterexamples that can't possibly work.)

Answer 1

I will repeat that the full text of the banner displayed after the question is put on hold looks like this:

This question is missing context or other details: Please improve the question by providing additional context, which ideally includes your thoughts on the problem and any attempts you have made to solve it. This information helps others identify where you have difficulties and helps them write answers appropriate to your experience level.

In particular, it links to: How to ask a good question. This FAQ item has also a section called Provide Context. You can see there that showing your own attempts is not the only possibility how to add context. In fact, many users advocate that other forms of context are quite often better (although perhaps they might be more difficult to provide by the asker). See the discussion here: Can we stop the “Show your work craze”?.

So even in the cases where it is difficult for the OP to show their work, they might have other options.

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The question you are asking about at the time when it was closed looked like this:

Let $f:\mathbb{R}\to \mathbb{R}$ be continuous at $x$ for every $x\in I$ where $I\subset \mathbb R$ . Does there always exist a function $F:\mathbb{R}\to \mathbb{R}$ differentiable on $I$ and $F'(x) = f(x)$ for every $x \in I$. ?

Correct definition of antiderivative function

Existence of an antiderivative for a continuous function on an arbitrary subset of $\mathbb{R}$

You said yourself in the question here on meta:

The "context" is clear from the, erm, context: We know that if $f$ is continuous it has an antiderivative; what sort of weaker result can we obtain under weaker hypotheses?

The OP did not mention even that they know this.

Moreover, there were two links (one to another question, the other one to an answer) in the question without even mentioning what is the purpose of those links.

The same user asked several questions close to this one:

• 2853575: Existence of an antiderivative for a continuous function on an arbitrary subset of $\mathbb{R}$
• 2853497: Existence of antiderivative on a part $I$ of $\mathbb{R}$
• 2854891: Correct definition of antiderivative function

Adding a few words what the OP learned from those question and how they are actually different from this one could count as context too.

Personally, I would consider something like this certainly a sufficient context. (Although I'd guess I'm much less strict about context than most users.)