And again, with a bit of poking around, and some logical thought applied, the first question would never have been asked, saving the need for the followup.
Perhaps.
But I've seen my share of production changes that were made for convenience and which introduced incompatibilities between the old and the new, such that the new stuff could not be easily retrofitted onto the old.
That such a thing is
possible is sufficient to prevent the first question from being easily eliminated without finding a direct answer to it.
If we've gone that far, then it's not a stretch to stumble across the Vorshlag posts find this little gem:
Right. I presumed the OP had read that bit, actually...
Now to me, there are some implications there. First, the supercession number would imply that there is a pretty great similarity between the 05-10 and 11-up calipers. The later calipers are certainly a valid retro-fit, so there MAY be hope for the earlier caliper to fit the GT500 rotor.
Perhaps. But similarity isn't sufficient for this.
Direct fit is necessary for the earlier calipers to work with the mounting brackets. And given the forces the parts in question are going to be experiencing, modification of the bracket might not be possible without compromising its structure.
The point is that a direct answer is not strictly deducible in this case. It requires
direct knowledge.
So, with a little more digging, like, I don't know, visting a vendor's website who sells all the parts in the form of a kit? We would find their disclaimer:
Right. And that tells you everything you need to know.
But in order to know that the vendor sells all the parts in the form of a kit, you either have to have seen an advertisement for it, or gone to the vendor's site yourself and found the kit in question, or seen reference to it in a thread. Visiting the vendor's site directly is easy enough, particularly since that vendor is the one that's posting about the conversion in the first place, so I do think it's reasonable to expect someone to find the kit if they go looking for it (as they should in this case). It's the second entry in the "brakes" section of the S197 section, so it's not exactly hard to find.
The main point is that with a single search session, and a little bit of thought and reasoning, the post that started this thread never would have been submitted. Instead, it would have read: "I just installed the new GT500 rear brakes and..."
Sure. Look, I
do agree with the general point you're making here. It's on us to do our due diligence when looking for information, and to ask informed questions. I fully agree with you that it's detrimental to simply spoon feed people -- detrimental to them
and to us.
And perhaps the OP is deserving of some criticism for failing to find the answers to the questions he asked on his own.
But none of that negates my point, which is that searching and logical thought do not
guarantee that an answer will be found to a question that is posed, even when that answer exists out there and is even indexed by a search engine. As such, that someone is asking a question does
not automatically imply that they didn't first attempt to find the answer.
The more basic the question, the more reasonable it is to assume that the person asking hasn't done his due diligence, because it's more likely that the question has already been answered (multiple times, at that!). I would argue that the OP's question is specific enough that it's within the boundaries of reason to give the OP a break for not having found the answer himself.
These things have to be considered on a case by case basis.
I think that the real crux of the argument for the "arbiters of protocol, officious intermeddlers and nattering nabobs of negativity" is that WE somehow manage to learn things without putting up superfluous or redundant posts. Why can't others? WE spent time learning to search properly, and learned a bunch in the process.
And how, exactly, did you learn to search properly?
I would wager it is by failing to find what you were looking for and for someone else to suggest better search terms, right?
In other words, wasn't it through the process of asking questions such as that which the OP asked here that you learned to search better?
For myself, I honestly can't remember, because I've been on the internet since before search engines even
existed.
If the OP is reasonably bright, this experience will teach him how to search better.
Yes, there is an art to running a search. That said, in this day and age, anyone who hasn't at least started to develop search chops is way on the bottom end of the bell curve. If you don't get hits on your search, ask yourself: Am I REALLY the only person that is having this problem, or thinking about this particular mod? If that's NOT the case (and in 99.999% of the cases, it's not!), then you need to refine your search terms, or approach the question a different way. Yes, that will require some form of internal experiential filter, however it will prevent posts like this:
I completely agree. But as I said, search engines can be finicky. Yes, you can (and should!) experiment with various search terms in various combinations, but in the end, it's
still sometimes a matter of sheer luck. I don't think this specific case is necessarily quite at that point, but the fact that I've been doing searches on the internet ever since the invention of search engines, combined with the fact that my quick and dirty searches for this thread did
not lead me directly to the page that had the real answer (I did a couple of basic Google searches, and the number of irrelevant hits made them unusable), suggests to me that in the OP's case, he may deserve a little slack.
But yes,
in general people these days should be searching and finding what they're after, for the most part.
With a little luck, and a little self-policing we can keep the amount of that level of drivel and stupidity out of our little corner of the bar. Coddling the search-deficient is only the first step (strictly IMO) towards letting that type of gross stupidity corrupt the fairly high-level content that we currently enjoy.
I completely agree with this as well. It's when you have a threshold case, as I regard this one to be, that things get interesting. Which direction should those who respond err? On the side of refusing to answer the question and telling the person to search further? Or on the side of answering the question?
Keep in mind, too, that by answering the question in a thread, that thread is also going to be picked up by search engines and, thus, will
increase the chance that people who search for the answer will find it.
Just how easy do you think it would be to find the answer you're looking for if it existed in only one place on the internet?
As regards doing due diligence, tell me this (and I'm making something of an assumption here, so please forgive me for that): why don't you expect that everyone you teach high performance driving to will know all about load transfer, contact patch management, the traction circle, etc., before you begin talking to them? Aren't they supposed to be doing due diligence first, and learning all of the concepts of high performance driving before they even get into the car for that first track session? Isn't it something of a double standard to expect people in the forum to search until they're blue in the face before asking questions, while
not expecting the same of your students? Of course, for all I know, you might actually expect the same of your students, but you certainly don't come across that way (and believe me, it's much appreciated! I've learned quite a lot from seeing your answers to my sometimes inane questions). I'd guess there's a balance there, too, and that the balance point may be very different for a number of good reasons.
I guess that I'm not an Obama poster child... Change is NOT a definitively good thing, and I for one, refuse to sink to the level of the lowest common denominator.
Nor should you. There is balance to be found here, just as there is balance to be found anywhere. I don't believe in spoon-feeding answers to people, but I don't believe in withholding answers when it is reasonable to believe that they've exerted
some effort to find the answer, or when the question is one that one hasn't seen asked before. In this specific instance,
both conditions seem to apply, and that to me tips the balance in favor of answering the question for the OP.
