I asked a non-homework question that was closed for being homework. How do I re-word it?

Question

I asked a question "How to use the born rule to find..." and it was closed for being a homework-like question. Now this was not a homework question. It's also not the case that I am lazy. I own multiple QM texts and have read through them trying to figure out how to solve these kinds of problems. I've also gone through physics grad school and I never learned how to solve these kinds of problems, which is surprising because of how simple they are. I suspect you do learn how to solve these kinds of problems if you go into certain fields like QM information. But in any case I think it is true that nowhere do typical QM texts cover how to answer these kinds particular kinds of problems. This feels like a very frustrating catch-22. Also, to make it even clearer that this was not a homework question, it was a follow-up to this question.

Can someone tell me how I can re-word the question? I thought I was being helpful by drawing a diagram and making a specific example that was complex enough to capture the salient points of how to solve these kinds of problems, but I realize that kind of specificity may make it look like a homework problem.

Answer 1

There are a few different reasons this can happen, but in this case, your best bet is probably to follow the same advice we give to askers of homework-like questions: show what you've tried and change the question to ask about the specific physics concept that you're confused about as you try to work through the problem yourself.

Despite the fact that our homework policy is called a homework policy, the recommendations we give there are not so different from the expectations we have of all questions on this site.

Answer 2

The main problem with that, that most of the homework questions have a very low quality, is asked by an unknown user who never gets again back. I think it would be very improductive to provide them essentially a free, unpaid problem solving service, despite I must mention: the math SE does this, they solve nearly every question if its quality is enough to decipher them.

Another problem with such questions that they confront academian ethics. Many of the well-respected site users are educating undergrad physicsists as their daily job, and enforce their ethical system doing that. They surely won't take part its exact opposite as their hobby.

Despite none of these problems are exactly mentioned in @DavidZ 's reasoing and his refered meta posts, I think these are the reasons why homework questions aren't really liked here.

The site users don't have any opportunity to check if your question was a actually homework question, or only it looked as if it would be. Thus, the exact meaning of the "homework questions policy" is that "homework-looking questions policy". Not the hw is forbid here, but asking questions looking hw questions.

After your question was closed, theoritally you could "fix" and reopen it. Practically, your chances are nearly negligible for that. And getting useful answers after that are doubly negligible, because most view hits the youngest questions.

But the rules you confronted here, are relatively easily cheated. Most of the long-term close-voters here doing his task highly algorithmically, and most question can be formulated to avoid their close reasons.

In your place I did this:

1. I would read DavidZ's link, here is how you shoud formulate your hw question to survive.
2. I tried to edit and reopen the question.
3. After it doesn't happen, silently deleted the closed question,
4. And later I would ask this again, in a heavily transformed form, which avoids the rules of the close-voters.

Good luck!