<p>I am only in my second week with this site and I have enjoyed many of the questions and answers and discussions but as I get to understand the purpose of the site and how it is being used, I have some concerns.</p>

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<li><p>The site provides experts in all disciplines prepared to answer technical questions.  The experts strive to provide the best possible answers.  My experience with Cross Validated is that there are a lot of smart people with specialized expertise in R, classification/machine learning and many other important applied areas in statistics.  This provides a great opportunity for someone who is stumped on a problem to get top-notch consulting advice for free.  So I ask whether this is really a good thing since it could take away work people who do professional consulting for a living.  Also are we encouraging laziness as someone who has a problem they find to be difficult might instead of thinking out the problem and doing their own research to find the solution decides it is much easier to raise the question here and just see all the great ideas poor out with practically no effort.  We even help them reformulate poorly posed questions.</p></li>
<li><p>Some students come here for free tutoring.  There seems to be an awareness here that this poses problems.  Students should study the course material and try to solve the problems themselves.  Cross Validated asks that these questions be labelled as homework and the approach to answering is to give guidance rather than a complete solution.  Nevertheless doesn't this also also encourage laziness as the student can just pose it here or in several places on StackExchange to get as much help as possible before doing any of the work on their own?</p></li>
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