Well before the LLM explosion I would often preface my answers with some form of praise for the question. It depends a lot on audience of course, but it’s amazing how many people tend to perceive direct answers to their questions as negative… and just as amazing how far a little strategic sycophancy goes to temper that. Even though everyone knows it’s half-sincere dead weight.
And in parallel: a non-trivial number of people in class or at work are asking questions for no reason other to establish their own social credibility as smart and or knowledgeable.
Validating their ego and effort and social position can fulfill their social desires regardless of an answer that dismisses, say, buzzword soup as both inappropriate to the current context and incoherent to people who know what those words mean.
