The simple answer is probably no, because even where those experts aren’t driven solely by the pursuit of money – as in, they might actually want to improve the state of the art, protect people from harm, prevent the encroachment of the surveillance state, etc… – they are still only human. And that means they have only so much time on this blue earth. If they spend their time answering simple questions that could have been found on the first page of a web search, that’s taking time away from other pursuits in the field.
Necessarily then, don’t be surprised if some experts ask for a minimum consultation fee, as a way to weed out the trivial stuff. If nothing else, if their labor is to have any meaning at all when they do their work professionally, they must value it consistently as a non-zero quantity. Do not demand that people value their labor at zero.
With that out of the way, if you do have a question that can’t be answered by searching existing literature or the web, then the next best is to ask in an informal forum, like here on Lemmy. Worst case is that no one else knows. But best case is that someone works in the field and is bored on their lunch break, so they’ll help point you in the right direction. They may even connect you to a recognized expert, if the question is interesting enough.
You were in fact lucky that they paid any attention at all to your
proposal, and they’ve already given you many hundreds if not thousands of
dollars worth of free consultancy between them
Don’t be the person that causes someone to be have to write this.
The simple answer is probably no, because even where those experts aren’t driven solely by the pursuit of money – as in, they might actually want to improve the state of the art, protect people from harm, prevent the encroachment of the surveillance state, etc… – they are still only human. And that means they have only so much time on this blue earth. If they spend their time answering simple questions that could have been found on the first page of a web search, that’s taking time away from other pursuits in the field.
Necessarily then, don’t be surprised if some experts ask for a minimum consultation fee, as a way to weed out the trivial stuff. If nothing else, if their labor is to have any meaning at all when they do their work professionally, they must value it consistently as a non-zero quantity. Do not demand that people value their labor at zero.
With that out of the way, if you do have a question that can’t be answered by searching existing literature or the web, then the next best is to ask in an informal forum, like here on Lemmy. Worst case is that no one else knows. But best case is that someone works in the field and is bored on their lunch break, so they’ll help point you in the right direction. They may even connect you to a recognized expert, if the question is interesting enough.
Above all, what you absolutely must not do is something like emailing a public mailing list for cryptography experts, gathered to examine the requirements of internet security, to look at your handmade data encryption scheme, which is so faulty that it causes third-party embarrassment when read a decade later.
Don’t be the person that causes someone to be have to write this.