Electrical Engineering =/= Electronics

Question

Electrical Engineering is not "Electronics".

I've seen many questions shut down because it's out of the "electronics" scope.

I fail to see the logic.

Answer 1

Electrical Engineering means different things to different people. To a consumer, fixing a consumer device would be electrical engineering (which is incorrect to anyone who is an engineer). To a hobbyist it means circuits or playing around with audio or high voltage equipment. To a student EE means finishing an EE degree an help with coursework. And to an electrical engineer it means answering (and sometimes asking questions) about their area of expertise (which is usually circuits here).

That being said the community has decided what kind of questions are ok to ask and which ones aren't. At the same time SE has also decided that some forms of questions are not ok (like asking for resources or asking for a place to buy things).

Because of this questions that are not on topic are closed, you can find guidance on which questions to ask here:
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask

I've seen many questions shut down because it's out of the "electronics" scope.

This is a natural part of SE and it keeps the question quality high and above the standard of general forums where many questions of different quality or many types of discussion are allowed. Consider that many types of questions would not be answered because there aren't many people to answer them (there are a few power/industrial engineers here but not many so it may take longer to get that question answered) most people here deal with circuits or digital design.

In addition EE is not the place to ask a question that would be best answered by a mechanical engineer or physicist. Engineering.SE would be the best place to ask a mechanical engineering question. While EE's understand physics the site is not the best place to handle these questions.

That being said you are more then welcome to ask about asking a question in the chat (or pinging a mod through flagging or chat) to see if it would be closed or not (or asking off topic questions in the chat). Additionally if you see a question closed that is on topic, you can flag it and a mod will be more than happy to reopen it.

Answer 2

Assuming that you are referring to your question:

I am one of the people who voted to close. After reading the comments and the question, I felt that the question dealt more with energy and mechanics and physics rather than any specific concept in electrical engineering.

One thing you could have done was to draw a neat diagram showing the pulley setup and whatever electrical machine / parameter that ties this to electrical engineering. Without a neat diagram, and only a vague description, IMO, it increases the effort of the people who try to answer. There is nothing that we can specifically point out to say it works / it wont work and here's why.

We can see from the attempted answers where people try to say that even though the force is less it has to travel a longer distance so that the total work / energy (force x distance) remains the same. If you had included a neat diagram, it would have been easier to point out.

My first attempt was to flag it for migration; but in the list of sites, (physics.se) and (engineering.se) didn't pop up. Hence I voted to close so that you can ask in one of the more appropriate forums.

I would still say that the question is suitable^[1] for the physics.se (if you can add a good diagram showing an example setup of pulleys rocks and generators.

^{[1] You can definitely expect people to get riled up about yet another free-infinite-energy generating machine / setup. You should take care to word your question carefully to avoid such an implication IMO.}

Answer 3

You haven't given examples, so this is a bit tough to answer, but in general, I sympathize. To a certain extent, this stack is unreceptive to some types of questions in the area of professional practice, licensing, the design process, regulations, standards, etc. -- the type of stuff that is bread and butter for practicing engineers.

I just chalk this up to a community choice, and I just roll with it. For most intents and purposes, Electrical Engineering is somewhat of a misnomer. It's a bit unfortunate, because this is the sort of stuff that is hard to find in other ways (without paying for it!), but it also wouldn't drive a ton of traffic.