Asking the Right Questions
Feb. 23rd, 2023 09:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithThis article talks about asking the right questions.
Children are question-asking savants, but adults often lose their affinity for the inquisitive.
I never outgrew asking questions, including stream-of-consciousness chain questions. And my hippie parents never outgrew it either.
Asking questions helps us organize our thinking around what we don’t know. As with any art or skill, it requires practice and commitment to ask the right questions.
The right question is anything that gets you information you're looking for. It doesn't have to be fancy. It certainly doesn't require much practice, because children are so good at it. All they need is a question word at least one other word for a topic. Sure it benefits from practice if you want to ask about esoteric topics, but not all worthwhile questions are esoteric. A recent conversation from our visit to a Mexican bakery boiled down to, "What's that?" "I have no idea. Let's buy one and eat it."
Many people, myself included, can find asking questions to be daunting. It fills us with worry and self-doubt, as though the act of being inquisitive is an all-too-public admission of our ignorance.
If you ever need to find a smart person, or a good problem-solver, just look for the person asking the most questions or the most far-out questions. Smart people don't need to look smart. They just are smart. And they know things because they ask questions, take things apart, and aren't afraid to shake up the status quo.
But once upon a time, we were all questing-asking savants. We started grilling our parents as toddlers, and by preschool, our epistemic inquiries plumbed the depths of science, philosophy, and the social order. Where does the sun go at night? How come zippers stay zipped? Why doesn’t that man have a home like we do? Why do rocks sink but ice floats? Is the blue you see the same blue I see?
I still ask questions like that. It's why I'm a speculative fiction writer ... and an activist. It's also why people say I'm not human. Well, they're not wrong. I have the ability to look at any society, even one I'm standing in, from the outside. It's not special, it's not permanent, it's just there. It has a given pattern of strengths and weaknesses, perspectives and assumptions. I have wads of those from all different lives, so I also have comparisons. I spend a lot of time going, "What in the sam-hell are you doing that for?" Sometimes it's just because people are stupid. Other times, though, they simply haven't found an alternative.
While it’s long been thought that children’s never-ending whys were an attention-seeking strategy,
Well, that's dumb. There are much easier ways for children to get attention, good or bad.
recent research suggests that they are genuinely curious and their questions influence their subsequent thinking.
Because how else would they learn about the world they're plopped into? They have to explore and experiment and ask about it.
Then, at some point, our interrogative urges peter out.
No it doesn't. It gets beaten out, at least out of most people. Some just don't have that off switch, no matter how much hammering people do. Me, it just makes me want to nettle those people with extra-awkward questions.
That’s a problem because, as journalist Warren Berger puts it: “In a time when so much knowledge is all around us, answers are at our fingertips, we need great questions in order to be able to know what to do with all that information and find our way to the next answer.”
No shit. Now if what I need to know is something already well-studied, then I'll probably just look up some good references and inhale them. But if I'm looking for great questions -- for insights -- that's not where I look. I aim for something other people aren't examining. And there's never any shortage of that, they're pretty blinker-sighted.
Take superpowers. Almost everyone writing about them is telling the same story: people had a conflict and punched each other really hard in the face until the strongest puncher won. 0_o And that is all they can think to do with it. I've seen a few exceptions but not many. Me and my readers? We're digging into how superpowers influence social evolution, how they can be used to repair flaws in society, the drawbacks of superpowers, which are popular or unpopular and why, their impact on the spectrum of inventions, why and how some groups cohere to police themselves, and so on. I'm fascinated by the fact that we have superpowers here but we don't call them that. Like how tetrachromats have a whole different body part that enables them to see things other people can't, which is a type of super-vision, but nobody acknowledges it as such.
Why does the child’s impulse to ask questions grow idle in so many adults?
See above, adults punish them until they stop. So if you want kids to grow into inquisitive adults, you have to encourage and enable them to ask questions and investigate answers. My parents spent countless hours answering my questions, or if they didn't know, "Let's look it up." When I got older, I looked up answers myself. But I never got tired of talking about the possibilities.
Schools transform from a place for asking questions to a place funded by our ability to answer them.
That is the opposite of helpful -- especially now when simple facts are easily found with a quick search, and what people need is not memorized facts but a learned process of fact-finding. The only facts you need to memorize are the ones you use all the time, and that differs for everyone.
We learn to sell ourselves on the job market by what (and who) we know, not what we don’t. And we recognize that society rewards the people who propose to have the answers, no matter how far-fetched those solutions might be.
Society rewards, and sometimes even requires, fraud. This underlies a lot of its problems.
As such, one way to revitalize our curiosity is simply to change the script. We can be bolder about asking questions in public and encouraging others to pursue their curiosity, too. In that encouragement, we help create an environment where those around us feel safe from the shame and humiliation they may feel in revealing a lack of knowledge about a subject, which can round back to us.
Hang out with nerds. We are easily intrigued, we notice things other people don't, and we ask all kinds of questions.
“It is a superpower. In a world that is governed by shame and perhaps political correctness, more and more people are not saying what’s on their mind. They’re not asking what’s on their minds. And the questions here are the most powerful,” entrepreneur Tim Ferriss said in an interview.
I hadn't really thought of it as a superpower, but 1) it's rare in adults and 2) it enables people to do things that others can't, including sometimes very impressive things.
“There are no stupid questions.” Even Carl Sagan voiced the sentiment, in the Demon-Haunted World.
But just because a question can’t be stupid doesn’t mean it can’t be snide, snarky, sarcastic, condescending, disregarding, or downright nasty. Here lies the dividing line between a “right” question and a “wrong” one.
And as soon as you start worrying about that, you're more focused on what other people might think than you are on getting answers. Don't purposely ask mean questions unless you are attacking a legitimate target, but don't fret over what people will think. Bluntly put, if you ask questions, you will irritate people. Most people have little patience with that, which is why they punish children for doing it. If you're worried about people liking you, approving of you, considering you to be doing the "right things" ... don't ask questions. It'll just make everyone unhappy. If you want to ask questions, if you care about getting answers, get comfortable with pissing people off. Even questions you think are innocent and neutral can rile people. You don't have to do it on purpose but it is going to happen and you should be able to deal with that. Or find a different hobby.
It’s one reason their whys never come a la carte but are bundled together in a dynamic chain. Their seemingly never-ending follow-ups aren’t rhetorical tricks designed to trip up adults and reveal them to be ignorant of basic truths; they are genuinely and unabashedly interested in learning as much about a subject as they can.
There are instructions for chaining questions, if you like a structured approach. Children often do what's called "drilling down" when they ask chains of "why" questions. Another example is my approach to speculative fiction, which starts with the standard "What if...?" followed by "... and then what?" That is, start with your quirky idea and then examine how it will affect the characters and the story, especially how it steers things in a different direction than our world.
One way to weed those out is to begin with the most basic question we can formulate.
No, the most basic question usually takes a while to dig down to. Start where you are and ask about what snagged your attention. Find a soft spot and then dig. Granted, those of us who naturally think from A to D to Q can shorten that process by skipping ahead, but it's still uncommon to cut to the core in one stroke. There is absolutely nothing wrong with splattering questions against a wall until you find the spot that makes a different sound.
Consider interpersonal relationships. Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, recommends a concept called “radical curiosity” whenever you want to connect with someone. Start by asking simple questions: How are they feeling today? What are they into? How has work been lately?
Even these “small talk” questions can elicit a lot of information if you’re paying attention, and you can use that to steer the conversation to deeper, more personal places to reveal previously unexplored depths in the person — whether it’s a new relationship or a lifelong partner.“
This can work if you have a ton of time, patience, and interest in people generally. Most folks don't. Smalltalk isn't designed for communication, it's designed for armor so people don't have to expose themselves to strangers or sit quietly. It just wiggles the air waves. If you want to get to know someone, you need more meaningful topics, but usually people prefer to work their way from casual to deeper topics. This set has a progression. Conversation starters are more casual.
The crucial point is that being curious helps us connect to others, and this connection makes us more engaged with life. Genuine curiosity invites people to share more of themselves with us, and this, in turn, helps us understand them.
This is true if and only if you have plenty in common with other people. If they are interested in celebrities fucking while you are interested in quantum mechanics, curiosity will not lead to connection.
They advise you to open with less sensitive questions, favor follow-up questions, keep questions open-ended, engage in a casual tone, pay attention to group dynamics, and, of course, listen intently.
Useful in social situations if you're trying to make people like you. Some of those things will kill the kind of questions you need as a scientist or activist.
I'll throw in a different approach that I use for milking experts. First, I can come up with one or two good questions on any topic that interests me. That's all I need to wind up an expert and get them going. If they wind down after half an hour or so, I take something they just said and ask about that, which winds them up again. Most people love to talk about their passion, especially to a new listener. So if you want to listen rather than talk, scan for someone mentioning their profession or hobby that really interests them, and ask about that. Note a few details for possible expansion if you need to wind them more. I used to do this all the time when I was little, but it's gotten harder to find people who know things I don't that interest me. But if I spot one, I will absolutely wind them up and then just soak up the input.
“The good news is that by asking questions, we naturally improve our emotional intelligence, which in turn makes us better questioners — a virtuous cycle,”
If you ask social questions as described above, you will gain emotional intelligence. If you are interested in other areas, you will increase some other intelligence or knowledge base instead. Asking "What is this insect on my flowers and is it good or bad?" tells me nothing about humans but everything about whether I should swat it or squee over it. And the last one was a truly beautiful blue-winged wasp that is probably subsisting on june bug larvae. <3 science.
You can also practice asking questions of and for yourself.
Aside from the aforementioned other fields like science (which feeds either naturalistic or logical-mathematical intelligence) asking questions of yourself will boost your intrapersonal intelligence or self-smarts. This is useful as long as you're making decisions by yourself, but does fuckall good with other people because they will almost never believe that you know yourself. After all, most people don't.
Finally, Ferriss also encourages you to set aside time to ask fantastically absurd questions. How would you accomplish a week’s work in two hours? What would you do if you won the lottery? If you could design a city from scratch, how would you? If you knew the day you’d die, how would that change your life today?
LOL been there, done those. You want to go far out with me? You'll need a setting that is nothing like Earth. A planet whose chemistry eats everything our technology is based on and whose surface liquid can crawl up the sides of a boat to sink it. A world-tree. A plasma cloud. That sort of thing.
“These types of absurd questions don’t allow you to use your default frameworks for solutions. They don’t allow you to use your base of current assumptions to come up with answers. It forces you to think laterally. It forces you to break some of the boundaries on the sphere of comfort that you’ve created for yourself, and that is what makes them, I think, in a way so powerful,” Ferriss said.
Speak for your own frameworks, dude. Mine is a tesseract. It doesn't run on assumptions, it runs on processes ... and questions. And farmemory, of course, which is why I'm the guy yanking some idiot away from poking a hole on an alien planet. There are times to be curious, and there are times to let a probe be curious for you.
Beyond the joy of discovery, know that the questions you ask are the problems you solve. They help you connect with others and strengthen those relationships. And they are also your primary means of learning about your world — both the external one surrounding you and the one internal to you. In short, asking questions is the best way to deepen your understanding of the things that matter to your life. As any child could probably tell you (if you asked).
Yep.
And of course, you can see this in my blog where I regularly post questions to prompt discussions.
Children are question-asking savants, but adults often lose their affinity for the inquisitive.
I never outgrew asking questions, including stream-of-consciousness chain questions. And my hippie parents never outgrew it either.
Asking questions helps us organize our thinking around what we don’t know. As with any art or skill, it requires practice and commitment to ask the right questions.
The right question is anything that gets you information you're looking for. It doesn't have to be fancy. It certainly doesn't require much practice, because children are so good at it. All they need is a question word at least one other word for a topic. Sure it benefits from practice if you want to ask about esoteric topics, but not all worthwhile questions are esoteric. A recent conversation from our visit to a Mexican bakery boiled down to, "What's that?" "I have no idea. Let's buy one and eat it."
Many people, myself included, can find asking questions to be daunting. It fills us with worry and self-doubt, as though the act of being inquisitive is an all-too-public admission of our ignorance.
If you ever need to find a smart person, or a good problem-solver, just look for the person asking the most questions or the most far-out questions. Smart people don't need to look smart. They just are smart. And they know things because they ask questions, take things apart, and aren't afraid to shake up the status quo.
But once upon a time, we were all questing-asking savants. We started grilling our parents as toddlers, and by preschool, our epistemic inquiries plumbed the depths of science, philosophy, and the social order. Where does the sun go at night? How come zippers stay zipped? Why doesn’t that man have a home like we do? Why do rocks sink but ice floats? Is the blue you see the same blue I see?
I still ask questions like that. It's why I'm a speculative fiction writer ... and an activist. It's also why people say I'm not human. Well, they're not wrong. I have the ability to look at any society, even one I'm standing in, from the outside. It's not special, it's not permanent, it's just there. It has a given pattern of strengths and weaknesses, perspectives and assumptions. I have wads of those from all different lives, so I also have comparisons. I spend a lot of time going, "What in the sam-hell are you doing that for?" Sometimes it's just because people are stupid. Other times, though, they simply haven't found an alternative.
While it’s long been thought that children’s never-ending whys were an attention-seeking strategy,
Well, that's dumb. There are much easier ways for children to get attention, good or bad.
recent research suggests that they are genuinely curious and their questions influence their subsequent thinking.
Because how else would they learn about the world they're plopped into? They have to explore and experiment and ask about it.
Then, at some point, our interrogative urges peter out.
No it doesn't. It gets beaten out, at least out of most people. Some just don't have that off switch, no matter how much hammering people do. Me, it just makes me want to nettle those people with extra-awkward questions.
That’s a problem because, as journalist Warren Berger puts it: “In a time when so much knowledge is all around us, answers are at our fingertips, we need great questions in order to be able to know what to do with all that information and find our way to the next answer.”
No shit. Now if what I need to know is something already well-studied, then I'll probably just look up some good references and inhale them. But if I'm looking for great questions -- for insights -- that's not where I look. I aim for something other people aren't examining. And there's never any shortage of that, they're pretty blinker-sighted.
Take superpowers. Almost everyone writing about them is telling the same story: people had a conflict and punched each other really hard in the face until the strongest puncher won. 0_o And that is all they can think to do with it. I've seen a few exceptions but not many. Me and my readers? We're digging into how superpowers influence social evolution, how they can be used to repair flaws in society, the drawbacks of superpowers, which are popular or unpopular and why, their impact on the spectrum of inventions, why and how some groups cohere to police themselves, and so on. I'm fascinated by the fact that we have superpowers here but we don't call them that. Like how tetrachromats have a whole different body part that enables them to see things other people can't, which is a type of super-vision, but nobody acknowledges it as such.
Why does the child’s impulse to ask questions grow idle in so many adults?
See above, adults punish them until they stop. So if you want kids to grow into inquisitive adults, you have to encourage and enable them to ask questions and investigate answers. My parents spent countless hours answering my questions, or if they didn't know, "Let's look it up." When I got older, I looked up answers myself. But I never got tired of talking about the possibilities.
Schools transform from a place for asking questions to a place funded by our ability to answer them.
That is the opposite of helpful -- especially now when simple facts are easily found with a quick search, and what people need is not memorized facts but a learned process of fact-finding. The only facts you need to memorize are the ones you use all the time, and that differs for everyone.
We learn to sell ourselves on the job market by what (and who) we know, not what we don’t. And we recognize that society rewards the people who propose to have the answers, no matter how far-fetched those solutions might be.
Society rewards, and sometimes even requires, fraud. This underlies a lot of its problems.
As such, one way to revitalize our curiosity is simply to change the script. We can be bolder about asking questions in public and encouraging others to pursue their curiosity, too. In that encouragement, we help create an environment where those around us feel safe from the shame and humiliation they may feel in revealing a lack of knowledge about a subject, which can round back to us.
Hang out with nerds. We are easily intrigued, we notice things other people don't, and we ask all kinds of questions.
“It is a superpower. In a world that is governed by shame and perhaps political correctness, more and more people are not saying what’s on their mind. They’re not asking what’s on their minds. And the questions here are the most powerful,” entrepreneur Tim Ferriss said in an interview.
I hadn't really thought of it as a superpower, but 1) it's rare in adults and 2) it enables people to do things that others can't, including sometimes very impressive things.
“There are no stupid questions.” Even Carl Sagan voiced the sentiment, in the Demon-Haunted World.
But just because a question can’t be stupid doesn’t mean it can’t be snide, snarky, sarcastic, condescending, disregarding, or downright nasty. Here lies the dividing line between a “right” question and a “wrong” one.
And as soon as you start worrying about that, you're more focused on what other people might think than you are on getting answers. Don't purposely ask mean questions unless you are attacking a legitimate target, but don't fret over what people will think. Bluntly put, if you ask questions, you will irritate people. Most people have little patience with that, which is why they punish children for doing it. If you're worried about people liking you, approving of you, considering you to be doing the "right things" ... don't ask questions. It'll just make everyone unhappy. If you want to ask questions, if you care about getting answers, get comfortable with pissing people off. Even questions you think are innocent and neutral can rile people. You don't have to do it on purpose but it is going to happen and you should be able to deal with that. Or find a different hobby.
It’s one reason their whys never come a la carte but are bundled together in a dynamic chain. Their seemingly never-ending follow-ups aren’t rhetorical tricks designed to trip up adults and reveal them to be ignorant of basic truths; they are genuinely and unabashedly interested in learning as much about a subject as they can.
There are instructions for chaining questions, if you like a structured approach. Children often do what's called "drilling down" when they ask chains of "why" questions. Another example is my approach to speculative fiction, which starts with the standard "What if...?" followed by "... and then what?" That is, start with your quirky idea and then examine how it will affect the characters and the story, especially how it steers things in a different direction than our world.
One way to weed those out is to begin with the most basic question we can formulate.
No, the most basic question usually takes a while to dig down to. Start where you are and ask about what snagged your attention. Find a soft spot and then dig. Granted, those of us who naturally think from A to D to Q can shorten that process by skipping ahead, but it's still uncommon to cut to the core in one stroke. There is absolutely nothing wrong with splattering questions against a wall until you find the spot that makes a different sound.
Consider interpersonal relationships. Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, recommends a concept called “radical curiosity” whenever you want to connect with someone. Start by asking simple questions: How are they feeling today? What are they into? How has work been lately?
Even these “small talk” questions can elicit a lot of information if you’re paying attention, and you can use that to steer the conversation to deeper, more personal places to reveal previously unexplored depths in the person — whether it’s a new relationship or a lifelong partner.“
This can work if you have a ton of time, patience, and interest in people generally. Most folks don't. Smalltalk isn't designed for communication, it's designed for armor so people don't have to expose themselves to strangers or sit quietly. It just wiggles the air waves. If you want to get to know someone, you need more meaningful topics, but usually people prefer to work their way from casual to deeper topics. This set has a progression. Conversation starters are more casual.
The crucial point is that being curious helps us connect to others, and this connection makes us more engaged with life. Genuine curiosity invites people to share more of themselves with us, and this, in turn, helps us understand them.
This is true if and only if you have plenty in common with other people. If they are interested in celebrities fucking while you are interested in quantum mechanics, curiosity will not lead to connection.
They advise you to open with less sensitive questions, favor follow-up questions, keep questions open-ended, engage in a casual tone, pay attention to group dynamics, and, of course, listen intently.
Useful in social situations if you're trying to make people like you. Some of those things will kill the kind of questions you need as a scientist or activist.
I'll throw in a different approach that I use for milking experts. First, I can come up with one or two good questions on any topic that interests me. That's all I need to wind up an expert and get them going. If they wind down after half an hour or so, I take something they just said and ask about that, which winds them up again. Most people love to talk about their passion, especially to a new listener. So if you want to listen rather than talk, scan for someone mentioning their profession or hobby that really interests them, and ask about that. Note a few details for possible expansion if you need to wind them more. I used to do this all the time when I was little, but it's gotten harder to find people who know things I don't that interest me. But if I spot one, I will absolutely wind them up and then just soak up the input.
“The good news is that by asking questions, we naturally improve our emotional intelligence, which in turn makes us better questioners — a virtuous cycle,”
If you ask social questions as described above, you will gain emotional intelligence. If you are interested in other areas, you will increase some other intelligence or knowledge base instead. Asking "What is this insect on my flowers and is it good or bad?" tells me nothing about humans but everything about whether I should swat it or squee over it. And the last one was a truly beautiful blue-winged wasp that is probably subsisting on june bug larvae. <3 science.
You can also practice asking questions of and for yourself.
Aside from the aforementioned other fields like science (which feeds either naturalistic or logical-mathematical intelligence) asking questions of yourself will boost your intrapersonal intelligence or self-smarts. This is useful as long as you're making decisions by yourself, but does fuckall good with other people because they will almost never believe that you know yourself. After all, most people don't.
Finally, Ferriss also encourages you to set aside time to ask fantastically absurd questions. How would you accomplish a week’s work in two hours? What would you do if you won the lottery? If you could design a city from scratch, how would you? If you knew the day you’d die, how would that change your life today?
LOL been there, done those. You want to go far out with me? You'll need a setting that is nothing like Earth. A planet whose chemistry eats everything our technology is based on and whose surface liquid can crawl up the sides of a boat to sink it. A world-tree. A plasma cloud. That sort of thing.
“These types of absurd questions don’t allow you to use your default frameworks for solutions. They don’t allow you to use your base of current assumptions to come up with answers. It forces you to think laterally. It forces you to break some of the boundaries on the sphere of comfort that you’ve created for yourself, and that is what makes them, I think, in a way so powerful,” Ferriss said.
Speak for your own frameworks, dude. Mine is a tesseract. It doesn't run on assumptions, it runs on processes ... and questions. And farmemory, of course, which is why I'm the guy yanking some idiot away from poking a hole on an alien planet. There are times to be curious, and there are times to let a probe be curious for you.
Beyond the joy of discovery, know that the questions you ask are the problems you solve. They help you connect with others and strengthen those relationships. And they are also your primary means of learning about your world — both the external one surrounding you and the one internal to you. In short, asking questions is the best way to deepen your understanding of the things that matter to your life. As any child could probably tell you (if you asked).
Yep.
And of course, you can see this in my blog where I regularly post questions to prompt discussions.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-24 05:49 am (UTC)Thank you!
Date: 2023-02-24 06:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-24 06:28 pm (UTC)Although sometimes when I ask a question, I feel like I'm somehow not asking the right question because I'll get an answer that I either 1. don't understand or 2. doesn't seem actually relevant to what I asked.
Thoughts
Date: 2023-02-24 06:50 pm (UTC)Go you!
>> and it's gotten me into trouble more than once.<<
An inevitable outcome of curiosity and questioning.
>> I'm naturally curious too (curiosity killed the cat-much?) so this bleeds into "I wanna know and why?" of everything and everyone around me.<<
Sooth.
>>Although sometimes when I ask a question, I feel like I'm somehow not asking the right question because I'll get an answer that I either 1. don't understand or 2. doesn't seem actually relevant to what I asked.<<
Part of this comes from the question itself. You can learn over time which types of question work better and how to frame one to get the desired type of information.
Part comes from the type of person you're asking. An average person will give a common answer, so if you want more detail, this may not be satisfying. An expert is easily inspired to a long spiel that may be much more than you need. So if you know the type of person you are asking, you can refine your question to tell them what kind of answer you are hoping to get.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-26 04:57 am (UTC)Technically, you don't even need words. Gestures - or with s sufficiently receptive partner, a puzzled expression - will work just fine.
>>If you ever need to find a smart person, or a good problem-solver, just look for the person asking the most questions or the most far-out questions. Smart people don't need to look smart. They just are smart. And they know things because they ask questions, take things apart, and aren't afraid to shake up the status quo.<<
I joke sometimes that a good question is one that stumps the expert.
>>Well, that's dumb. There are much easier ways for children to get attention, good or bad.<<
Well, children do enjoy attention, and some people particularly enjoy learning/intellectual stimulation. So it isn't /impossible/.
>>No it doesn't. It gets beaten out, at least out of most people. Some just don't have that off switch, no matter how much hammering people do.<<
I've occasionally tried to coax adults into being comfortable asking questions (for reasons). Most people seem to feel fairly awkward, unless they have a ton of self-confidence or are really extroverted.
Of course, some questions can seem odd, coming from adults and that can cause complications.
>>I'm fascinated by the fact that we have superpowers here but we don't call them that. Like how tetrachromats have a whole different body part that enables them to see things other people can't, which is a type of super-vision, but nobody acknowledges it as such.<<
A superhero series set in our world with these sorts of superpowers would be interesting.
>>The only facts you need to memorize are the ones you use all the time, and that differs for everyone.<<
Well, it is useful to have systems for things like 'how to solve a problem,' 'how to identify a problem,' and so in.
>>Bluntly put, if you ask questions, you will irritate people. Most people have little patience with that, which is why they punish children for doing it. If you're worried about people liking you, approving of you, considering you to be doing the "right things" ... don't ask questions. It'll just make everyone unhappy. <<
It also depends on if your questions are doing something consensual /with/ someone, or non-consensual /to/ someone.
>>Smalltalk isn't designed for communication, it's designed for armor so people don't have to expose themselves to strangers or sit quietly.<<
https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/the-invitation-by-oriah-mountain-dreamer
I'll participate in smalltalk as a soothing ritual with people I like. Otherwise, I am not really interested.
>>This is useful as long as you're making decisions by yourself, but does fuckall good with other people because they will almost never believe that you know yourself. After all, most people don't.<<
Well, if a person doesn't know themself, why should a stranger?
(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-26 05:11 am (UTC)