 Whenever I go camping, I feel like I'm always the guy who has to ask if we're pitching the tents too close to the campfire. I guess I always have the same burning question. Asking good questions is an underrated art form. We live in a culture that focuses a great deal on getting answers, explaining, and problem solving, but knowing how to generate a good line of inquiry in which to perform these activities, a question that allows us to apply our faculties in a productive fashion, that isn't really a skill we're explicitly taught, despite being an essential part of that process. What is it that makes something a good question? Well, if it's not rhetorical, like that one, the purpose of asking a question is generally to get an answer. An answerability is a great metric. Good questions and good answers are complementary. If you ask the right thing, the response is often interesting, insightful, inspiring, or even just useful. In contrast, bad questions encourage answers that are less than helpful. They don't just waste people's time, they can cause confusion or even intractable arguments simply by being malformed in a way that isn't obvious at first glance. In that light, knowing how to ask good questions isn't just a matter of efficiency or conscientiousness, it can be the difference between elevating or degrading the quality of discourse around a subject. Some people are perplexed by communities that respond to badly phrased or previously answered inquiries in unfriendly or even hostile ways. But these communities often know the value of holding a high standard for what sort of questions deserve airtime and how they should be answered. What might seem like absurd indignation over some minor breach of etiquette, like asking something that's easily Googled, is often a defensive strategy to avoid drowning out more interesting and fruitful conversation with the same stupid airplane on a treadmill thing. There are some universal principles of question asking and answer getting that apply regardless of the question's context or domain. First and foremost is clarity. A fuzzy or vague query is bad because it can be answered in many different incongruous ways that won't actually solve the asker's problem. If the whole purpose of asking a question is to get the best possible answer, being unclear about what you're asking might easily get you a really, really good answer for something that you weren't actually interested in. Things like do humans have free will might prompt two people who believe more or less the same thing to give totally different answers depending on how they interpret what's being asked. Language is always more easily misunderstood than we might like it to be, but there are obvious steps that you can and should take to make sure that you're asking exactly what you want to be asking. All of the principles of good language usage apply to the asking of questions. Your choice, tone, etiquette, choice of audience, the way that you ask can vastly color what sort of answer you receive, and if you receive one at all. Another useful guideline is to minimize the number of dependencies a question might have, background information and assumptions that aren't really necessary to arrive at a satisfactory answer while still maintaining actionable relevance to the situation at hand. In fact, the best questions are as general as they can possibly be while still prompting answers that are practically relevant to the original problem. As an engineer, I regularly encounter inquiries like how do I fit this round peg into the square hole when neither the peg nor the hole are actually necessary to make something that works. A better question might be something like how can I hold these two objects together securely or do I need to? Not only do unnecessary assumptions limit the range of acceptable answers, possibly missing out on superior ones, but they can render those answers useless if any aspect of the original question changes. Okay, is a triangular hole now, what do I do? Of course, the flip side of that coin is relevance, that pesky practical application thing. As any thunk viewer is doubtlessly aware, is all too easy to zoom a question so far out that it's no longer useful for the original subject you are interested in. Essentially becoming a philosophical exercise that might be fun to think about, but is impossible to answer in any way that's actionable and won't grant any insight into the original problem. Asking something like what is the essence of good design could prompt all sorts of different answers. There are hundreds of books with thousands of unique and interesting responses to that query, each of which can be interpreted in several fascinating ways. Any one of those could serve as a valid answer to the question. And none of them would give you a significant advantage in figuring out the round peg square hole thing. So good questions are clearly articulated and as general as they can possibly be without losing practical relevance to the matter at hand. You absolutely won't be wasting time by refining an important question to be clearer or to reduce the number of assumptions that are necessary to answer it. That's a great abstract framework for thinking about how to improve your queries generally, but maybe you'd like some more specific guidelines, some actionable pointers for making your questions more effective in particular situations, like maybe you want to ask a person something. Harvard researchers Allison Wood Brooks and Leslie K. John have done some legwork to try and figure out what makes for better question asking and they have a few tips. One of the primary findings of Brooks research is that conversations can usually be categorized as either competitive where both parties are thinking strategically about how to gain the upper hand or cooperative where they're working together to achieve some shared goal and that the best types of questions vary considerably between the two situations. Think about what you might ask while interrogating a witness in a courtroom versus what you'd ask if you were trying to get to know someone at a party. Very different scenarios, very different questions in a competitive exchange, you'll generally get more info out of your interlocutor by starting out asking big potentially sensitive things, then gradually backing off on the intensity of the queries. If you start off asking if your witness was at the scene of the crime when it happened, it seems much less scary and more reasonable when you ask if they know the victim or what kind of car they drive. In contrast, to build a cooperative rapport with someone, it's better to start with small unobtrusive questions and lead up to larger, more sensitive ones. Maybe start with something like, what have you been reading? And build some rapport before you ask about Nazi punching. There are also differences in what sorts of answers you should be angling for in each situation. Cooperative exchanges benefit from lots of open-ended queries, questions which require detailed answers that require a fair amount of thought encourage people to share more than they would otherwise. However, in competitive scenarios, open-ended questions can allow your interlocutor to slightly avoid mentioning important facts, focusing on anything but what might give you an advantage. It's much better to ask such a person closed questions that require only a few words to answer. It forces them to lie to your face if they want to conceal something. The same general principle applies when you're looking for a straight answer out of someone who you're cooperating with but who might have made a mistake. Asking about errors, hang-ups, or other problems is more likely to garner a truthful response when posed in the form of a pessimistic, closed question, assuming that things have gone wrong. Something like, you're going to be late to the party, yeah? Of course, there are some factors that improve both competitive and cooperative inquiries. Follow-up questions are especially effective at encouraging a flow of information from one person to another. Asking about some detail or related aspect of the explanation your conversational partner just gave shows them that you're listening and that you care enough to want to know more. If you're pumping someone for useful data that might be in their head somewhere, it could be hard to predict ahead of time what you should ask to get the most complete picture. But asking logical follow-up questions is easy and natural and seems to get you a long way. There are also some common sense ideas that seem to be backed by experiment. Being overly formal or asking about things with social ramifications in a group setting are both bad news for getting truthful answers. But perhaps most importantly, people who ask questions more frequently learn a lot more than those who don't. We absolutely should try our best to ask good questions, but even if revealing what we don't know can be excruciatingly uncomfortable. Trust me, I get it. Asking a ton of half-baked questions will get you farther, faster than sitting around hoping that someone accidentally lobs you an answer. What do you think makes a good question? Is this one? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to ball-ball-subscribe-blah-share and don't stop thunking.