Common ways to get bad answers

There are a lot of different ways to mess this up but here are 3 mistakes in questions and the people asking them.

1. Thinking it's easy

This is the most common by far. You assume that everyone is comfortable talking to you or that the formulation of the question is not a large factor in responses.

Everything about the person asking the question including the way the question is constructed, the way you're feeling while asking it and the way the person being asked feels about you changes the conversation. Some of these effects may be subtle - for example accidently correcting your question form while making it. Some impediments are more profound, for example if the person you're asking doesn't feel like you care what they think, just that whatever they say will be used as evidence to support some agenda.

There is decades of research into how to poll and quiz people and of course much of sociology, psychology, economics and other sciences are based on it. It would take a person decades to become an expert. I think the good news however is that because being an intermediate question asker is considerably better than a beginner, and the experts still get it wrong occasionally - a little thought into the topic goes a long way.

2. Using questions as a tool to persuade or validate

“I neither know, nor think I know” (Socrates, from Plato)

If you start a question presuming to know the answer, you achieve two things:

a. You’ll get pissed off with the other person disagreeing (or you'll ignore the areas where you disagree) b. The person you're asking will feel like it's a trap and activate a self censoring mode

The quintessential example of this is those following "the Socratic method”. People use it as a way of asking questions to induce "the right" thoughts and answers in another person. I feel sad when I see this (perhaps with the exception of for small children) because not only does it not work, it's not particularly faithful to the Socratic method.

The gist of the Socratic method's "origin story" is (and I’m doing it a massive disservice) that Socrates hears from the oracle at Delphi that he is the wisest man in the world. Being a maverick he sets out to disprove the oracle. He does so by finding the "wisest" people he could and asks them a series of questions. These interlocutions seemed to take the form of a modern cross examination; Socrates puts them on the stand looking for logical inconsistencies in their assertions which would show they don’t understand something.

Socrates manages to find inconsistencies or mistakes in everyone's spiel, so he finally states: I am the wisest of all the Greeks because I know that I don't know anything. The implication here is that because everyone he spoke to either lied about knowing or was unable to accurately evaluate their own knowledge, he was the wisest to state that he didn’t know anything (thus fulfilling the oracle’s prophecy).

I maintain that this story arc was probably as annoying and humblebrag-ish today as it was then. If you're asking questions knowing the answer, likely the other person is either a child or finding you annoying.

3. 42

A question that has been misunderstood or cannot be processed out of context - what’s also known as a non sequitur.

In the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy a computer called Deep Thought is built to answer the question "what's the meaning of it all?", only to respond millions of years later with only "42". This astute piece of postmodernism illustrates a key point; some questions cannot reasonably be answered, and if you do get an answer it appears terse, without a frame of reference.

If you are asking questions but getting weird answers or blank faces, maybe you're asking a question that cannot be answered sensibly by the people you're asking. Often we’ve done a lot of thinking about a particular problem before asking for help or an answer and we forget that our question is the first time someone has thought about that. If in doubt, you can always ask what questions to ask - "what do you think I should ask or need to understand?". This likely would have been a better question for Deep Thought.