Questions Are Not Just For Asking

Podcast summaries

• Conversation As Medium solutions are way harder than problems the importance of being able to say that you don't yet know how to solve a problem what does it mean to understand each other compromise is not what everyone wants Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings Dialectic Higher Dimensional Thinking, the End of Paradox, and a More Adequate Understanding of Realitywith any misunderstanding, it's possible (& usually worthwhile) to come to a place of profoundly mutually satisfying shared understanding just because someone has an articulation of a problem, doesn't mean their proposed solution is any good solutions are way harder than problems SimPol John Bunzl omniwin perspective-taking Coherence Therapy Questions Are Not Just For Asking the point of friendliness is not to avoid conflict, but to actually create contexts that allow for deeper, more intense, prolonged conflict over the long term the importance of being able to say that you don't yet know how to solve a problem double bind contradiction there's no way to communicate correctly or incorrectly - there's just what works in context and what doesn't work meaning John Vervaeke

• 9:40 - 18:36 - New insights on Questions Are Not Just For Asking

• 10:48 - 46:10 - How to approach volatile/heated discussions? Higher Dimensional Thinking, the End of Paradox, and a More Adequate Understanding of Reality just because someone has an articulation of a problem, doesn't mean their proposed solution is any good solutions are way harder than problems compromise is not what everyone wants SimPol John Bunzl omniwin perspective-taking with any misunderstanding, it's possible (& usually worthwhile) to come to a place of profoundly mutually satisfying shared understanding Coherence Therapy Questions Are Not Just For Asking the point of friendliness is not to avoid conflict, but to actually create contexts that allow for deeper, more intense, prolonged conflict over the long term the importance of being able to say that you don't yet know how to solve a problem double bind

December 25th, 2021

• I wrote a bunch of stuff about asking/revealing & Questions Are Not Just For Asking here in these comments
  • facebook.com/mati.roy.09/posts/10159974882649579?comment_id=1015997648…
  • The community I was part of that was incubating Reveal Culture has also done some experimenting with questions. One experiment that I find fun is for a group of people to agree to try not asking any questions for a day or a week. Forces acknowledging your own desire to know something, and also can encourage people to learn how to contextualize their questions in a way that people often don't know how to do. Separate from the content it can be a good opportunity to practice giving & receiving feedback without judgment or shame—like "oh, you asked a question there!" "so I did! <rephrase>". I don't recommend trying to do this for more than a week, as it gets weird & stale.
  • In general, that community was inclined against asking direct questions, for various reasons related to the OP here and also because they can sometimes make people defensive by invoking a sort of interrogation vibe. And because they often are profoundly contextless in nature. But you can have all of those problems with "I want to know X" as well, and as Lief notes, you can also have additional ambiguities around whether you're actually *proposing*/*requesting* that your curiosity be satisfied in this moment or not.
  • In 2017, I published a guest post on Ribbonfarm titled "Questions Are Not Just For Asking", and shortly thereafter I went to an EA Global event, and I was struck by how often in conversations people were just asking me stuff and I had no idea why they wanted to know, or what the question underneath their question was, or if they even wanted to know at all or just rambled a question as a potential next thing to say. But I found that the nature of asking questions is that people tend to answer them immediately without actually pausing to get in touch with the context or what the conversation is really trying to do. And I had to actually do a lot of work to inhibit that impulse in myself, but I found that when I did the quality of my conversations improved a lot. So here's another case to be made for gaining a bit more space around one's relationship to questions, as both an asker and an askee.
  • Regarding the dimension [person] brought up [about whether questions help create space for consent]... my sense is that it depends on the person and the tone & speech patterns used.
    • It's possible to ask a question in a way that absolutely demands an answer and honestly kind of hijacks someone's agency so they start answering before they've even considered it. It's also somewhat possible to do that without a question, although harder in my experience and requires almost literally demanding "so tell me what's going on with that". It's also possible to ask a question in a way that's really spacious and won't get an automatic response even from someone who *is* happy to answer it. Pacing, tone, intonation, and of course the entire context of the relationship.
    • On the flip side, it's possible to say "I would like to know X" in many different ways, from idle curiosity to fascination to a strong demand. Even as a strong demand, it doesn't produce the automatic hijack but it may create a sense of threat if the person doesn't answer. But given enough safety, there can be plenty of space to respond without satisfying that want. If there's not space for one person to say "I want [something you could perhaps satisfy]" and another person to not satisfy it, you have a problem that has nothing to do with questions, imo. Which, perhaps to Julian's point, is indeed a problem lots of spaces have!
    • There's also the classic phenomenon of loaded questions (eg "Have you quit smoking yet?" implies the person has been a smoker). The presupposition in those questions is a bit easier to negate if you're not stuck inside a yes/no question. Like you sort of have to include yourself in the picture: "I'm wondering if you've quit smoking yet" at which point it's easier to respond "well you're gonna be wondering awhile since I haven't smoked in the first place". Harder to do with a yes/no question since you have to first go "wait, what?" and unask the whole question.

Malcolm podcast appearances

• talks extensively about my ribbonfarm essay Questions Are Not Just For Asking