The Cost of a Question

The school stereotype divides questions into clever and stupid, and people into those who understood at once and those who made fools of themselves. In practice the quality of a question is more often set not by ignorance but by how much work the asker has already done and what they expect from the answer.

A question becomes a bad one when the person:

• has not spent a few seconds looking for the answer themselves;
• demands a lot of work from another for their own small convenience;
• has no intention of listening to the answer;
• has already built an accusation into the wording;
• is asking not to understand but to make a point;
• can only get useless information back.

“What colour is that door?” is a normal question to someone who can see it, if you cannot. The same question becomes odd when the door is in front of you and lit.

In a learning situation the cost of a question is usually small and the potential benefit large. Better to check a simple thing than to build another four storeys on a misunderstanding and discover the problem in the exam.

Here it helps to state the difficulty first:

I follow it up to this step, but I don’t see why the sign changes here.

Such a question helps whoever is answering and shows that the work has already begun.

In ordinary life it is worth checking before you ask:

• can I find the answer quickly myself;
• do I actually need the answer;
• is this the right person;
• are they free not to answer;
• am I shifting onto them a decision I should be making myself.

A good question saves time on both sides. It narrows the uncertainty rather than simply passing it to the other person.

At the same time, the fear of looking unintelligent is more dangerous than any one unfortunate question. People rarely remember other people’s questions for as long as the person mentally rewriting his own remark all evening assumes.

In most cases everyone around is busy with a similar investigation of themselves.

The cost of a question is conveniently measured in someone else’s minutes. “How do I put this report together?” demands half an hour of explanation from a colleague, from scratch. “I built the report by the instructions, everything matches up to step three, after that the total is off by exactly the returns line — where could I have lost it?” demands two minutes and one glance. The work is the same in both cases; in the first it is simply done by somebody else. The difference between the two wordings is precisely the twenty minutes the asker did not want to spend himself.

That is why a question that starts with a description of the ground already covered gets an answer faster. Not out of politeness: what is left for the answerer is a small piece rather than the whole route.