What Is a Good Question? | Michael Strong

So first, I'm going to say that I'm not going to tell you what a good question is because I want you to think about for yourself what a good question is, and it varies. There is no way that I can tell any of you what a good question is. Ultimately, I want each of you to become somebody who generates questions naturally and effortlessly because you're solving problems for yourself. So what is a good question? It really depends on you, but hopefully I'll provide you with some frameworks that help you think for yourself more effectively and in more satisfying ways. Before getting into the substance of this, I want to connect the whole issue of asking questions directly to AI. And even before AI, there was Google and so forth. But I would say that because these machines can answer just about any question you provide them, sometimes accurately, sometimes not, if you don't ask them the right questions, they will not give you useful information. And I think the future will be for those human beings who are really good at generating their own questions, their own ideas, taking their own initiatives. If you are passive, machines are going to take over. If you are a passive human being who simply does as you're told and listens to what other people tell you to do, then there's a good chance that the AI and the robots will eliminate your job. And that's sort of a provocative version. But conversely, if you're somebody who takes initiative, who has your own ideas, who thinks for yourself, who asks broad relevant questions, then you can use AI and robotics to do amazing things. So I think the future is going to be divided between those people who leverage technology to do amazing things and those people who perhaps may be somewhat marginalized because other people are leveraging the technology to do amazing things. And, you're not keeping up. So with that little bit of a provocative version of watch out or you may be replaced, but I think it's real, I'm gonna back up a little bit and ask why do we ever ask questions? And I think usually it starts by wanting to solve a problem. So for instance, there are very simple ways to determine kind of the level of consciousness, either of say infants or animals, where they'll say put a mirror and see if the animal or the baby notices the mirror. Because if some— something notices, you know, like ants, ants do not notice mirrors and to just walk around being dumb ants and ants together do amazing things in anthills. But ants don't have any kind of awareness of what's going on. But you'll see, say, with bears or with dogs or with infants at a certain stage, there's a sort of a double take with mirror. What's going on in there? And I would say, even though bears and dogs and infants are not asking questions, that double take of, "Wait, what's going on?" They're questioning reality in the sense of something's not making sense. That thing's moving when I'm moving. Why does that thing move when I move? And sometimes you'll see, again, bears, dogs, or infants kind of checking out the situation with a mirror. So in terms of thinking of the origins of asking questions, think of some situation where either you or somebody else can't quite figure out what's going on. And so because you can't quite figure out what's going on, you have to pause and, as it were, question your reality. So watch certain kinds of animals to see how they relate to mirrors, and watch how you relate to things that make you question your reality. And questioning reality sounds big and metaphysical, but you can see how even something as simple as a mirror can make people wonder, "What's going on? How do I make sense of this?" I'll give you another super simple example, so simple most of you, probably all of you, have forgotten that it once made you question things. But as we all know, if you put a straw in a transparent glass with water in it, it will look like the straw is bent. And we're all grown-ups, we've seen a million straws. Hello, straws look bent in the water. But At some point, sometimes you'll see children wonder, wait, why does the straw look like that? And it's really fun if any of you have the opportunity to hang out with young children, start to notice when they kind of check things out and do double takes, because that is the origin of questioning. Why is this thing not quite making sense? What's going on with the straw? And I like to ask children questions, this is the origin of conscious questions is for you to ask them questions or for other people to ask you questions. So with a child and the straw, I might ask, say, a 4-year-old, "Hey, look, the straw doesn't look straight. Do you think the straw bends suddenly in the water?" Or, "What's going on here?" And most 4-year-olds will figure, okay, straw's probably not bending. But occasionally I've seen kids, you know, feel the straw, put their fingers in the water, No, the straw is not bent. What's going on? Why does it look bent? And then I'll ask them, why do you think it looks bent if it's not bent? And that gets them to stop and think, what is going on there? So something as simple as a straw bending in water, as with a mirror, can get human beings, or in some cases animals, more intelligent animals, to pause and think. So anytime there are pieces of your reality And I'm jumping between super banal examples like mirrors and straws bending to a reality which is really big and, you know, mysterious. But one of the reasons I'm doing that is to get you to become more aware of all kinds of ways in which you might ask questions. Maybe in the back of your head there's something that doesn't quite make sense here, and maybe you could ask a question. Maybe some of you are— maybe some of you do ask questions. But I want you to start to notice things where, huh, that doesn't quite make sense. Give you another example. Suppose your professor says something you don't agree with. You could say, oh, the professor is God and therefore correct, and therefore I will do whatever the professor tells me to do. And I'm playing with you on that. Or you could say, I don't think that's true. Or maybe, maybe the professor knows something I don't and I should ask a question. It doesn't need to be a professor, could be a friend. Become aware of situations in which somebody says something, doesn't quite match reality somehow, because the beginning of questions is to begin to become acutely aware things don't match reality all over the place. I'll shift to a few moral examples. You know, right now we've been doing these very simple, banal examples. Suppose you have a friend who says that boys— males and females are equal, but he or she will only watch male sports and never watch female sports. You could ask, wait, if you think they're equal, why don't you watch equal amounts? And there might be a good reason. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. I'm just saying, wait, the thing said is not the same as the reality. Or to give a different example, maybe you have a friend who thinks it's not good to drink and drive, but you know they had a drink and drove. You might say in the back of your mind, Hey, wait, they say it's not good to drink and drive, but hey, they drank and drive. So one way to think about the origin of questions are these little pieces of reality that don't quite match. And one way to kind of think about becoming more aware of all these pieces of reality that don't quite match is to begin to become aware of the extent to which all of us, all human beings, are creatures of conformity and respect or sometimes submission to authority. And so I am fascinated with independent thought. Some of you know, may know of Socrates in ancient Greece. He was put to death for not believing in the gods of the state and for encouraging young people to ask questions. And because the standard around the world is you do what your elders tell you to do and you do what your other people in tribe do, and, or say or believe they do. That sort of conformity and submission to authority is the reason why we don't typically ask questions. Oh, everybody gets used to mirrors, everybody gets used to the straw in the glass, everybody gets used to hypocrisy all over the place, whether it's males and females or drinking and driving or a thousand other things. I'm sure if you listen to politicians, they say a thousand things that bear no relationship to the reality. If you look at advertising, you've probably found products that the product said it would do X, you get it, and it does not do X. Lying and hypocrisy are ubiquitous all over the place, everywhere. And you can just kind of conform and say, oh, I'll do the thing, whatever it is, or you can start to let those questions in the back of your head. Think of how many times a day you hear somebody who says something not quite true, or maybe that's not remotely true. Um, become aware of all the times in the day where things are not quite matching reality. And I just say in the back of your head, if you're not yet ready, maybe for a variety of reasons— maybe you don't want to question your professor because you're afraid of your grade, or maybe, you know, you don't want to question Grandma because you love Grandma and why, why say something annoying to Grandma? Whatever it is, I would say before you get to the point of actually asking questions, become aware of this back of your head thing things are not making sense. And then the next step is to crave that things do make sense. I think insofar as we're habitual creatures who typically just conform and listen to authority, we don't even notice that a thousand things— you might think I'm exaggerating, but my bet is if I woke up in the morning and I wanted to count a thousand things that didn't make sense, you know, just listen to TV, I bet I listen to could find 1,000 lies on TV between advertising and political statements easy, probably by noon. You know, that's the extent to which there are all kinds of things that just don't make sense out there. And you could say, of course it makes sense, the advertisers want to sell something, so they're going to lie to me, so no big deal. The politicians want to be elected, so they're going to lie to me, no big deal. But part of the question is, do I wish that things did make sense? Do I wish I understood why the thing in the mirror moved when I did? Do I wish that I understood why the straw looks like it's bent but it's not? Do I wish I understood why people say they believe in, say, gender equality or not drunk driving or a thousand other things? Politicians will say they care about the poor or whatever. Again, you can think, maybe I should pay attention to the fact that things don't quite make sense. So with that initial framing in mind, I want to now move to the social aspect of this, because again, it's one thing to be all alone in your mind, in the back of your head, thinking sometimes people lie, things don't make sense, something's not quite consistent. I would say a very transformative step is when you have somebody with whom you can discuss something. And I expect all of you on some issue or other kind of thought, that doesn't quite make sense, and then you found another human being who kind of said, yeah, it doesn't make sense, and then the two of you start talking, and pretty soon You created this new reality. Holy cow, this is nonsense. And you start building reality between the two of you. We realize something that everybody seems to take for granted all day, every day is absolute nonsense, and everybody accepts it. I would say the opportunity to have somebody with whom you can have a discussion is one of the most valuable things on earth. I would say it's a foundation of many deep and fabulous friendships. And of course, initially, if you just find you agree on something where it seems like everybody else disagrees, that's nice, but that's not quite questions, that's not quite dialogue. So the next step is you think you and your friend agree on this, and then you try something else, and gosh darn, that friend doesn't agree with me. They have their own ideas. This person has their own thoughts about this thing. But if you have a certain kind of relationship with a certain kind of social norm, you can say, hey, I don't quite see why so-and-so says this but behaves that way. They say, well, I think sometimes there are good reasons. Somebody could explain, oh, um, they didn't come to your party because their grandmother really is sick, or a thousand other things. So for me, the foundation of intellectual dialogue— and I call it intellectual dialogue even if it's about social things— is you are respectful of the fact the other person might have a good reason. So you think this doesn't make sense, you talk to your friend and, oh, they have a really good explanation. Or maybe even to go back to the politician or the advertiser, maybe the politician really does have a good reason for why they were— seemed to be a hypocrite. Or maybe the advertiser really did have a good explanation for why you thought something that seemed like an obvious lie was not. Again, I think part of going back and forth in intellectual exchanges is first listening to that voice in your head that, gosh, this doesn't quite make sense, maybe it's not true, maybe something else is true. Then you ask the question, and then if it's a receptive person, somebody who cares about you and you trust and respect and they trust and respect you, then maybe they provide an explanation that you hadn't thought of as to why this actually does make sense. And then you need to kind of question yourself a second time. First you question the reality that caused you to ask, and then you go to, and I thought I had the right answer, that that person was stupid in line, and whoops, I didn't. There was something else going on there. And so I want you to start to pay attention to this dynamic. Hopefully all of you are having these conversations all the time, just like you're always noticing that things don't make sense. You have lots of relationships with whom you are questioning, discussing, exploring reality. And again, it can be banal stuff like why the person didn't come to the party, Or it could be much bigger stuff, such as, why do most people in public seem to lie all the time? Going to pick on the politicians. I think from a rigorous standpoint, almost nothing politicians ever say is actually deeply, profoundly true. And maybe that's okay, maybe it's not. That's for you to discuss with your friends, to explore it. I want to use a different piece now about the role of questions themselves. First, we talked about things not making sense. About how exploring that which does not make sense expands when you have a social interaction with somebody with whom you can discuss these things, somebody you can share, gosh, why does this— doesn't make sense. And the question is, when somebody asks a question, they cause your attention to go in a new direction. You know, one way to think of human beings is that we're just passive biochemical machines where you know, DNA and what we had for breakfast that day and the thing that flashed across our screen all dictate everything we do. And hopefully either none of you believe we're biochemical machines or you hope it's false. Or if you temporarily are believing that, I'll hope that we can go beyond that. But it's not a fun life if you think everything's determined and you're just a biochemical machine. And I think it's a much more interesting life if you believe you have free will. And then what can we have free will over? Well, I'm not sure that I can choose not to sleep for 3 weeks. I think I probably will fall asleep. I can't choose not to eat for more than a certain time. We do have certain fundamental biological needs, and I think that even includes the needs for status and respect. You know, we have emotional needs and it's okay to acknowledge it. But one thing that I think we can have some control over is where we focus our attention. You know, if you think about what you can control, um, again, going without sleep or food for a long time— wow, that's hard to control. But can you maybe take your mind off the screen for a moment? Or you— can you maybe take your mind to a place where you ask a question you'd only thought of? Or maybe can you listen to a friend and allow their question to shift your attention? Because as simple and banal as it sounds, where your attention goes really creates your reality. I'm going to go from the super banal to the really big and fancy, but one of my favorite examples of what is consciousness by the psychologist Julian Jaynes— he wrote a wonderful book called The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind in the 1970s, long mouthy title— but he describes consciousness as like a flashlight in the attic. And so you can picture your mind as this dark attic, and you can shine a flashlight around your consciousness by means of asking questions, or your friend can. You can just pause and think, what did I have for breakfast this morning? Before somebody asks that, you're probably not thinking about what you had for breakfast unless it was really incredibly good or bad. But if somebody asks you, what did you have for breakfast this morning? Your mind flashes. The flashlight shows that That's what I had for breakfast. Or if somebody asks you, you know, why is so-and-so sad? You may not even have noticed that so-and-so was sad, but the question focuses your attention. So suddenly you're thinking, oh, maybe that person is sad. Is that person sad? I don't know. So think of questions, either questioning yourself or questions with other people, as ways to direct the flashlight in your mind so that you a new part of your consciousness is illuminated. And again, going from passive to active, picking on the social media addiction— I'm very concerned, by the way, with addictions of all sorts, including technology addictions, social media addictions, gaming addictions, those sorts of things— is that if you let your attention completely be driven by the algorithm, by the machine, by the technology, you are closer to becoming just a biochemical robot. You know, there are billions and billions of dollars in tech platforms designed to grasp your attention. Everybody makes money in technology these days by means of eyeballs. The longer they can keep your eyeball on the screen, the more money they're making. So your, your little tiny brain in your little tiny head, all in its lonesome, is fighting against billions, probably trillions of dollars of efforts to try to suck your attention into the machine. So what are you going to do? And maybe many of you have healthy habits around digital hygiene and you stay away from the technology for part of the day. I hope so. Or you're really disciplined. That would be great. But I think the one thing that you can work on is either alone or with friends asking questions. Is this the best use of my time? 'Do you want to go outside and go for a walk?' Or 'Let's spend Saturday having a conversation or singing together or baking a cake or doing something.' Again, people asking you questions help pull you out of the addictive technology that threatens to overwhelm us all. So I encourage you to have relationships where it's normal, socially respected, wonderful to ask questions, whether it's something social or something bigger and more intellectual. I'm going to shift now into the more intellectual side. So Alfred North Whitehead, a philosopher and mathematician, said that all of Western philosophy may be thought of as a series of footnotes to Plato. And I think of that as all of Western civilization may be thought of as a series of footnotes to Socratic inquiry, whereas if people started asking questions of each other that shifted their attention, and that shift in attention led other people to answer those questions, or a group of people as a society to answer those questions, and fundamentally new things were discovered. I'll give you two examples. Now, Galileo is famous for, on the one hand, noticing certain facts of motion. He played around with balls on ramps, something as simple as rolling a ball down a ramp and the rate of the, the rate at which the ball went down the ramp. And he looked at the motion of the sun and the moon, and he speculated that the laws of motion on Earth and the laws of motion in space might be the same. And that little thing, this notion there might be one nature, led in a sense to the foundation of modern science and We all have addictive cell phones now because Galileo launched us on the modern science trajectory. But it was really, "Hmm, I wonder if things out there in space follow the same laws of motion of things here." Simple, simple thing in one sense, but absolutely changed human history in another. To give you a different example, you know, in Christianity, it was clear from the very earliest gospels that Christians believed that every human had a soul. And yet slavery lasted. It's still— there's still slavery today. But slavery really lasted, you know, until the Quakers and others, 17th, 18th century, started these initially tiny campaigns to eliminate slavery. And they were noticing, hey, if every human being has a soul, then why does Person A get to enslave Person B? Again, one way to think about this is noticing the discrepancy, just like, hey, the straw is crooked. Hey, I thought we're all equal, and yet Joe is enslaving Nancy over there. Kind of weird. I'm trivializing it in a sense. It was incredibly courageous for the first people who spoke out against slavery to speak out against slavery. But it started with noticing these discrepancies between things don't quite work. So I'm trying to provide maybe far-fetched, or you think they're rare, examples of ways in which this process of noticing discrepancies, having friends you can talk about it with, asking questions that illuminate consciousness, and then continuing to ask the questions, um, over time, over space, across broader and broader segments of society, until the series of questions that Galileo asked led to modern science. The series of questions that the Quakers asked led to the end of slavery. And we don't know which questions you may ask or may not ask, which conversations you and your friends may have, may not have, that could maybe just eliminate a small injustice in your community, or it could lead to a business discovery that helps your company go from, you know, tiny to big. Or changes reality in all sorts of ways. So my big sort of ask of you is that you all become active agents, actively in control of your own consciousness, actively engaged in questioning and dialogue with your peers and friends and anybody who will engage with you in dialogue. So you shift away from a world ruled by, on the one hand, custom and authority, and on the other hand, by addictive technology to a world in which each of you becomes an agent of, in some sense, a better world by means of thinking, questioning, and engaging in dialogue with other people who have questions. So all of this doesn't get us to what is a good question. It just gets, I think, to the importance of a question, the importance that I think all of you have an opportunity to think of questions. Again, I'll call it a thousand times a day. My book, my first book, is called The Habit of Thought because my big goal is to make this kind of questioning habitual. I think some people maybe go much of their life without asking much of a question at all, and if you want to choose that life, you're free to choose that life. But I think the more you develop the habit of having questions first of yourself, maybe just in your diary, maybe the questions are super private, You know, I think GPT takes everything you ask, so maybe there's certain kind of questions you don't want to ask the technology because then the tech companies own all of your most personal questions. But, you know, find, find ways to ask questions and engage in dialogue and expand your mind, expand your consciousness. Get that flashlight going all around the attic of your consciousness, and gradually it'll discover, oh, this side of my brain believes that, but that side of my my brain believes that, or this side of my brain likes this, but that's on my side of my brain doesn't like that. And my sense is that you will become stronger in your personal identity, stronger in your personal beliefs, and more capable and confident about the decisions you make. And ultimately, I can't promise this, but ultimately I think a happier person because you'll be more in charge of your own life. We're flooded with lots and lots of different beliefs and different, you know, ways to evaluate the world. In my virtual school last year, I asked a group of 8 and 9-year-olds, how do you know when you're being manipulated? And at the ages of 8 and 9, some of them knew the answer was all the time. That is, every time you get on the internet, somebody is trying to get your eyeballs. Somebody's trying to persuade you of something. You're being manipulated all the time. So if you want to have a chance of fighting against that, you need to spend more seconds than minutes than hours every day thinking for yourself, discussing ideas, becoming more robust in your beliefs. St. John's College, where I actually left Harvard because it was all lectures and I hate being lectured at— my apologies for lecturing, but she required it, I'm going to blame her— St. John's is a class where all classes are taught Socratically. The guides only ask teachers, the tutors only asked ask questions. They do not lecture at all. It's described as 4 years of having your most sacred beliefs ripped to shreds week after week after week. You read Plato and think he's the dude, and then Aristotle contradicts him, you think he's the dude, and Aquinas contradicts him, and then think he's the dude, and next thing you know, Kant has ripped him up. Um, same thing with, you know, Euclid is the dude, and then oops, non-Euclidean geometry rips that all up. You know, science Yeah, it's a matter of constantly changing things. Any system of belief has been changed thousands of times and is constantly being changed. And so again, if you're not going to be just a candle in the wind that's buffeted by the person you spoke with last or the ad you last saw on Facebook or whatever, I want you to become strong and capable internally. So then, all that in mind, backing up to what is a good question, I would say First and foremost, what is a good question is the question that you need to be asking most. And that may seem like a real cop-out of an answer to this because, wait, I want the answer to what is a good question. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. What is a good question is what do you need? What part of your life is not really being satisfied? Where are you being manipulated? Where are you being cheated? Where are you being misled? Where are you being ignorant? Where are you being bored? Who is influencing you in ways you don't want to be influenced? How are you not living your best possible life? Why are you not living your best possible life? I want you to constantly be thinking of how to have a better life, how to be a better human being. The true, the good, and the beautiful are not abstract. Is this true? You should be asking all day, every day. Is this good? All day, every day. Is this noble or beautiful? All day, every day. And if you're engaged in a community of dialogue, then you will get new and better and different answers constantly. All of this gets to the point of what is a good question. If you have the habit of questioning everything around you, then when, say, in a business meeting somebody says, "Let's have this be the marketing campaign," and you know that's ridiculous, and so you ask, "Excuse me, our customers don't relate to this idea. Why do you think this would be a good marketing And that's a simple question, but in that context, it's a great question. Or, um, why don't we hang out with so-and-so? Well, you know that this so-and-so makes you all miserable. Why are you going to go hang out with so-and-so who's a bad influence and makes you miserable? Again, what is a good question involves first and foremost, who am I? What do I stand for? What am I trying to achieve in this life? And then what influences might be preventing me from doing that? Some of this might be knowledge. You know, it could be that you've noticed a discrepancy in belief. Oh, Politician A said this, Politician B said that. What should I— what should I believe? Well, there's a discrepancy. You should go out and research it. I always like to see situations where people disagree. Let's see, does the AI agree, disagree? Why or not? Why not? You can ask the AI for controversies. What are the controversies around this issue? What are the biggest differences of opinion around this issue? You should be aware that even if you're using AI, you should be using AI to inform you as a high-agency independent thinker rather than passively accepting what it is. And AI, of course, I think— I don't think AI is the end of the world. I think human beings are going to be valuable forever. But in order for the human beings to be valuable, we need to be deeply connected to who we are, what we stand for, and knowledgeable about these discrepancies so that we won't simply be ruled by machines who certainly do not and will never have our best interests in mind. So I, I'm on a campaign for humanity to push back individually in the inner recesses of your consciousness every millisecond of every day. And I'm also on a campaign for us collectively as human beings to think together about how to make a better world, discuss honestly and respectfully together how to make a better world, and ultimately have AI be our servant rather than our master. Do a quick ping for the Cosmos Institute. A friend of mine, this man named Brendan McCord, um, he is financing something called the Cosmos Institute, and it celebrates liberty and virtue and in a world of AI. He's— he sold a couple of AI companies for several hundred million dollars. So he's certainly informed in the tech side and he's creating a coalition of philosophers and technologists to address the issue of freedom and virtue in a world of AI. So follow Cosmos Institute for, I think, ongoing interesting content. I'm very active on social media, mostly Facebook, Twitter. And LinkedIn. You can disagree with me constantly, I love that. I encourage you to follow all sorts of accounts all over the place that annoy you, you disagree with, freak you out. Again, limits of freaking out, but the point is not to become complacent. You will generate questions by having ideas. I deliberately follow some accounts of people whose ideas I know I disagree with, but they're thoughtful, intelligent perspectives I haven't thought of. So always push yourself, push yourself in conversations, push, push yourself online. And ultimately, I want everybody to have a rich, flourishing life for you, your children, your grandchildren, and at the same time, again, help protect humanity from the machines taking over.