[HN Gopher] Erotetics
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       Erotetics
        
       Author : pizza
       Score  : 42 points
       Date   : 2022-03-08 07:44 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
        
       | ggm wrote:
       | There are no bad questions but there are plenty of bad answers
        
         | IncRnd wrote:
         | That's a good point.
        
         | k__ wrote:
         | I would consider a question bad that is not explicit enough
         | about what answer would actually be "good".
         | 
         | But when learning new things, I'm often faced with the problem
         | that asking the right questions isn't much different from
         | already knowing the answer.
        
         | tpoacher wrote:
         | Are you just saying this because you're angry at your mother?
         | 
         | (see? bad question)
        
         | travisgriggs wrote:
         | Can't help but think of this one:
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLt1HoAPniM
        
         | RobertRoberts wrote:
         | Passive aggressive questions intended to inflame a situation
         | are bad. Especially so if the asker has no interest in a
         | truthful (or any) answer.
        
           | _kst_ wrote:
           | Are they really?
           | 
           | 8-)}
        
             | RobertRoberts wrote:
             | I wonder if this is a rhetorical question?
        
         | drewcoo wrote:
         | A question can smuggle in presuppositions. A question can
         | clearly be asked in bad faith.
         | 
         | "Did you stop beating your spouse yet?" is a bad question. So
         | is "why do atheists hate god?"
        
           | dublin wrote:
           | Every question, and every answer carries with it a plethora
           | of presuppositions. Cornelius van Til wrote some excellent
           | works on presuppositions with respect to worldviews, but his
           | work is much more easily understood by reading the works of
           | Greg Bahnsen, a student of van Til's, who died at an early
           | age about 25 years ago.
        
           | gweinberg wrote:
           | Yes, and a rhetorical question really isn;t a question at
           | all, it's a statement disguised as one. If someone asks a
           | question like "would you feel the same if the shoe were on
           | the other foot?" and the reply is "as a matter of fact I
           | would", you can be fairly confident the "questioner" would
           | come back with "no you wouldn't".
        
       | whyage wrote:
       | I always wondered if there's a way to define the group of
       | unanswerable questions. Specifically, is there some sort of test
       | that can be applied to a question, resulting in whether or not it
       | is answerable. This will likely have to be limited to a certain
       | field (say, physics) but could be useful nonetheless.
        
         | JadeNB wrote:
         | This would run up against a standard halting-type reduction: if
         | there is any unanswerable question Q, and you feed your test
         | the question "A and Q?", then you will be testing whether A is
         | true.
        
       | FabHK wrote:
       | Related (nice) word: supererogatory = more than what can be asked
       | for, more than is required by duty. "In ethics, an act is
       | supererogatory if it is good but not morally required to be
       | done."
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supererogation
        
       | pontifier wrote:
       | I noticed something along these lines when designing pages on a
       | website that I'm working on.
       | 
       | Each page is the answer to a question. If you don't define the
       | question well, it's difficult to know what that page should show.
        
       | WFHRenaissance wrote:
       | SFW in case anyone was wondering
        
         | afstr wrote:
         | I was definitely wondering!
        
           | belter wrote:
           | Just a discussion about human intercourse...
           | 
           | https://www.thefreedictionary.com/social+intercourse
        
           | imhoguy wrote:
           | I was almost expecting some new development teledildonics
           | domain ;)
        
           | amelius wrote:
           | You probably confused this with erotic erotetics, i.e. the
           | part of logic devoted to erotic questions.
        
       | nonrandomstring wrote:
       | The idea of an implicit dialogical contract is common to the
       | ideas of Alfred Jules Ayer, Jurgen Habermas and Carl Rogers in
       | addition to these "Erotetic" philosophers.
       | 
       | An implicit question rides along with a speech act. Even ones
       | like submitting post to HN. In this case it is:
       | 
       | "Oh how interesting is Erotetics.. what might this imply for
       | digital technologies of social or commercial value?"
       | 
       | And the response might be:
       | 
       | "Oh yes, I see there's an overlap with formal query languages
       | (indeed structured ones (SQL)), so maybe we can learn to make
       | better databases"
       | 
       | OR
       | 
       | "Hmm isn't it interesting that in machine learning the trainer
       | knows both the question and the answer so; is the weight matrix
       | essentially the proof that links the a-priori to the consequent?
       | What can this tell us about building better neural nets"
       | 
       | And still, these questions carry along with them implied
       | questions of their own, perhaps to do with the study of language
       | as branch of computing.
       | 
       | Each participant "signs" (like a block-chain) their contribution
       | not just with a response, but with an implicit expectation.
       | 
       | Wouldn't it be a "fun" (and strange) world, if like that scene in
       | Mr. Robot where everyone at the Allsafe office wears a label that
       | sums up their life, if each comment also had a "Why I am saying
       | this and what I expect in response" field.
        
       | irrational wrote:
       | >To teach someone something is to answer that person's questions
       | about some subject matter.
       | 
       | I wonder if this would be better said, "To teach someone
       | something is to answer the questions that a person should have
       | about some subject matter."
       | 
       | I'm thinking about school children and I imagine most of them
       | would claim they have no questions about the subject matter and
       | can we please be finished now?
        
         | JellyBeanThief wrote:
         | My question then would be: can a disinterested school child be
         | taught as well as an interested school child?
         | 
         | Because if this is not so, then it seems to me that the first
         | task of an effective teacher is not to plow ahead answering
         | questions the student doesn't have (and may not even
         | understand), but to provoke those questions in the student.
        
           | dublin wrote:
           | The art of teaching (or management, or any other kind of
           | leadership) is not communicating information and directing
           | activities, but instilling a curiosity, want, or _desire_ to
           | learn and do. Once you do that, there 's no stopping an
           | intelligent person from learning. (As Jordan Peterson (among
           | others) correctly points out, though, there is a minimum
           | human intelligence level required for that baseline
           | curiosity, and alas, much of humanity doesn't reach that bar,
           | especially in certain regions of the world...)
        
           | beaconstudios wrote:
           | That's the principle of constructivist teaching methods -
           | you're not transferring information, you're helping the
           | student construct a mental model. Thus, rather than just
           | dumping info, you have to probe the student's model to see if
           | they truly understand, and teach to the misunderstandings.
        
       | kaycebasques wrote:
       | > In proportion as a man is thinking scientifically when he makes
       | a statement, he knows the statement is the answer to a question
       | and he knows what the question is.
       | 
       | Interesting way of looking at communication!
       | 
       | I might be able to apply this to technical writing (my line of
       | work). Sometimes you write some content and it feels out of place
       | or awkward. Perhaps asking "what question is this statement an
       | answer to?" might clarify what to do with the content.
       | 
       | I also find it effective to sometimes literally start each
       | paragraph with the question that the paragraph is answering. It
       | helps keep the writing focused.
        
         | maicro wrote:
         | https://diataxis.fr (or the original of that page) was posted
         | on HN recently, and I thought it was fairly interesting; I
         | haven't had an opportunity to apply it to my own technical
         | writing yet (I wear many hats, and "documentation writer"
         | hasn't been needed recently), but I'm keeping it handy for when
         | I do.
        
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