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Comment by serial_dev | Hacker News Reader

I don't like to say "I'm going to ask a stupid question". First of all, it feels disingenuous to me, people who say that never actually think that their questions will be stupid. And the second reason is that I think I might even convince myself that my questions are stupid... I know it sounds silly to some but little things like how you talk about yourself (and your questions) is important.

I often ask these "stupid" questions, though. I usually start with: "it might have been said in other meetings, but just to be sure, what is...", "I might be a bit slow, could you explain X once again just to make sure I understand it", "So just to paraphrase what we've been discussing, X is Y, is that correct?", and sometimes I just ask "what does $acronym stand for and why is it important for us now".

I, too, often find that nobody knows the answers to very basic questions and we are in a meeting of 6-12 people...

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> First of all, it feels disingenuous to me, people who say that never actually think that their questions will be stupid.

No, I often legitimately think that my question might (!) be stupid, because I'm aware that I'm coming into the discussion with less domain knowledge and experience than the other people in the room. I still think it's good for everyone (ie, not just me) to explain. (Sometimes it's clear that everything is just out of my league, in which case I shut up and let the meeting go on.)

It's this very awareness of one's own limitations that allows folks to overcome those limitations. If I might add my own (personal, biased, narrow) understanding; the whole concept of "stupid" is like a cognitive filtration mechanism. We filter ideas that others have by calling them "stupid" and then we attempt to avoid being filtered in that way, but that filter is kind of stupid. Unless you already know everything (protip: you don't) you run the risk of filtering based on an incorrect assumption.

Yeah I feel the same way. I never understood the "This may be a stupid question..." framing.

Asking fundamental questions in order to build up to a more complex understanding is the most effective way to learn, I have no hesitation about asking such questions.

One reason for the framing (when used by a senior person or someone in authority) is to give permission to more junior people who may be holding back on their own questions because they are afraid of looking bad.

It can easily backfire. Some one who has an urgent but basic question might refrain from speaking up if, beforehand, a senior prefaces their pointed probing question with "this is a stupid question...".

It's better to just kick things off with naive questions or even use a bit of humor to disarm people, so they don't feel like they have to be "advanced" all the time.

You don't say this is. You say "this may be" a stupid question.

The point is not that anyone with the same question should feel stupid; it's that I don't care if anyone thinks I am.

Depending on who is asking, the intention behind such framing is different. For someone in a leadership position, the point is to open up dialog and make folks comfortable enough to ask questions without them feeling they're at risk of humiliation or judgement. For others it may be to signal politeness and deference to the speaker.

Whatever the case, there are more effective, more genuine phrasings to use than to literally invoke "stupidity".

> more effective, more genuine phrasings

Examples please?

I was thinking about:

"I'd like to ask some things that might be obvious to many of you: ..."

Yeah, to pretend to be "stupid" and basically dismiss your own question is kind of cloying or may be seen as disingenuous or even passive aggressive.

Folks who are good at communicating can always keep everyone feeling engaged and comfortable, while still getting to nitty-gritty WITHOUT resorting to saying stuff like "... this is stupid question, but...".

They're not pretending to be stupid. It's that they think their question might be stemming from not understanding something fundamental that everyone else in the room already knows.

If you think they're being disingenuous because you think they do understand what's going on, then it actually supports why they feel the need to preface their question with that phrase. You expect that they know it, so they make questions around it less jarring by admitting that they probably don't know enough.

In my view, admitting that you "might have a stupid question" is not disingenuous, it's a form of self-depreciation that disarms people and relaxes the room.

It's important to treat yourself with respect, but people also respect when you admit that you don't know something simple.

It's "self deprecation", depreciation is something different.

I'm not sure what kind of audience you think it works on.

I tend to get (particularly from people under 40) one of two inappropriate reactions to reflexive self deprecation - either exaggerated sympathy for my plight, or treating it as an exposed weakness to attack.

It's all about reading the room. If you're talking to a hostile crowd you're not going to expose weakness. I hope that most of these internal alignment meetings are not hostile, and are instead conducted with the intent to best deliver value to the business. In these instances, I have found comments like "I'm sorry to ask a basic question here..." work well to explain that I probably don't have as much domain experience as the others in the room; that I'm not trying to school them on their domain; and that I'm simply trying to gain understanding so that I can contribute.

"I'm sorry to ask a basic question here..."

Sure...but I think that an insight that I've gained is that this is an example of a formula which doesn't really communicate or explain all the things you mention. You aren't sorry, you don't know that your question is basic, and you don't think you're wasting peoples' time.

In effect, it's a "pointer" to a bunch of things, so it only works with people that are conditioned to such things and have them in their memory. One of the things you mention, "not trying to school them" sounds to me like deference, and I don't think deference can be quickly established without a formula. Like a salute, you have to do something arbitrary in a mutually understood way.

"Basic questions" sounds nice :-) more nice than "stupid questions" I think.

(Probably the questions aren't literally stupid, or the person maybe would never have been hired in the first place)

Whoops, yes I meant self-deprecation (I added an 'i' by accident)

Yes, some people will pity you, or treat it as a weakness. But having the courage to admit when you don't know something is a valuable trait that most people (in my experience) respect.

Also if you demonstrate your knowledge in other areas and contribute value to the meeting, people tend to forgive a few stupid questions in another area.

But "courage" is exactly the sort of response that bugs me. It's not courage, or passive-aggressiveness, it's etiquette. Responding with praise, or pity, or a put-down, it's all a failure to appreciate the formula for what I consider basic etiquette.

It's like when I'm having a meeting with my manager and I want to talk, so I start, they stop, I apologize for interrupting, and they say no, no, go on.

I assume there is no emotional drama going on. If they really want to continue talking, they can do so. That's why I apologize and pause. I'm not sorry, but I need to show appropriate deference.

It would be unfortunate if someone was building up resentment because they're not on the same wavelength about appropriate behavior. The purpose of etiquette seems to me to provide a formula to negotiate common situations without having to navigate emotional complexities.

But when different people have different rules, there's not much that can be resolved.

I think some of this might be cultural. For example, I think self-deprecation may be in general more widely appreciated in the UK than the US (though perhaps this is gradually changing).

I’m reminded of Arthur Dent (British) in the Hitchhiker’s Guide telling Zaphod, modestly, “oh, it was nothing” about something great he did, and Zaphod responding along the lines of “oh, it was nothing? In that case forget it then”, which was not at all what Arthur intended.

Well, I'm American, and there were definitely bits in that book that totally failed to translate for me. For instance, "Ford Prefect" seemed like a perfectly normal name - IMO the American edition should've changed it to "Ford Escort".

But being self-deprecating was not one of them. I feel like I'm surrounded by Zaphods, or something, and I'm not sure when it happened.

Yeah, I like this tactic, but I don't think phrasing it with the word "stupid" is helpful.

I prefer to say things like "I'm not fully up to speed on this, so let's go back to basics/fundamentals for a moment", or "sometimes we're so focused on the details that we can't see the wood for the trees - let's take a step back and just run through it at a high level again".

That just sounds like corpratese though, the stupid question is much better in my opinion.

With yours it's to easy for someone to switch off and not hear what you said because they think you're talking bullshit.

In two sentences you managed to cram in 5 idioms/phrases that are basically corporate babble.

They sound like someone avoiding directly admitting that they don't understand something. Unwillingness to look stupid.

Gareth321 here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28955167 mentioned "basic" instead of "stupid"

> people who say that never actually think that their questions will be stupid

I use it all the time. Oftentimes they are stupid questions. Sometimes they're not, but generally that's when I'm not sure if it's a stupid question or not. And that's okay—the point is, it's fine to ask stupid questions.

> ...it feels disingenuous to me, people who say that never actually think that their questions will be stupid.

I ask questions that have a decent chance of making me look stupid all the time. Even when the rational part of my brain says "if you have this question, it's likely that other people do too," there's a big part of me that worries, "nah, I'm the odd one out here."

>> First of all, it feels disingenuous to me, people who say that never actually think that their questions will be stupid.

I preface some of my statements with this, and I fully expect them to be stupid. In fact, many of the questions I ask that I don't preface with the above disclaimer are in fact quite stupid.

I prefer using “basic” over “stupid”. A basic question is literally about the basics or fundamentals, while a stupid question implies something is wrong with the asker to even need to pose it.

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