> Don’t put them in a position to embarrass themselves: “RxJS was really confusing for me when I learned it, was there any way I could make my explanation clearer in this talk?” This is much more effective than just, “Did that make sense?” People are going to say “yes” to that 90% of the time to save face (you can tell this by their facial expression and tone of voice). A related trick for this is to create a hypothetical third person: “The next time I give this talk, is there something I could do to make the explanation clearer for the audience?”

This really illustrates how an understanding of human behavior and social norms is needed to ask the right questions in the right way in order to actually get the answers you need.