Comment by brotchie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brotchie | Hacker News Reader

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I totally agree with this sentiment. My parents would always attempt to answer any question, however absurd: What's this made of? wood. What's wood made of? Carbon, Hydrogen, and Oxygen. What's Carbon made of? Protons and Neutrons. What's a Proton made of? It would stop at this point because they weren't Physicists and didn't know about Quarks and Gluons.

Following many of these experiences, I though it always appropriate to ask probing questions, and continue to ask them until I understood a problem or situation fully. This attitude continues to this day, though curbed in some social situations. I'm not sure whether this persistent character trait is correlated with my parents behaviour or caused by it.

I distinctly remember feeling quite angry during my first "adult" interactions with many of my friend's parents. Most had equal or greater education than my parents, yet when queried about aspect of their field that I knew they had deep knowledge of (eg. Ships engines from a Marine Engineer, Offshore tax havens from a Tax Accountant), they'd be very hesitant and often express "why do you ask so many damn questions?"

In hindsight, perhaps this result was in part due to my lack of social awareness and emotional intelligence, but I swear it's imbued their offspring with fundamentally different characteristics. My friend's that had parents such as these have tended to follow more qualitative pursuits (Musicians, writers, journalists) while those with parents similar to mine ended up in strongly quantitative fields (Engineering, Maths, Science).

Obviously my experience is a single sample from the distribution, yet I wonder if others have observed a correlation between their own or others parent's attitudes towards answering their children's thorny questions and life / career attitudes? Perhaps it simply comes down to genetics?

I dropped my kids off at pre-school the other day. There is a little box full of sea shells, and my boy picked one up and fingered the little lumps and bumps on it.

I thought, damn, I have no idea how those little bumps on the shell are made. So I went on the internet and read as much as I could and found some nice links. Then I did a show and tell with the family. There wasn't that much interest, but later in the week I heard from his teacher that my wife had been telling the other kids how shells made, and what lives in them. My boys learned how to draw spirals.

That's my story.

I like the questions that kids ask, like what is an atom, what are protons, quarks etc. Then we get to say "No one really knows" and talk about the biggest machine in the world (LHC) (it may no be the biggest - but the story has to be good) and lab coats and scientists (like Dora the explora - that one's a bit of a stretch.) I think kids like to hear that we all question stuff and some people try to answer those questions.

I love it when my kids say 'I think so-and-so' and you can tell them that other scientists thought that and did an experiment to see if they were right. That son, is a valid and interesting question.

My parents were like this too, and my innate thirst for knowledge led me to persistently question people for years until I realized how much many people seem to dislike this.

I love explaining in depth and enjoy the opportunity to explore the boundaries of my knowledge. "Actually, I don't know! Let's find out!" comes out of my mouth often.

But so many people seem to get irritated or annoyed when I (inadvertently) expose their lack of knowledge. I still haven't quite figured out why, but I've been told on more than one occasion to "Stop grilling me!" when I'm simply curious about someone's job or how they see things.

You lack the knowledge, so it's fascinating for you to learn it for the first time. They already have the knowledge, so it likely gets increasingly tedious the more questions you ask as reciting what they already know lacks the fascination of discovery that you experience.

Then am I abnormal in that I get vicarious joy out of seeing someone else learn something for the first time?

Relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1053/

- randall

You've probably seen/read interviews with people where the person doing the interviewing has a list of questions already prepared and just goes through them one by one, occasionally asking a question that was just answered as part of a previous question or failing to dive deeper into an answer that is so fascinating that it's a shame not to explore it more. I find those kinds of interviews frustrating since the interviewer is putting no thought into it.

A good interviewer is someone who asks questions, then connects them with previously learned information in order to ask a better, more insightful question that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to ask had they not just learned the info. It's clear that this interviewer isn't just going down a list of things to ask. A really good interview is one where the interviewee walks away having learned something, even though they've only answered questions posed to them.

Asking questions is a lot like this. If you're more like the first interviewer going through a list of disjoint questions (or questions which only probe for further detail) then it's not surprising to me if people get annoyed. If you're like the second interviewer asking insightful, deeper questions where you're connecting the dots in such a way that you're asking questions that matter and they still get annoyed then perhaps it's just them. Of course, if it's totally new territory for you then you may need to go through seemingly disjoint questions in order to establish a baseline of knowledge to be able to ask more intelligent, interesting questions. You may lose people in your attempt to bootstrap your knowledge to that level.

It's also entirely possible that they hate their job but through cognitive dissonance they've learned to cope with it. Your questions may increase the dissonance for the work they do in which case they'd rather avoid thinking about it entirely.

I doubt they're annoyed by their "lack of knowledge" being exposed, it seems more likely to me that they're annoyed because they're trying to do something more important (to themselves/their boss/whoever) than answer your persistent questions..

This has happened in casual conversation where nothing else important was going on.

It would be great if people were taught to say "I don't know" (in other words, to tell the truth).

It's such a liberating thing to be able to say.

I tutor kids, and sometimes they ask stuff I can't answer. I tell them I don't know but will find out, then move heaven and earth to find out. A week later, when I tell them, the look of surprise on their faces can be funny: an adult actually admitted to not knowing, and then kept a promise to find out!

All this talk about asking mom and dad questions reminded me of the short story "Examination Day"

‘Why, Dad?’

‘Because it does, that’s all.’

http://www.thebostonbachelor.com/2008/examination-day-by-hen...

That reminds me a bit of the Vonnegut short story, Harrison Bergeron with some more overtly Orwellian tones.

http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

The comments below that story are worth a look. They aren't insightful but they make an interesting contrast to the story itself.

Comments like the following:

"After reading some of the comments on this page, I am beginning to suspect this story has already come true"

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