On Rigorous Thinking

Striving for rigorous thinking over lazy thinking should be everyone’s goal. Rigorous thinking enforces people to defend their thesis and advocate their ideas. The ideas are backed by data rooted in reality. Lazy thinking is a black box of logic where people don’t know why something works.

Adult life is more than just a multiple-choice test. Go beyond “what?” and ask “how?” and “why?” Finding answers to “What are the main causes of lack of critical thinking?” can be answered with a quick web search. But this type of knowledge is superficial. To build rigorous knowledge, we need to go beyond simple facts and web search. We can all improve critical thinking by asking a few extra questions each day.

To be a successful investor, scientist, writer or a founder, it is not enough to follow the same prediction. Therefore, critical & independent thinking becomes important. Rigorous thinking implies being critical of information presented to you. Rigorous thinking implies being able to think for yourself. If everyone is hiking the same trail, should you be following the same trail? That is the essence of Rigorous and independent thinking.

Logical perspective is called upon us everyday while making critical decisions. However, the noise around us makes it very difficult to separate fact from opinion. Politics, religion and stock market direction yield useless discussion because they do not go anywhere. Beliefs become part of people’s identity and they are hard to mold once they harden.

We are constantly bombarded with new information, day in and day out, via our smartphones, our browsers, advertisements, digital news, and more. Take a look around you and you’ll find yourself surrounded by a data overload, but a drought of original thought. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. We take opinions as facts and as a single source of truth. It even seems at times like we have forgotten how to question and reason.

Liberal arts and humanity is not given the same importance as math and science in higher education today. It should be a reminder for us all that we are molded by our way of thinking. In that case, you can bet the decay of society will start accelerating if there is a broader decay of rigorous and independents thinking.

Great thinkers

Ralph Waldo Emerson on solitude:

He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.

Emerson is suggesting to lead and avoid heading towards the cliff led by a common herd. To avoid falling over the cliff, you need to make solitude as your dear friend. Solitude and leadership is contradictory but that is the essence of leadership. Being able to think for yourself and make hard decisions for common good is required out of great leaders. [2]

Charlie Munger’s tip on improving the ability to hold opposing views:

Well I do have a tip at times in my life I've put myself to a standard that I think has helped me. I think I'm not really equipped to comment on this subject until I can state the arguments against my conclusion better than the people on the other side. If you do that all the time, if you're looking for disconfirming evidence and putting yourself on a grill to make that, that's a good way to help her move ignorance. What happens is that every human being tends to believe way more than he should in what he's worked hard to find out or what he's announced publicly that he already believes. In other words while we shout our knowledge out we're really pounding it in without we're not enlarging it and I was always aware of that and so I've accepted these damned annual meetings I'm pretty quiet.

I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.

George Orwell on lies from his 1984 book:

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'

Emerson, Munger and Orwell are pushing for independent thinking and challenging conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, in our society thinking from the fundamentals or the source material is rare. We instead form conclusions after taking in layers and layers of overlapping information and opinions, without basing our reasoning on those essential fundamentals. Also rare is a deep, multi-faceted education, which contains a breadth of learning.

Socratic method

To ask continual questions, Socrates, a Greek philosopher who sought to get to the bottom of his students’ views used continual questions until a contradiction was exposed. This challenges the initial assumption of his students. Asking continual questions is known as the Socratic Method.

The Socratic Method pushes for critical thinking and finding holes in assumptions. Questions to promote critical thinking:

• Why does X cause Y to happen?
• How will making a decision impact others?
• What is the hardest part of this problem you are working on?
• How can you overcome constraints you are dealt with?
• Can you back your thesis with a set of data points?
• How did you know this?
• Why did you fail and what did you learn from it?
• What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
• Where does conviction and ambition come from? How can you get more of it?
• Why ask great questions?

Timeful vs timeless advice

Be critical of timeful vs timeless advice.

If one is equipped to think critically, can a person challenge conventional wisdom? One can start with understanding the basic elements of conventional wisdom. Buying a home to build wealth, for example, was relevant for a specific era, but might not be for many today.

Outsourcing decisions to recent history might sound novel and convenient, but can be dangerous because you have failed to explore why it’s conventional in the first place. Compounding doesn’t have the same magnitude of wealth accumulation when buying a home. Why is that? The elements of yesterday do not comply with elements today. Interest rate environment was different in the 70s than today. That is just one possible explanation. But one should compile all these elements and then try to answer the same question.

Challenging these types of conventional wisdom allows you to differentiate between timeliness and timelessness of advice. On a final note, we need to teach that doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed. It’s OK to say, “I don’t know” and question everything, because that is when the independent thinkers inherent in all of us can rise.

Writing essays for critical thinking

We are taught in schools to write essays with introductions and conclusions. But a real essay should be for pure observations. Since high schools imitate universities, the entire experience of education is rooted in writing essays around English literature and defending the thesis. Defending a thesis comes from law, but that is pointless when writing essays for thinking.

Traditional essays do not allow to explore questions, but rather explore answers to a specific question. A quick web search can point me to all possible answers. I can beautify my essay with a flavor of rhetoric and perfect grammar. Paul Graham has written an excellent piece on this topic.

It's no wonder if this seems to the student a pointless exercise, because we're now three steps removed from real work: the students are imitating English professors, who are imitating classical scholars, who are merely the inheritors of a tradition growing out of what was, 700 years ago, fascinating and urgently needed work.

The other big difference between a real essay and the things they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it. That principle, like the idea that we ought to be writing about literature, turns out to be another intellectual hangover of long forgotten origins.

Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth, as I think lawyers would be the first to admit. It's not just that you miss subtleties this way. The real problem is that you can't change the question.

An essay is supposed to be a search for truth. It would be suspicious if it didn't meander.

If there's one piece of advice I would give about writing essays, it would be: don't do as you're told. Don't believe what you're supposed to. Don't write the essay readers expect; one learns nothing from what one expects. And don't write the way they taught you to in school.

Paul Graham on independent mindedness

There's room for a little novelty in most kinds of work, but in practice there's a fairly sharp distinction between the kinds of work where it's essential to be independent-minded, and the kinds where it's not. I wish someone had told me about this distinction when I was a kid, because it's one of the most important things to think about when you're deciding what kind of work you want to do. Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else? I suspect most people's unconscious mind will answer that question before their conscious mind has a chance to.

Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than nurture. If you're naturally independent-minded, you're going to find it frustrating to be a middle manager. And if you're naturally conventional-minded, you're going to be sailing into a headwind if you try to do original research.

People are often mistaken about where they fall on the spectrum from conventional- to independent-minded. Conventional-minded people don't like to think of themselves as conventional-minded. By the time they reach adulthood, most people know roughly how smart they are (in the narrow sense of ability to solve pre-set problems), because they're constantly being tested and ranked according to it. But schools generally ignore independent-mindedness, except to the extent they try to suppress it. So we don't get anything like the same kind of feedback about how independent-minded we are.

The conventional-minded are often fooled by the strength of their opinions into believing that they're independent-minded. But strong convictions are not a sign of independent-mindedness. Rather the opposite.

Paul Graham's suggestion on how to practice independent mindedness:

1. Ignore conventional beliefs. It is hard to be a conformist if you don't know what you are supposed to confirm to. A common technique practiced by nerds.
2. Surround yourself with others who are independent minded. Surrounding yourself with conventional thinkers will yield conventional thinking while surrounding yourself with independent minded will yield surprises.
3. Cultivating conversations from people with different views will lead to multi-disciplinary thinking which allows you to import ideas from one to another.
4. Reading history can influence time and space. Focusing not only on what happened, but try to get into the heads of people who lived in the past (hard to do however).
5. Cultivate an attitude of skepticism. When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself “Is that true?”
6. Stand back and watch how other people get their ideas. When you stand back at a sufficient distance, you can see ideas spreading through groups of people like waves. The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking.

There are 3 components of independent mindedness: fastidiousness about truth, resistance to being told what to think, and curiosity.

1. Being fastidiousness about truth by using degree of beliefs.

For most people, degree of belief rushes unexamined toward the extremes: the unlikely becomes impossible, and the probable becomes certain. To the independent-minded, this seems unpardonably sloppy. They're willing to have anything in their heads, from highly speculative hypotheses to (apparent) tautologies, but on subjects they care about, everything has to be labelled with a carefully considered degree of belief.

2. Resistance to being told what to think.

The big mistake people make about it is to think of it as a merely negative quality. The language we use reinforces that idea. You're unconventional. You don't care what other people think. But it's not just a kind of immunity. In the most independent-minded people, the desire not to be told what to think is a positive force. It's not mere skepticism, but an active delight in ideas that subvert the conventional wisdom, the more counterintuitive the better. Think how often your reaction to a novel idea is to laugh. I don't think it's because novel ideas are funny per se, but because novelty and humor share a certain kind of surprisingness. But while not identical, the two are close enough that there is a definite correlation between having a sense of humor and being independent-minded — just as there is between being humorless and being conventional-minded.

3. Curiosity.

To the extent that we can give a brief answer to the question of where novel ideas come from, it's curiosity. That's what people are usually feeling before having them. Everyone I know who's independent-minded is deeply curious, and everyone I know who's conventional-minded isn't. If you're sufficiently curious, you don't need to clear space in your brain, because the new ideas you discover will push out the conventional ones you acquired by default.

Selective skepticism

There is skepticism as a permanent attitude and there is selective skepticism. A distinction between both is necessary. Selective skepticism is necessary in sound reasoning and discovery of truth. But being permanent skeptics can damage our perception of the real-world.

We shouldn't respond everything with doubt. There are situations where we should use selective skepticism. Selective skepticism is a useful tool when investigating the truth. It is useful to find enough information to validate a hypothesis or an argument. We should be reluctant to accept any conclusions at face value. Especially when a premise is questionable. Or a premise is being made by a questionable individual. This kind of healthy skepticism is necessary.

But skepticism as a permanent attitude can impair our perception of the real-world. Someone with this view will refuse to accept any sound reasoning. Or fail to understand the reasoning process. The extreme skeptic will claim there is no standard for sound reasoning so he or she will reject any truth. The whole purpose of logic is to discover the truth. It can be deadly if an individual does not bother to search for truth.

So, what should we do? Besides, being a selective skeptic, we can strive to be an optimist. But be aware of naive optimism. A naive optimist is someone who makes positive estimates without sufficient evidence. This represents an illogical position because a naive optimist acts out of prejudice. Their mind is already made up about a particular matter before they have engaged in other alternatives. Being a naive optimist clouds our observation if we ignore reality.

Embrace reality and seek to improve it. We can fix problems by keeping our minds open to various possibilities. A narrow-minded person will not consider alternatives because they do not meet their assumptions. An open-minded person will seek all possible alternatives and relevant information.

Being a permanent skeptic, naive optimist, or narrow-minded will cloud our observations. So what must we do? Do what scientists do: strive for objectivity. Scientists try to describe the world as it is, not as they want it to be. Selective skeptics will seek to answer whys and hows questions by using method of scientific integrity.

A sound reasoning can eliminate all prejudices by deploying selective skepticism in necessary situations.

Selective skepticism and sound reasoning can eliminate all prejudices in necessary situations.

There are in fact two things: science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance. — Hippocrates

It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is—if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. — Richard Feynman

Sit down before facts like a child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived Notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature leads, or shall learn nothing. — Thomas Henry Huxley

Avoid tribes

In modern culture, we all associate ourselves to a certain tribe. Primitive humans would not be surprised to see this phenomenon today. This has been going on since ancient times.

Ideologies (ideas) become part of who we are. People get invested in their ideologies, especially if they get invested publicly and identify with their own ideologies. So there are many forces against changing your mind. Flip-flopping is a bad word to people. It shouldn't be. Within sciences, people who give up and change their mind get good points. It's a rare quality of a good scientist, but it's an esteemed one.

Being tribal causes intense ideologies. Intense ideologies cabbages up one’s mind. You start out as a kid with orthodox ideologies, you keep pounding on, gradually ruining your mind. Preachers will keep preaching their views. It happens daily, in every corner of life. The only core ideology is to not get hung up on what you already know or believe in. Listen to both sides because everyone comes from different experiences.

The solution to prevent intense ideologies is to get involved in more of tribal ideologies, not avoid them. Primarily, ego gets in the way because we think we know what is right and wrong. Staying neutral is what many choose but the world is not neutral. This is immensely powerful from an aspect of social learning. Tribes are schools of storytelling, connection, sense making, evolution, persuasion, human behavior and many other things. If any of these things are useful to you, you have to get involved. You can't learn these things from books or any other platform.

Examples of tribes include scientology, crossfit, blockchain, church, religion, etc. The way to free yourself from the control of an entity is to keep researching from the source of truth. At the core of tribes are usually patterns to be found around.

There are two things that are distilled in our society to prevent us from getting involved—institutions and ego (confirmation bias). Institutions like school, work or religion prevent us from thinking broadly. Second, ego gets in the way because we are so married to our own ideologies. If you really want to learn, join these tribes and exit.

Progressive enrichment of tribe membership should be everyone's goal. This allows us to think and learn incrementally.

Latticework of mental models

Use mental models to ask the right questions. You’ll learn to disassemble and reassemble ideas in such a way that they form something new from something old. Address and assess differing views as a means to form your own conclusions. You can use mental models as a guide book to your learning, rather than as a rule book.

Read widely and deeply, drawing lines between many disciplines and concepts so that the principles that apply to one can benefit you in another. For example, engineering principles can be applied to economics and vice versa. Independent thinkers approach a high-level of abstract thinking that allows them to draw upon their breadth of learning and reach their own novel solutions and ideas.

It is easy to pay homage to Charlie Munger’s widely-lauded latticework of mental models, but when you live it, you’ll see why he is right. Knowing the key drivers and major ideas from a variety of fields is a huge source of leverage. It is difficult to study broadly and deeply, but the two are not mutually exclusive.

Mental models will broaden your thinking so that you can make wise and informed decisions. Modern education systems hinder students when it comes to approaching problems from a broad, multidisciplinary perspective. Mental Models will help you gain that perspective and a basis for broad rational thinking.

Questions

I have always admired people who can ask great questions. Those who ask great questions possess the key to genuine curiosity. Question is a powerful tool to learn anything. If I ask enough questions, I am certainly positive that I can trace back to the first question ever asked, but that is an exercise for never.

What is a question?

My interest lies on how to master the art of asking quality questions to learn anything in life. But what is a question? Wikipedia describes it as:

A question is an utterance which typically functions as a request for information, which is expected to be provided in the form of an answer.

Wikipedia goes on further that at linguistically level, a question can be defined on three levels:

1. At the level of semantics, a question is defined by its ability to establish a set of logically possible answers.
2. At the level of pragmatics, a question is an illocutionary category of speech act which seeks to obtain information from the addressee.
3. At the level of syntax, the interrogative is a type of clause which is characteristically associated with questions, and defined by certain grammatical rules.

On the last point, questions are often conflated with interrogatives, which are the grammatical forms typically used to achieve them. Rhetorical questions, for example, are interrogative in form but may not be considered true questions as they are not expected to be answered.

The purpose of this deep dive is to explore open-ended questions for better conversations and drive personal growth for curious people.

What is a quality question?

What is the purpose of asking high quality questions? A quality question “reframes” the knowledge allowing to build further conviction or “refactors” an existing belief. It allows you to think about the current information and finding the gaps which triggers further questions. Most questions would never change your existing mental models or body of knowledge, but great quality questions will allow you to question your current beliefs which then allows you to adapt your beliefs over time.

If you are reading a murder novel, asking “who was the murderer?” is a less fruitful question than “why did the dogs in the house didn't bark?” The second question is a good indicator of a curious mind. The first question alone is less directional towards the answer. A good question cuts to the heart of anomaly, the answer to which would crack the larger problem open.

Socratic approach to questioning

The trial of Socrates was a controversial case because the citizen of Athens knew him as an intellectual and moral citizen of their society. However, Socrates was sentenced to death due to the consequence of asking politico-philosophic questions of his students. Plato captured the presentation of the trial and death of Socrates that inspired many people. Plato called him “the wisest and most just of all men” who demonstrated the defects of democracy.

The Socratic approach to questioning has stood the test of time. The Socratic method is an effective way to explore ideas in depth. It is based on the practice of disciplined, thoughtful dialogue. In this technique, the teacher professes ignorance of the topic in order to engage in dialogue with the students. With this “acting dumb,” the student develops the fullest possible knowledge about the topic.

Teachers promote independent thinking in their students and give them ownership of what they are learning. Higher-level thinking skills are present while students think, discuss, debate, evaluate, and analyze content through their own thinking and the thinking of those around them. Socratic method is used in many disciplines and institutions including the US Supreme Court.

In Plato's early dialogues, the elenchus is the technique Socrates uses to investigate, for example, the nature or definition of ethical concepts such as justice or virtue.

1. Socrates' interlocutor asserts a thesis, for example, “Courage is endurance of the soul.”
2. Socrates decides whether the thesis is false and targets for refutation.
3. Socrates secures his interlocutor’s agreement to further premises, for example “Courage is a fine thing” and “Ignorant endurance is not a fine thing.”
4. Socrates then argues, and the interlocutor agrees, these further premises imply the contrary of the original thesis; in this case, it leads to, “Courage is not endurance of the soul.”
5. Socrates then claims he has shown his interlocutor's thesis is false, and its negation is true.

The essential component of the Socratic method uses questions to examine the values, principles, and beliefs of people. The Socratic method focuses on moral education, on how one ought to live. The Socratic method demands a classroom environment characterized by productive discomfort. The Socratic method is better used to demonstrate complexity, difficulty, and uncertainty than at eliciting facts about the world.

Paul Graham on questions

• Few grasp this. One of the biggest misconceptions about new ideas is about the ratio of question to answer in their composition. People think big ideas are answers, but often the real insight was in the question.
• Part of the reason we underrate questions is the way they're used in schools. In schools they tend to exist only briefly before being answered, like unstable particles. But a really good question can be much more than that. A really good question is a partial discovery. How do new species arise?
• Unanswered questions can be uncomfortable things to carry around with you. But the more you're carrying, the greater the chance of noticing a solution — or perhaps even more excitingly, noticing that two unanswered questions are the same.
• Sometimes you carry a question for a long time. Great work often comes from returning to a question you first noticed years before — in your childhood, even — and couldn't stop thinking about. People talk a lot about the importance of keeping your youthful dreams alive, but it's just as important to keep your youthful questions alive.
• This is one of the places where actual expertise differs most from the popular picture of it. In the popular picture, experts are certain. But actually the more puzzled you are, the better, so long as (a) the things you're puzzled about matter, and (b) no one else understands them either.
• You have to be comfortable enough with the world being full of puzzles that you're willing to see them, but not so comfortable that you don't want to solve them.
• It's a great thing to be rich in unanswered questions. And this is one of those situations where the rich get richer, because the best way to acquire new questions is to try answering existing ones. Questions don't just lead to answers, but also to more questions.
• The best questions grow in the answering. You notice a thread protruding from the current paradigm and try pulling on it, and it just gets longer and longer. So don't require a question to be obviously big before you try answering it. You can rarely predict that. It's hard enough even to notice the thread, let alone to predict how much will unravel if you pull on it.
• It's better to be promiscuously curious — to pull a little bit on a lot of threads, and see what happens. Big things start small. The initial versions of big things were often just experiments, or side projects, or talks, which then grew into something bigger. So start lots of small things.
• Being prolific is underrated. The more different things you try, the greater the chance of discovering something new. Understand, though, that trying lots of things will mean trying lots of things that don't work. You can't have a lot of good ideas without also having a lot of bad ones.

Warren Berger on questions

I was a member of LTCWRK which is a community of curious people. Recently, a lecture was held by Warner Berger who is an author of several books on this particular topic. Some of my notes below from the lecture:

• There are negative/dark side of questions:
  • Questions can be confrontational.
  • Questioning authority can have consequences.
  • Questions get used for a lot of purposes. Not all of them are good.
    • Someone with an agenda especially political figure with an agenda.
    • They are not used for the purpose of learning but to drive an agenda which discourages an open debate.
• Steve Jobs was the architect of questions. He used it as an everyday tool. He used the philosophy of Zen, the beginner’s mind which is to ask questions while emptying your mind. He used “why” every day to challenge himself and his employees to keep everyone on their toes.
• Questions reveal vulnerability. We ask less questions as we age. People (leaders) want to preserve their identity, age and authority so they don’t ask enough questions. Humility comes into play while asking questions.
  • Humility & confidence are both important elements of questions.
  • You need confidence to ask questions, but you also need humility to be vulnerable to ask questions.
• Kids don’t have egos, but adults do which prevents them to ask questions. This is why kids are better.
  • It’s this tool that allows us to learn. It’s the question. What a beautiful thing.
  • Kids are not afraid to use it. They are good at open-ended questions.
  • But we can do something better than kids. We can moderate our questions that are less annoying.
• If you don’t ask questions, you are putting on an act.
• All innovation comes from big open-ended questions. Ask yourself, “what are some of the radical things we can do?”
• A good question has some element of curiosity. The way to determine if a question is authentic if it has the following elements:
  • Good faith
  • Purpose of curiosity & learning
  • Open mindedness
• Frameworks to use:
  • Sandwich framework
    • Start with “I am curious” then ask the question followed by providing a rationale for that question For example, “I am curious, why do we do [x]? I am asking because of [y] rational.”
    • This is a great framework to ask questions. It gives the listener a warning, a 2-second warning, when you start with stating that you are curious and then providing a rational towards the end.
  • Self-taught questions are great to bring perspective in your personal life.
    • Shift your perspective when in situational events by asking, “what would [x] person do?” What would Abraham Lincoln do? What would a 90-year-old me do?
  • Constraint on-off questions
    • On: what would I do if I had 24 hours to live?
    • Off: what would I do if I had all the budget in the world to build a product?
      • AirBnB uses this a lot while defining user experience. “What would an 11/10 experience look like?” Of course, not feasible, but allows learning about all the possibilities by exploring open-ended questions.
• Questions are great to break mental traps, biases and prejudices based on past-experiences. We are wired in this way since the beginning of our days. So a tool like this is super helpful to break the conditioning. Use self-taught questions to understand these self-constructed biases. This is called critical thinking.
  • Business leaders are overconfident in their gut decisions, but science disagrees. Spend time avoiding your gut reaction by asking open-ended questions.
  • Avoid recency bias when asking questions.
• A good practice exercise is to journal about the most important question of the day.
• Question requires solving for a puzzle which our brains are wired to do. Don’t try to get answers immediately. Think deep and broad to solve it.
• Don’t lead with questions with pre-meditated answers or outcomes. They are not good for learning and exploring. However, they do have a place:
  • They have a role while teaching others especially in education space. Teachers do it a lot.
  • Socrates did that during his trial with pupils.
  • Even people with agenda do it. Be careful.

Types of questions

• Leading question: A leading question cannot be answered by a simple “Yes” or “No.” It requires the person you're interacting with to utter more than one syllable. Often, once you get the momentum of an answer going, the person will continue talking. Another key is to be curious. A genuinely interesting question will get a boat loads of love because people love feeling respected for their opinion and knowledge.
• Closed question: A closed question is a question that has only one answer. For example: “Do you file your taxes?” You will most likely get a response “Yes” or “No.” All closed questions lead to a tense atmosphere since it narrows the space for a partner to have a conversation with. It also has a purpose when you are trying to obtain an agreement, but less fruitful when you are trying to explore something. This is useful when you are trying to get an agreement from your significant other to go on a date. It'd be less useful if the other person goes on a tangent before answering a yes or a no.
• Open question: An open question is a question that requires some explanation and implies a detailed answer. You can use the open questions to get additional information or find out the real motives of the interlocutor. Often, such questions begin with words: why, what or how. Open-ended questions bring the partner you are having a conversation with in an active state and eliminates the barriers.
• Rhetorical questions: A rhetorical question is a question that does not require a direct answer and is aiming of focusing their attention or pointing out unsolved problems. For example: “Are we holding a common opinion on this issue?” or “When do people finally learn to understand each other?” Proceed with caution as it is easy to slip into the dark side of questions.
• Alternative question: An alternative question is an open question with several pre-prepared answers. For example: “When do you think is better to hold the next meeting? Can we meet this week again or the next one?” To talk more to the interlocutor, you can use the alternative questions. However, it is recommended to soften the alternative questions that may offend feelings of the interlocutor. For example, instead of the question, “What are you afraid of that is preventing you to get work done?” use the following, “Are there some circumstances that will prevent you from doing work on time?”
• Provocative questions: Provocative questions can catch the interlocutor on the contradiction between what he says now and what he has said earlier. To use such type of questions is not the best way to gain authority. At best, your partner (or opponent) will look for revenge. This type leads to the dark side of questioning.

Question bank

Here is my ridiculously long list of good questions accumulated over the years from the internet, blogs, podcasts and personal notes. I use them to get a conversation going or poke holes into my existing beliefs or learn something new.

Further reading