
Asking the right question is more important than getting the right answer - hardmaru
https://lemire.me/blog/2018/12/06/asking-the-right-question-is-more-important-than-getting-the-right-answer/
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GuB-42
We all know the right answer is 42 ;)

Anyways, asking the right question is just a consequence, not a cause. If you
are searching for the "right question", you won't find it, it is something
that comes naturally with knowing about things.

In the penicillin example, he asked himself the right question "why did the
mold kill bacteria" only because he knew about how bacteria and mold
proliferate, and that he was confident in his experimental results.

To make an analogy, if you roll a dice and get a 7, you will definitely ask
yourself the question, inspect the dice, etc... But that's only because you
know that dices only go up to 6, that question is a result of you knowledge of
dices. Now imagine you know nothing about dices, you wouldn't even ask
yourself the question: the last roll was a 6, so why not 7. Worse, you may
find yourself questioning the next roll, a 1, because by chance, you never
rolled it before, and by the time you finally understand that it is normal,
you have forgotten about the 7.

~~~
ZainRiz
I wouldn't say it comes naturally. It comes from noticing points of confusion
in the world and making an effort to ask the big Why? question.

And then refining your question to arrive at a different question, which may
be a better question.

E.g. Why is my father in law so difficult to get along with -> Is my father in
law difficult to get along with? Well, he gets along just fine with others...
-> Why is it so hard for my father in law to get along with _me_? What is
different about our dynamic?

One question leads you to the next, but you have to put some effort into the
process.

An excellent book on the topic: A More Beautiful Question
[https://www.amazon.com/More-Beautiful-Question-Inquiry-
Break...](https://www.amazon.com/More-Beautiful-Question-Inquiry-
Breakthrough/dp/1632861054)

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SpikeDad
Interesting but you can only know if you're asking the right question in
hindsight when the right answer is generated.

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makr17
Wholeheartedly agree, asking the right question helps in getting closer to the
right answer. In my undergraduate Mathematics curriculum, "The Art of Problem
Posing" (Brown and Walter) was required reading alongside "How to Solve It"
(Polya and Conway).

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ggm
Secret questions are why computer science advances by standing on toes not
shoulders of Giants.

Secret questions imply differential reward to answering.

Secret questions imply harvesting public knowledge of public questions you
know to validate the worth implications of holding your secret back.

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avip
"In mathematics, the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value
than solving it."

\- G. Cantor

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petermcneeley
I think this might be related to Eric Weinstein's discussion about excellence.
(Eric works for Thiel Capital)

[https://youtu.be/EzdLBGPidAM?t=28](https://youtu.be/EzdLBGPidAM?t=28)

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drugme
Which must be why, during most tech interviews ...

the emphasis is completely the opposite.

~~~
nixpulvis
A good technical interview should spend as much energy on the path as the
solution, if not much much more.

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8bitsrule
My high-school physics teacher was always telling us to keep asking questions.

Not until later did I (happily) realize what a big damn radical he was.

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matchagaucho
_" In computer science, we had the XML craze at the turn of the century."_

I'm amazed at how much shade gets thrown at XML (still).

The biggest company in world (MSFT) defines their entire office suite in XML.
SOAP on the wire is the most efficient M2M protocol for conveying strongly
typed message payloads.

But to the Author's point, maybe some of the "questions" asked of XML were
incorrect.

~~~
yason
_The biggest company in world (MSFT) defines their entire office suite in XML.
SOAP on the wire is the most efficient M2M protocol for conveying strongly
typed message payloads._

That does not point to a particular excellence of XML. XML was designed as a
markup language and thus people came up with XML-based domain specific
languages with which they could define trees of data and metadata for storage
and payloads.

So, in effect, what these people are sending back and forth is trees with
metadata. You can encode the same information in JSON or S-expressions, and
people have already done all that. You just need to agree on conventions for
the semantics but that holds even for XML.

XML has the benefit of wide support across platforms, good reference
implementations originally, various standard schemas for different data, but
technically it has nothing revolutionary: rather, as people who do know XML
inside out it's overly complex as a base format for data encoding. Writing a
parser compliant to the spce is not trivial.

XML's best feature is probably the fact that the complexity in the structure
and syntax of the language is not enforced and you can easily keep your XML
simple. That is what most people actually do.

The fact that you can define an office suite in XML is not particularly a
merit to XML: Microsoft just decided to use XML to encode their previously
binary documents in plaintext. It's not as if they couldn't have done it
without XML but some other format, or, defining their formats in XML would
somehow make the documents available for anyone to interpret who has an XML
parser. The meat is still in the semantics which you have to implement in your
export and import code. Whether those semantics are then applied in the form
of JSON or XML or pickled Python dicts or whatever is the trivial part.

