Mental Metadata

Sometimes you also need to be careful not to specify too much background for the question. Suppose you want to evaluate a controversial hypothesis by asking a simple, non-controversial factual question. Then what you want to do is to just ask the factual question, without connecting it to the controversial hypothesis. Otherwise people will end up debating the controversial hypothesis and never answer the actual question you were interested in.

This not only happened to me recently, but also expanded to a flamewar elsewhere. I should've just asked "what gender ratios have you observed".

Obviously this is more of an issue in online forum-type conversations, but I've also observed in one-to-one conversations.

For numerical inquiries that your interlocutor cannot seem to answer, pick one or more threshold numbers (surprisingly often, people who have "no idea" how to answer a numerical question can tell you whether the answer is greater or lesser than an arbitrary quantity).

Beware.

OTOH, "what kind of car is it" is a more revealing question, in that it will yield more information about what metadata matters to your interlocutor. (It's what I'd call a more open question.)

Conversely "what color is it" conveys information about what metadata matters to you. If you think about it, it's strange for a question to convey information; more often when you ask a question you want to collect information.

Often you'll want to start an information-seeking conversation with open questions, the ideal being "context free questions" - questions that are likely to elicit an answer irrespective of the situation you ask them in. Then as the answers lead you to generate hypotheses you'll want to ask confirming questions to probe for false assumptions.

Garbled or missing metadata can cost time and cause fights

Citation needed. (Or an example or three.)

Speaking as someone who asks questions for a living, some of your advice in this post strikes me as dubious. I kind of agree with your caveats about definitions, but they seem weakly connected to the general notion of "metadata".

Get clear about motives.

For example, when my husband asks me "Do you want to go out tonight?" I generally reply "Why do you ask?" Sometimes he is motivated by a desire to get out of the house; sometimes he is motivated by a desire to do laundry (which means he can't leave the house for a while).

Similarly, I try to preface questions with a brief explanation of why I care. For example, I prefer "I came across this stuff while cleaning the basement and was going to throw it out, but I figured I'd check with you first: do you want to keep any of it?" to "Do you want to keep any of this stuff?"

You make some good points here, Alicorn.

One thing to watch out for: When you find out that your interlocutor has interpreted your question differently than you intended it may be polite/friendly to let her finish speaking before following up with the more specific thing you wanted to know. People (often) enjoy open conversation more than specific interrogation.

I seem to have this problem with my mother-in-law, we don't understand each other very well. A recent conversation went like this.

MIL: So, what sort of girl is this babysitter you've hired?

Me: Oh, she's a lovely sweet country girl, a bit shy. This one time she was... [want to launch into a funny story]

MIL: [interrupts] No, no, I mean - is she a student or does she work somewhere?

Me: [annoyed that I didn't get to tell my story] She's a student.

Very interesting post. I do think some of your examples are more realistic than others. The "how many people are coming to the party?" example is the most plausible: you want a direct, numerical answer so you can build your plans on it, and a roundabout answer is frustrating because it prevents you from executing any plans.

The "what kind of car?" and "what kind of house?" questions are, I think, naturally more open-ended. In most of the contexts where I would ask those questions, it would be to start a conversation, or to signal interest in the other person's life. (Maybe not when I was eleven, considering I lacked basic social skills back then.) Unless I needed the purely factual information of car colour to make a decision, I wouldn't want to restrict those questions. Even if I want to decide what kind of car to buy, I would probably learn more from letting the other person, who almost certainly knows more about cars than I do, decide what they think is pertinent. Likewise for the house-building; anyone who is building a house of their own probably has a very interesting story about what kind it is and why. And in the process, their story will reveal something about their personality, so that I can model them better, which will allow me to interact with them more efficiently in future because I'll know how they see things and how they communicate. (This is assuming I have time to invest in a conversation, but I consider it a quite important investment, as well as being pleasurable for its own sake.)

However, your point holds very true for conversations that are fundamentally about ideas or concepts and not socializing/personal enjoyment. If you're going to discussion politics or quantum physics, you definitely want information to be transmitted clearly and efficiently, and you want your keywords to mean the same thing to the other person as they do to you.

Overall good advice.

I have a bit of a couple of concerns about the threshold suggestion, however.

Sometimes when I ask people how things are going with them, I don't want a lot of technical detail, I want to know something about whether they're happy or not with how things are working out.

More generally, (and this might be worth another post) people are pretty inflexible about how much detail they give, and have trouble going to a more detailed style or a more summarized style than their usual.

Morendil's comment about "open questions" made me think about this a bit more:

The concept of "open" and "closed" questions is something I saw a lot of in customer service - you ask broad, open questions like "How can I assist you?" at the start of the call, then start using closed questions to collect specific follow-up data like "what model of phone do you have?"

One of the other things you learn is how to re-frame questions when the other person has no clue what you're talking about: "Okay, is it a flip phone? Okay, then there should be a model number on the back, it will be three digits. Thank you!"

I sadly don't have a training manual available to me, but it occurs to me that it would be a fairly obvious source of useful information on this topic :)

I have these problems a lot, and have tried those solutions, but they rarely seem to work unless the person you're talking to also know of them. And they get cumbersome quickly when you have to do this kind of expansion for more than 2 or 3 terms in a conversation. Non-rationalists tend to find my habit of asking for definitions and clarifications annoying and tell me to stop, sometimes angrily. Holding of on proposing solutions for now.

The Self-Explanatory Magical Amulet

Aren't they all?

The super-powerful weapon...which cannot be used directly against the main antagonist...or is so evil it can't be used at all.

The artifact that gives only a subtle, unmeasurable boost to the hero's abilities...because the magic was inside him or her all along!

The magic whistle that summons help, only to be used in case of an emergency requiring its use...one and only one of which will arise.

The item presented by the old one to the hero who has a humble upbringing but newly discovered noble origins...which always casts insert backstory.

The useful magic item necessary to get the hero through a later challenge...which, when carried by a non-central character, always casts have item bearing non-central character carrying it get fatally wounded, but not so badly he or she dies immediately, and say, I'm dying, please take my item,' to which the hero says 'No non-central character, you can't die!'

The item that actually would kill the hero if used...which always casts insert villain arrogance, usually gloating and/or explaining the evil plan, providing time to avert the hero's death.

The powerful intrinsically evil artifact used by the villain...which casts karmic justice, turning against the villain, even though the hero was not strong enough (or too unwilling to kill) to do so (or kill the villain directly).