Q&A is a Funny Thing

In a recent presentation at the University of Florida, I was asked to set the stage for how experts approach problem solving. I decided to use my Meta-Problem Method to guide me.

The ability to ask good questions underpins the method. In my last post I introduced this series focused on asking – and answering – questions well. In this post, I chose to drill into one of my mental models for questions and answers, which I pull from game theory.

Try to ask a question on Stack Overflow and you’re likely to get a multi-point explanation of how your question is badly structured, already covered by multiple other posts, and you clearly should have known all this before you dared to ask for help.

The key challenge is that on the one hand you typically have one person who is looking for some information they don’t presently have. On the other side you have someone who may or may not have that information. It’s then a game to come together and determine if the other person does have the desired information and if they’re willing to share it.

In game theory we have the concept of private information. We also have complicated math that would determine when someone would be willing to give up that private information in exchange for benefits to themselves. Typically, this kind of analysis is used in negotiations or auctions where the private information may be the only leverage you have.

Real-life discussions are usually quite a bit removed from this artificial and cynical view of the world. Still, some of the challenges remain, and new ones emerge.

• In the game-theory view of the world, the questioner knows that the answerer has the desired information. In the real world, people often assume (wrongly) that this is the case.

• In the game-theory view of the world, the answerer will give up information in exchange for a financial benefit. For example, the questioner asks “how much is this painting worth to you?” The answerer might value the painting at $100, but they don’t want to tell you what it’s worth to them for fear of the price being set at that value. The answerer will tell the questioner “I’ll give you $50 for it.” This tells the questioner that the answerer has a value of at least $50, but not the exact valuation.

• In the real world, a conversation involves both sides giving unrelated information to each other. It’s an exchange, but a different kind than the game theory view of the world since it’s less transactional. Still, conversations are in some way an exchange, you should both be benefiting in some way. If you ask someone a question and they seem progressively more annoyed, it can be a clue that you’ve asked for information they either don’t have or aren’t willing to share. (pro-tip, this is when I shift perspectives and might ask why they seem reluctant, often with good success).

• In the real world, often the hardest point of the process is to figure out what information the questioner is looking for, and whether the answerer has it. To make this point in work, I sometimes explain that I don’t have a “lottery prediction algorithm” when someone says they want a really good forecast for example.

The biggest challenge in practice is that the questioner doesn’t know how to ask for the information they want. Novices also often fail to think about what answers they might reasonably get and use that information to shape their question.

Over the next few weeks, I will delve deeper into what makes a good question, how to formulate one, and how to choose the right expert to answer it.