Episode 26: Just Asking Questions...

April discusses the importance of questions and the difference between questions designed to gain knowledge and questions used to manipulate. Plus she says the word "bullshit" several times so she has to label this episode "explicit." Oh well.
Show Notes:
Kids and questions:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/curious-children-questions-parenting-mum-dad-google-answers-inquisitive-argos-toddlers-chad-valley-tots-town-a8089821.html
https://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/importance-kids-asking-questions/
Guy who used his dead mom's ballot to vote for Trump:
https://news.yahoo.com/officials-finally-found-case-dead-225210492.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmluZy5jb20v&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAM0A4VXI1H4LuNUipKSSuf7V_DVFGlNRgL8-pd1LeyPDhkaqX5KS_lr7OOo4ME78IKjwhXfzxYe2A__xUp9j8X-uxHFcMs_LFIs5U19hXhpDcuIXFePv7ivYp5ooE5T8ZLiaV24pO5wsozTmnpB8fSHv3s_qlM_i0ECwTu_vt7ek
More examples of people who AREN'T Democrats using their dead relatives to vote for their favorite politicians:
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/another-gop-voter-caught-casting-ballot-dead-relative-n1276965
Still more examples, debunking Fox news pundits who used them as "evidence" that the election was stolen:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/10/25/trump-team-fox-news-alleged-dead-voters-most-cases-were-either-debunked-or-actually-involved-republicans/
Randy Rainbow is awesome: https://www.randyrainbow.com/
A description of the way that “just asking questions” actually shifts the burden of proof: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions
Finally, I return to a discussion of Brandolini’s law: http://ordrespontane.blogspot.com/2014/07/brandolinis-law.html
Frank Sesno's book: https://www.amazon.com/Ask-More-Questions-Uncover-Solutions/dp/0814436714/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
The five legitimate questions to ask to determine if something is bullshit:
https://www.fastcompany.com/3068589/how-to-fine-tune-your-bullshit-detector
Living Room Conversations stuff:
https://209859-635214-1-raikfcquaxqncofqfm.stackpathdns.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/NEW-Immigration.pdf
https://livingroomconversations.org/

Transcript

Episode 26— Just Asking Questions…

 Questions…are essential, let’s acknowledge that right off the bat. They are one of the earliest and best ways that we learn about the world and everything in it. According to a December 2017 article in the Independent, researchers determined that curious children often ask up to 73 questions every day!  And if you’ve ever been the parent of a 3 to 4 year old child, you know exactly what I’m talking about! Sasha Briggs, author of “The importance of kids asking questions,” says that many of those questions spring from a real desire to understand the world around them, and that they are an extremely important part of their educational process. And the importance of questions continues on throughout our lives—you’ve probably been tested on your knowledge in school or at work through the use of questions; those could be closed-ended questions, like true/false, multiple-choice, or Likert scale questions. Or they could be open-ended questions, which are less restrictive and more subjective in nature, and you would be expected to answer not just correctly but thoughtfully. Questions are also a critical part of the scientific process—a good question is one that leads to a hypothesis, to research and experimentation, all for the expansion of our knowledge about the universe. So, questions are good, right? If a person is asking questions, they must be doing it to learn, and doing it with the best intentions, right? 

I don’t know if you realized this, but those questions I just asked weren’t designed to get an answer. They were designed to hint to you that maybe there are some questions that aren’t straight up asking for information. In fact, these kinds of questions, while they might have some uses that are acceptable, are just as often used to manipulate others. How can we tell the difference between these types of questions? That’s what we are going to look at in today’s episode! I’m going to talk about three of the most common of these kinds of manipulative questions: rhetorical questions, loaded questions, and leading questions. Then we will look at effective, legitimate questions that are designed to seek information and gain knowledge. Let’s get started!

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First, rhetorical Questions: if you ask most people what a rhetorical question is, they’ll say it’s a question that doesn’t require an answer. And that’s basically correct, except that they may not realize the reason it doesn’t require an answer is because the answer is actually built into the question, it’s structured in a way that the listener might not realize that the person asking the question has also implicitly answered it, and just accept it as factually correct without even thinking about it. Rhetorical questions are used to great effect in literature to move the audience towards a particular topic and maybe even a particular way of thinking about a topic, just like I did with my questions about questions—let me repeat them: “So, questions are good, right? If a person is asking questions, they must be doing it to learn, and they must be doing it with the best intentions, right?” Now hopefully you picked up on the idea I was trying to get across there, that maybe questions aren’t always being asked with good intentions. I’m being totally up front with you here so you can see how tricky rhetorical questions can be; they are often used to surreptitiously insert an opinion into a discussion without seeming to do so. The word “Rhetoric” is defined as “the art of persuasion,” and a rhetorical question is at its heart a persuasive tactic. Here’s an example from a meme I saw recently; it said “If I die, can you please make sure I don’t end up voting for a Democrat?” Obviously it’s phrased as a question, but it’s actually a statement—and that statement is: “Democrats have voted illegally using the ballots of people who have died.” That’s unfortunately a fairly common belief among some people, despite a serious lack of evidence. Because it’s a meme, and memes don’t generally come with a Works Cited page, it doesn’t lend itself to a calm, logical discussion about the facts; it’s just designed to get an opinion across in a way that makes it seem like it’s true. Now, for me to go into the details of why this meme is, frankly, bullshit, right here and right now, would take us waaay off the topic.  However, I’ll put an explanation and some pretty good evidence for my claim that this meme is simply not the case in the show notes. I always tell you to look at the show notes, and in this case it might be a good idea.

Moving on--Another kind of manipulative question is known as the Loaded Question: that’s a question that also uses an unproven or unjustified assumption as its basis, but it goes beyond a rhetorical question and forces the person being questioned into a defensive position. This is the famous “Do you still beat your wife?” kind of question, in that example the questioner is basically assuming this person has beaten his wife in the past (which may or may not even be true), and probably is still doing so, and now the guy being questioned is put in a position of having to defend himself, because there’s really no good “yes or no” answer to that question, it demands an explanation about whether he actually has beaten his wife in the past AND is still doing it in the present. 

I have to tell you my loaded question experience that happened recently at a Randy Rainbow concert of all places (and if you don’t know who Randy Rainbow is, you’re missing out on a delightful performer, so look him up on YouTube). Anyway, after the concert, we were in a line to get into the parking structure. A cute little old lady in front of me turned around and asked if we loved the concert, and I said we did love it. She then said she loves Randy Rainbow and she also loves Donald Trump (who Randy Rainbow loves to make fun of), and then she said it's too bad that people just can’t get along despite their political differences. I said, you know you’re absolutely right, and I thought we were going to have a nice bonding moment there. Then she said, yes and it’s all the fault of these college professors who teach everyone to hate. I said, um, I’m a college professor, and without missing a beat she asked, well how do your students feel when you do that to them? It was a perfect loaded question, and of course it totally took me by surprise, but I gathered myself together and said look I don’t know what you’ve heard but that’s just not what we do. And before she could say anything else, the man she was with complimented me on my necklace and I complimented the lady on her outfit, and just like that it was over, thanks to that guy’s quick thinking. But yeah, it was disconcerting to be blindsided by an otherwise delightful old lady assuming that I teach my students to hate. I’ll bet the guy she was with was used to her pulling that crap on people; My husband thought it was hilarious, so at least someone was entertained by it.

The third type of questions are leading questions, which are not the same as loaded questions, leading questions are trying to “lead” you to come to a particular conclusion, obviously the one they want you to come to. Now you’re probably familiar with leading questions if you watch any courtroom dramas, when a lawyer is asking questions to lead a witness to a particular conclusion, the opposing lawyer objects to the line of questioning and the judge disallows it. For example, a lawyer who asks the question, “The defendant punched you in the face when you walked around the corner, didn’t he?” is asking a leading question that the defense attorney will probably object to; a question like, “Can you tell the court what happened when you walked around the corner?” is much more likely to be allowed, because there’s no inference that anything in particular happened. They’re also used in medicine, where a doctor is questioning a patient in order to make a diagnosis and they’re pretty sure they know what it is but they need to make super-sure. But when it’s used as a way to move a person’s opinion somewhere they would maybe not have gone by insinuating that that’s the way they should think about the topic, then it’s manipulative. Now, this is such a common tactic in the advertising world that we hardly think about it, and I’m not here to say that it shouldn’t be done and it’s always a bad thing. But it IS manipulation, and it’s important that you recognize that. I’ve seen quite a few leading questions on political advertisements that I’ve gotten through email, text or seen on tv, with questions like “Isn’t it time to get rid of (fill in the blank space with some politician)?” Now the advertisers are hoping that you already agree with them, but you might have been on the fence initially, and the way that question is phrased might make you think, ok, maybe it IS time to get rid of them. And of course they have the perfect person to take that politician’s place, so they want you to be sure to vote for that person, of course. Oh, and send them some money while you’re at it…

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 According to RationalWiki’s “Just Asking Questions” page, one of the problems with these types of questions is that they often tend to shift the burden of proof. In Episode 12 I addressed the fallacy of the Misplaced Burden of Proof, so you might want to go back and listen. In a nutshell, when people make statements they want you to accept as fact, but they don’t provide any evidence and instead demand that YOU provide evidence to show that they are wrong, they are committing this fallacy. People who make a statement they want someone else to believe are the ones responsible for providing the evidence to show their statement is correct. So, now let’s apply this idea to these manipulative kinds of questions we just learned about, because they’re not really questions, they’re statements. However, since the general belief is that if someone asks a question, they deserve some kind of an answer…all of a sudden the person being asked the question is now expected to come up with an answer to something that’s not really a question. And seriously, that doesn’t make any sense.

 Another problem has to do with something called Brandolini’s law. I talked about this Law back in Episode 9, the episode on bullshit, and I did say that someday I’d return to it, and that day has finally come! Brandolini’s law states “the amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” Think about it, it’s true; somebody can state the most asinine thing and call it truth, and then they’re pretty much done, unless they also refer you to some sketchy website or video as their evidence. If you happen to really, really feel like you must refute their statement, you have a big job ahead of you—you have the overwhelming task of laying out all the reasons why it’s incorrect, refuting whatever evidence that person gave you (if any), and providing better evidence for your side of the argument. And on top of all that, if they phrased their statement as a question, you might also have to convince the person that their question isn’t really a question and is instead a statement phrased as a question, and you can understand those of us who recognize it as a largely futile effort and a huge waste of time. And then when you throw up your hands and walk away, the other person claims the high ground because, after all, they were “just asking questions” that you can’t or won’t answer.

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 Okay, I guess Brandolini’s Law is kind of depressing, but it does put things into perspective. Honestly, the best defense you can muster when you run into manipulative questions is to call them out for what they are. Of course you have to immediately recognize what they are, which can be really hard, especially when you’re in the moment and, like my experience with the little old lady at the Randy Rainbow concert, you simply don’t see it coming. I guess I handled it as well as I could by not even trying to answer her question, but instead pointing out that the underlying statement in her question was wrong, that teaching students to hate is not what I do. And you might be able to do something similar, instead of trying to come up with a reasonable answer to an unreasonable question, point out the assumption or the belief on which the question is based. If you want to go beyond that and do that whole refutation thing, well, good luck with that.

 Of course, not every question that arises in a discussion or disagreement is one of the three types I just talked about. It’s certainly possible to ask a legitimate question that isn’t an attempt to persuade and truly springs from a desire to gain information and knowledge. What kinds of questions are those? Frank Sesno’s book Ask More: the Power of Questions to Open Doors, and Warren Berger’s article, How to Fine-Tune Your Bullshit Detector, both give some good examples of the types of questions that are real attempts to gain knowledge and ascertain what is actually the case. One of the types of questions that Sesno discusses are diagnostic in nature,  that focus on objective facts—questions like: How do you know that’s the case? Can you give me an example of what you’re talking about? What is your evidence for that statement? What’s the evidence for the other side? Why do you think the evidence for your side is stronger? Berger mentions that we should also ask questions like: Does your evidence come from a solid, trustworthy source? Is there information that’s being left out? Is there any flawed reasoning in the argument, fallacies like weak analogy, false dichotomy, or any of the other fallacies I’ve talked about in previous episodes? If someone is truly curious and not just trying to get you to change your mind about something, these are the kind of questions they should be asking. These can still be difficult questions for people to answer, not because they’re manipulative, but because many people really haven’t thought about those aspects of their opinions and beliefs. And by many people, I am including you and me in that… Not being able to express your ideas and support them effectively in the moment is absolutely natural; however, thinking about these legitimate kinds of questions should open our eyes and make us more intellectually humble, to help us to see that it’s a good idea to thoughtfully and reflectively consider what our beliefs are and why we hold them, consider the quality of the evidence we have used to determine truth, as well as try to understand why other people may think differently about something. 

I’ve talked before about the great work that an organization called Living Room Conversations does by bringing people who are very different from each other together in online and face-to-face forums to discuss sensitive and important topics. They do this through “guided conversations,” in which they follow a structured format of different “rounds” of questions, each person has a time limit of around 2 minutes with no interruption or crosstalk from other participants. For instance, in the first round of a living room conversation on the topic of immigration, participants are asked a question designed to introduce themselves to the other group members, like “What would your best friend say about who you are?” Then the next round they would all take turns answering a question about the topic, so something like, “What is at the heart of the immigration issue for you?” or “What personal experiences inform your beliefs about immigration?” Finally, a reflection round, where the questions might be something like “What learning, understanding, or common ground have you found on the topic?” It’s amazing how people who might have considered someone their enemy can find common ground with that person by answering thoughtful questions like these, even on such a divisive topic. I’ll post a pdf of one of the scripts they use in the show notes, along with a link to their website if you’re interested in learning about them further.  

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 So, questions—they can be manipulative and drag us into an argument hole that’s nearly impossible to climb out of, or they can truly be the beginning of knowledge and the key to understanding another person. I hope you’ve learned how to tell the difference, and that you use the information you’ve gained here to help you think it through.