'Question & Answer' is a useful technology for many things: to get information, to request actions and permissions, to make friends, to make jokes, ...

Q&A: the right question, anyone? (PSE)

We have looked at how we can construct questions from words mechanically. (Please see 15 - Q & A: getting facts and solutions (PSE) <http://www.gotoknow.org/blogs/posts/472028>) We will now look at Q&A in more details.

'Question & Answer' is a useful technology for many things: to get information, to request actions and permissions, to make friends, to make jokes, ...

Q&A is a powerful tool since ancient time. History is full of accounts of people who excelled in constructing the right questions and changed the world. The Buddha used Q&A very often. Socrates used Q&A. The Pali book "Milinda Panha" is a Q&A database.

Many games like I Spy, 20 Questions (20Q), and Prisoners Dilemma (where answers can be truth or lie) show us that we can construct questions to get answers to very complex problems.

We can enjoy and learn fron many Q&A jokes (from the Net):

Question: What do diapers and politicians have in common?
Answer: They both need changing regularly - for exactly the same reason. (Crude answer: They get full of shit.)

Question: How many teachers would it take to find their way out of a maze?
Answer: No idea, none have ever made it out yet.

We can even write a computer program that picks a noun (word) and a verb (word) then outputs several questions from the 2 words. So, we can make questions. But, we learn very little from this process.

If we study these Q&A examples, we would see a common pattern: all questions lead their answers to follow a certain path. In a way: the questions are constructed with knowledge of what the answers will be.

Why do we ask questions if we already know the answers?

Is Q&A a way to compare or to test knowledge (or information) on the subject (in question) between the questioner and the answerer?

Is Q&A the same as Causes (and Conditions) and Effects (including side-effects)? That is a question is used to cause someone to respond and produce effects (that we want). (Interrogation techniques are about constructing questions to get facts or truth).

Is (repeating) Q&A useful in learning (or teaching) a second language? Would using only Q&A bore or scare learners away from learning completely? How do we use Q&A to make better learning? How do we encourage students to use Q&A?

What we really want is 'the right' question (in the same way as 'the right wo/man', the right stuff, the right time,...). We want questions that serve our need.

[An Internet search with "right question" would return some 60+ millions of webpages. Enough to show that people use "right questions" quite often.]

We want the right question so we get the right answer!

How do we construct the right question?

Several methods and apptoaches are presented on the Internet. We may go through them when we have spare time. We can use a recipe based on what we have observed about Q&A. That is to construct a sequence of questions that leads to the right answer (as in I spy and 20Q games). The right questions are questions that give us maximum information (please see Channel's Information Theory) for our purpose (what we want). This sequence of questions is the shortest path (with the minimum number of questions) to the right answer. All we have to do now is to find a method to measure "amount of information" in answers. (No, it is not that easy. See Note 1.) 

Whom do we ask the right question? (Will s/he answer -- truthfully?) Where, When and how do we ask the right question? These questions are also factors of the right question. The right answers to these questions are used to make/construct the right question.

As we all know, time is an important aspect of what we want. (Have you heard a Tipitaka story of a poison arrow? We want know "what poison" first so we can save a life. "Who" shot the arrow and "how we catch him" can come later.) So, we want the right answer 'in time'.

What if we don't get/understand the answer? What if the answer is long, complex and costly to decode/learn? (For example: in case of 'continuous assesment' or 'monitor', we can have streams of data that eventually overload our capacity to process. See Note 2.)

By playing Q&A games, we may learn to recognize the patterns of Q&A leading to the right answers and we may try to take short cuts. But a 'short cut' can turn into a  'detour' and add more time and effort to get a right answer. Worse is when we fail to recognize that we have taken 'a wrong turn' and we continue on a wrong path.

Is there an minimum cost or maximum efficiency and effective (= getting the right answer) way to construct the right questions? [Quick, we need one recipe to use to manage Thailand's water resource/flows before the taxpayers' money runs out.] This optimization question is for experts, managers, and engineers. For most people, getting a good answer in time is good enough.

We come to see Q&A close up and scratch its surface. We now wonder, to where learning about Q&A can take us. The many pathways we can choose. The many vehicles and tools we can use. (I choose not to list them.) It is fun to learn about them and to get them ourselves. Getting the knowledge is only a half-result. Another half is getting worthwhile experience. The journey makes a wo/man, right?


Note 1. Information measures based on statistics or probability [like Bayesian] have inherent [in small print] assumptions/conditions to obey.

Note 2. In real life: doctors usually have more patients than available time, doctors have to use the 'right questions' on patients. New high-tech tools usually output specific data that only (medical) specialists can use. Patients for complex treatments may need several specialists at the same time. These specialists must talk and agree on the right answer before any treatment can begin. This takes time that the patients may not have. (Search for "iPatient" and see how information has become the focus of medical treatments --instead of real patients who have become just icons on computer screens.)

Note 3. We often use Q&A for learning from external sources (of information): we stimulate the sources, capture the responses then process into our knowledge.

We can of course use Q&A on ourselves: we ask and answer our own questions then "change" ourselves to give the "best right answer".

Is it possible to ask questions that start a process of learning (or getting or in more formal term 'acquistion' of knowledge) to construct the right answer? We know the answer. Why do we have enough experience of this Q&A?

Note 4. Higher education usually involves "constructing" a right question and/or a right answer. Master Q&A and you can receive a PhD ;-)

Note 5. If we follow 'ariya-sacca' (อริยสัจจ ๔) by:

What is the 'right' question?

What is the cause of the question?

(Why do we have this question?)

What is the right answer?

What is the way to get the answer?

(How to get the answer?)

And we apply 'magga' (มัคคะ, มรรค ๘) to construct our Q&A. Then, we should have only 'right' Q&A.