It wasn’t all that long ago that knowledge and wisdom were largely reserved for an elite few. Most people couldn’t read or write. Times have changed, of course, and we’re largely facing an exact opposite problem. Today, we have access to practically everything that every human has ever known. Every last little tidbit and knowledge nugget is at our fingertips, but you have to know what you’re looking for to find it. In other words, you have to know how to ask the right questions.

How Could You Even Know to Ask?

Let’s say that you’ve never even seen a smartphone in your life. If that’s the case, you would never think to ask how to connect your Bluetooth headphones to your phone. Or how to download and install an app. You can’t ask these “right questions,” because you don’t have the fundamental, baseline knowledge to even think to ask these questions.

People sometimes wonder, given that we have all the world’s wisdom at our fingertips, why the Internet oftentimes descends into an inane barrage of pointless memes (don’t get me wrong; I love memes too) when we could be learning everything there is to know about astrophysics. Or medicine. Or moral philosophy. We could ask, we could dig deeper, but we don’t. By and large, we don’t really care to ask in the first place. Because it’s hard.

Instead, we fall into these echo chambers where everyone is an “expert.” We get bombarded with misleading or false information and just take it at face value, instead of turning to the experts who are actually experts. The truth is complicated and nuanced, but we just want easy, straightforward answers… to the right questions, even if we don’t know what those right questions are.

In much the same way, I know nothing about “string theory” aside from knowing of the term itself. So, there’s no way I could ask an intelligent question about string theory. Could you?

A Child-Like Curiosity

This is a big reason why it’s so fascinating when children ask curious questions. To adult ears, some of these questions may sound preposterous or ridiculous. What is the opposite of “table,” anyway? But this is because children are still acquiring some level of baseline knowledge. As they learn more and build up that knowledge base, they develop the ability to ask more relevant and complicated questions… and that’s not to say their questions are irrelevant either!

You know what you know. And, on some level, you know what you don’t know. I know that I don’t know string theory. But, there’s this whole other category: you don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t even know about these blind spots until someone or something reveals them to you. A terrific example of this is the world of parenting. And it’s one big, confusing, and self-contradicting world.

Expectant parents get bombarded with so much information, all at once, and it’s largely because they don’t know what they don’t know. How can you ask the question about whether the crib should or shouldn’t have stuffed animals if you don’t even know about SIDS? A (childless) friend of mine recently attended a baby shower, and he had no idea what a hooded towel was and why you might want/need one. Of course he wouldn’t know, because he’s never needed nor cared to know.

What Are the “Right Questions” Anyway?

How can you possibly ask the “right questions” about how you should best do XYZ activity if you don’t know what XYZ may entail or what it even means? It’s true that we can look up anything online these days and we literally have all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips. But, if you don’t know what to look up, how can you look it up?

I guess it starts with asking some questions. Then, as you build up your knowledge base, you’ll start asking the right questions. Like… what is the opposite of table?