The great questions efficiently lead you to the true solution

there’s no stupid questions

In my previous profession asking questions to address issues or enigma is critical. Right questions leads to the right answers and sometimes the working solution. Keys to the truth are always hidden in our eyes. Asking questions is just like poking around and one successful poking can point to the path to the solution. Sort of like asking questions containing keywords in adventure games.

How can we ask efficient questions to find solutions? First we should isolate the issues needed to be addressed. In programming world sometimes we can create minimal, complete (sufficient), and verifiable (reproducible) example codes. It will help us to ask specific questions about its details. If the isolated parts are too huge to poke around, we should break it into smaller workable problems and continue to research. By following up the answers to the initial question, the chance getting right questions will go higher.

We shouldn’t think a question “stupid”, there’s no such things called stupid questions or jokey questions, since human beings are always subjective and limited by our own imagination. Questions might seems to be relative or irrelative only in our concept, but the true situation may be totally different in reality. When Novoselov and Geim asked themselves “could we peel of layers just by the scotch tape on our desk?”, that might sound stupid and irrelative to their subject of “graphene”, but eventually it efficiently lead to the solution and the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics.