(2022-02-15) Brander Questions As Tools For Thinking

Gordon Brander: Questions as tools for thinking (thinking tools). To use a programming analogy, if facts are like data, then questions are like functions. When you ask the question in different contexts, it generates different answers.

How might we make questions a first-class primitive?

Perhaps we could start by collecting every sentence in our notes that ends with a question mark? We might pose these questions in new contexts.

Some questions are generally useful, like standard functions in a programming language:
What if?
How might we ________?
What might this be true of?
What does this remind me of?
How does this relate to ________?
What does this contradict, correct, support, or build upon?
Can I combine this with ________ to create something new?
What new questions does this trigger?

What if we could use questions as literal functions? There are programming languages for doing this, called logic languages. Datalog is one logic language

Could my whole notebook become a living network of facts over which I can pose questions?

What if we went a step further, and saw questions themselves as a kind of useful fact?

If questions are data, and we can ask questions about data, then we can also ask questions about questions. Questions could be composable

Questions as creative partners

Questions can act as creative partners. They can cause us to walk back over familiar terrain, and see it from a new angle, to get lost in the land of ideas.

Questions as lenses (cf gloss)

cf API

related: Visakan Veerasamy thread: I want to experiment with reducing my entire body of work into a set of questions....