{"id":304,"date":"2025-04-09T05:41:50","date_gmt":"2025-04-09T05:41:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2025\/04\/09\/why-not-inquire-together-more-marginal-revolution\/"},"modified":"2025-04-09T05:41:50","modified_gmt":"2025-04-09T05:41:50","slug":"why-not-inquire-together-more-marginal-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2025\/04\/09\/why-not-inquire-together-more-marginal-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Why not inquire together more? &#8211; Marginal REVOLUTION"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>I find that \u201cinquiring together\u201d works best when you are traveling together, and confronted with new questions.&nbsp; They can be as mundane as \u201cdo you think the two people at that restaurant table are on a first date or not?\u201d&nbsp; From the point of view of the observers, the inquiry is de novo.&nbsp; And the joint inquiry will be fun, and may make some progress.&nbsp; You both have more or less the same starting point.&nbsp; There isn\u2019t really a better way to proceed, short of asking them.<\/p>\n<p>For most established social science and philosophy questions, however, there is so much preexisting analysis and literature that the \u201cchains of thought\u201d are very long.&nbsp; The frontier point is not well maintained by a dyadic conversation, because doing so is computationally complex and further the two individuals likely have at least marginally separate agendas.&nbsp; So the pair end up talking around in circles, rather than progressively.&nbsp; It would be better if one person wrote a short memo or brief and the other offered comments.&nbsp; In fact we usethat method frequently, and fairly often it succeeds in keeping the dialogue at the epistemic frontier.<\/p>\n<p>I find that when two people converse, they often make more progress by joking, and one person (or both) taking some inspiration or insight from the joke.&nbsp; As the joke evolves through time, and is repeated in different guises, each person \u2014 somewhat separately \u2014 refines their intuitions on the question related to the joke.&nbsp; The process is joint, and each person may be presenting new ideas to the other, but the crucial progress-making work still occurs individually.<br \/>\n\u2014 Read on <a href=\"https:\/\/marginalrevolution.com\/marginalrevolution\/2025\/04\/why-not-inquire-together-more.html\">marginalrevolution.com\/marginalrevolution\/2025\/04\/why-not-inquire-together-more.html<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I find that \u201cinquiring together\u201d works best when you are traveling together, and confronted with new questions.&nbsp; They can be as mundane as \u201cdo you think the two people at that restaurant table are on a first date or not?\u201d&nbsp; From the point of view of the observers, the inquiry is de novo.&nbsp; And the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}