Having a policy of “no dumb question” is really important for a sane collective, because the things considered obviously true are very often the very same things which lead to massive blindspots, echo chamber dynamics, or simply stagnation. In practice however, whenever a group says that there are no stupid questions, it is simply not the case.
Anyone reading this can probably remember moments in school or university where there was clearly a climate that did not allow certain questions to be asked, because 1) few want to look dumb in front of a lot of people 2) there is always an implicit frame, and an implicit window of what is tolerable, in order to maintain some minimum of group coherence.
Essentially all the institutions in the modern world maintain themselves through a combination of coercion and shaping the individual so that they fit in, rather than the other way around. School, academia, the health system, the government, the law, and so many others, force you to interact with them in order to meet some basic need, and require you to engage with their protocol which end up becoming their own bureaucratic end. As such, the demands of institutions become more important than what individuals benefit from, and within those, not only are there stupid questions which you, implicitly, aren’t allowed to ask, but you aren't even allowed to question the way things work in the first place.
So what does it mean to truly allow stupid questions then? It's certainly not in the direction of institutions as I've pointed out, because those are mainly concerned with maintaining themselves and spreading their influence. The direction is rather of very small groups of people, such as a family where the parents genuinely listen to the child's questions about the World, instead of reaching out for the most readily available explanation to shut them up.
Children are a particularly good example of the value of allowing stupid questions, because they see the World in a radically different way than us, since they are not burdened by the weight of what is “obvious”, “normal”, “mundane”. To the extent that they are ignorant, they are ignorant in novel and unpredictable ways, which is overall far more beneficial for a collective than people who are intelligent in a totally corrupt way, such as technicians thinking deeply about how best to keep users addicted to a social media site, or businessmen finding creative ways to wiggle their way around the law and taxation system.
In a better world, we would seriously consider what children have to say, and take what alienated intellectuals far more lightly. The good thing is that everyone still carries a spark of that inner child, the one who marvels at how incredibly weird the Universe is, and who feels compelled again and again to ask: Why?
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2024-10-27