I wish more people would try to solve the problem rather than answer the question, especially when it takes little additional effort. example: q: "Will material x work in this scenario?" A1: "No, that's not a good choice." vs A2: "No, instead try or Y" or even A3: "No, in fact none of our products will."
Interesting. I get rather annoyed by people who run around trying to solve a problem they think I implied by my question, rather than giving me the information I requested specifically to solve my actual problem.
The other day, for example, I asked about my health insurance coverage. Just to be prepared, as I'm still covered by my parents' insurance and thought it would be prudent to have better emergency plans in place than "Call parents for help" or "Follow the doctor's lead and hope things work out". I got treated to a helping dose o...
See also: Boring Advice Repository, Solved Problems Repository, Grad Student Advice Repository, Useful Concepts Repository, Bad Concepts Repository
I just got back from the July CFAR workshop, where I was a guest instructor. One useful piece of rationality I started paying more attention to as a result of the workshop is the idea of useful questions to ask in various situations, particularly because I had been introduced to a new one:
"What skill am I actually training?"
This is a question that can be asked whenever you're practicing something, but more generally it can also be asked whenever you're doing something you do frequently, and it can help you notice when you're practicing a skill you weren't intending to train. Some examples of when to use this question:
Many of the lessons of the sequences can also be packaged as useful questions, like "what do I believe and why do I believe it?" and "what would I expect to see if this were true?"
I'd like to invite people to post other examples of useful questions in the comments, hopefully together with an explanation of why they're useful and some examples of when to use them. As usual, one useful question per comment for voting purposes.