At LessWrong we encourage people to be curious. Curiosity causes people to ask questions, but sometimes those questions get misinterpreted as social challenges or rhetorical techniques, or maybe just regular questions that you don't have a "burning itch" to know the answers for (and hence maybe not particularly worth answering). I sometimes preface a question by "I'm curious," but of course anyone could say that so it's not a very effective way to distinguish oneself as being genuinely curious. Another thing I sometimes do is to try to answer the question myself and present one or more answers as my "guesses" and ask if one of them is correct, since someone who is genuinely curious is more likely put in such effort. But unfortunately sometimes that backfires when the person you're directing the question at interprets the guesses as a way to make them look bad, because for example you failed to hypothesize the actual answer and include it as one of the guesses, and all your guesses make them look worse than the actual answer.
I've noticed examples of this happening to others on LW (or at least possibly happening, since I can't be sure whether someone else really is curious) as well as to myself, and can only imagine that the problem is even worse elsewhere, where people may not give each other as much benefit of doubt as we do around here. So my question is, what can curious people do, to signal their genuine curiosity when asking questions? Has anyone thought about this question already, or perhaps can recognize some strategies they already employ and make them explicit for the rest of us?
ETA: Perhaps I should say a bit more about the kind of situation I have in mind. Often I'll see a statement from someone that either contradicts my existing beliefs about something or is on a topic that I'm pretty ignorant about, and it doesn't come with an argument or evidence to back it up. I'd think "I don't want to just take their word since they might be wrong, but there also seems a good chance that they know something that I don't in which case I'd really like to know what it is, so let's ask why they're saying what they're saying." And unfortunately this sometimes gets interpreted as "I'm pretty sure you're wrong, and I'm going to embarrass you by asking a question that I don't think you can answer."
ETA2: The reason I use "signal" in the title is that people who do just want to embarrass the other person would want to have plausible deniability. If it was clear that's their intention and it turns out that the other person has a perfectly good answer, then they'll be the one embarrassed instead. So ideally the curious person should send a signal that can't be faked by someone who just wants to pretend to be curious.
Here's an experiment we could try: look at the "recent comments" feed, and do a text search on the question mark.
For instance, taking this link as starting point (because the most recent messages are biased by this very thread) we can count 67 occurrences of the question mark.
For a preliminary analysis I went through these discarding the ones in quotations, and built a list of question classes:
Questions asked in the negative are often rhetorical (e.g. "Isn't the whole point of patents for people NOT to use them?"). Rhetorical questions are quite common but do not obviously dominate. We could push this a bit further and get some statistics.
I've considered a reversal test. Would it be feasible to signal non-curiosity instead of signaling curiosity? That is, encourage a norm that every time you were about to ask a non-curious question, you prefaced it with an explicit "I think you're a fake and I'm going to ask embarrassing questions"?
My first thought was "obviously that wouldn't work". But that's an interesting thought, why would I think that? Do I think that in fact most of the time when we ask a question it's to make the respondent look stupid?
Actually, the factual analysis suggests that "question" is a more complex category than one might first think. There are many types of question, not all of them stemming from curiosity. Combining that with the reversal test, I conclude that there might be real value in coming up with sentence forms that convey the meaning "this is intended as a genuinely curious question", and encouraging their use in the community.
Whenever a conversant uses an extremely effective phrasing that conveys to me "I'm asking about/referring to X, and would only like you to think about X when answering/replying, because I am certainly not, in any way, referring to Y, Z, and D," it stands out to me and I'll (often ask for permission to) adopt that phrasing.
I think it would be an added bonus of a curiosity signal to have this trait.
Most prominent example: a friend used, "If I may," in an e-mail, which I requested to "make my own" - they allowed it, informing me they themselves had recently lifted the phrasing from someone.
\ Full formation: "[I]f [I] may, [I] suggest..."