Questions are too cheap

The asymmetry between asking and answering

It is easier to ask than to answer. 

That’s my whole point.

It is much cheaper to ask questions than answer them so beware of situations where it is implied that asking and answering are equal. 

Here are some examples:

Let's say there is a maths game. I get a minute to ask questions. You get a minute to answer them. If you answer them all correctly, you win, if not, I do. Who will win?

Preregister your answer.

Okay, let's try. These questions took me roughly a minute to come up with. 

• What's 56,789 * 45,387?

• What's the integral from -6 to 5π of sin(x cos^2(x))/tan(x^9) dx?

• What's the prime factorisation of 91435293173907507525437560876902107167279548147799415693153?

Good luck. If I understand correctly, that last one's gonna take you at least an hour¹ (or however long it takes to threaten me).²

Perhaps you hate maths. Let's do word problems then.

Define the following words "antidisestablishmentarianism", "equatorial", "sanguine", "sanguinary", "escapology", "eschatology", "antideluvian", "cripuscular", "red", "meter", all the meanings of "do", and "fish". 

I don’t think anyone could do this without assistance. I tried it with Claude, which plausibly still failed³ the “fish” question, though we’ll return to that. 

I could do this for almost anything:

• Questions on any topic

• Certain types of procedural puzzles

• Asking for complicated explanations (we’ll revisit later) 

• Forecasting questions

This is the centre of my argument 

I see many situations where questions and answers are treated as symmetric. This is rarely the case. Instead, it is much more expensive to answer than to ask. 

Let’s try and find some counter examples. A calculator can solve allowable questions faster than you can type them in. A dictionary can provide allowable definitions faster than you can look them up. An LLM can sometimes answer some types of questions more cheaply in terms of inference costs than your time was worth in coming up with them.

But then I just have to ask different questions. Calculators and dictionaries are often limited. And even the best calculation programs can’t solve prime factorisation questions more cheaply than I can write them. Likewise I could create LLM prompts that are very expensive for the best LLMs to answer well, eg “write a 10,000 word story about an [animal] who experiences [emotion] in a [location].”

How this plays out 

Let’s go back to our game.

Imagine you are sitting around and I turn up and demand to play the “answering game”. Perhaps I reference on your reputation. You call yourself a ‘person who knows things’, surely you can answer my questions? No? Are you a coward? Looks like you are wrong!

And now you either have to spend your time answering or suffer some kind of social cost and allow me to say “I asked him questions but he never answered”. And whatever happens, you are distracted from what you were doing. Whether you were setting up an organisation or making a speech or just trying to have a nice day, now you have to focus on me. That’s costly. 

This seems like a common bad feature of discourse - someone asking questions cheaply and implying that the person answering them (or who is unable to) should do so just as cheaply and so it is fair. Here are some examples of this:

Internet debates are weaponised cheap questions. Whoever speaks first in many debates often gets to frame the discussion and ask a load of questions and then when inevitably they aren’t answered, the implication is that the first speaker is right⁴. I don’t follow American school debate closely, but I sense it is even more of this, with people literally learning to speak faster so their opponents can’t process their points quickly enough to respond to them.

Emails. Normally they exist within a framework of friends or colleagues, who understand when emails should be sent and feel obliged to respond. But at some point often emails get too cheap - anyone can send you one and those norms change or your email becomes unusable. I don’t want everyone in the world to be able to ask me any question they want, it’s too cheap. 

Freedom Of Information requests. I worked in Government for a while and anyone can ask for any information from any department. What follows is several days of a government employee’s time, either finding all the relevant documents and redacting them or giving a reason why the request is to be denied. Maddeningly, it’s also possible to send a ‘Freedom Of Information Meta-Request’, which then requires all documents about the original request. The costs are huge and all from a single email.

Further examples include political interviews, nagging questions on social media, support boxes on websites (and why they slowly fall in quality). 

In all these cases, the system might work when there are established norms to limit the number or style of questions, but allowing anyone to ask these questions quickly becomes unbalanced. 

Often when looking at norms of privacy or status, I ask myself “which cheap but generally acceptable interaction is being artificially limited⁵”. I prefer debates amongst groups who know and respect one another, giving time for longer answers. Between friends a question cannot be repeated for political effect. Email addresses are often hidden, or messaging is inside walled gardens, like Slack or Microsoft Teams. Companies do not give anyone the right to ask any question - comms departments often limit questions to employees.

Does anyone think otherwise?

Maybe this doesn’t sound like an insight, but it’s an observation I make relatively often and it explains for me why several of the above systems don’t work.

What I do personally 

Notice this asymmetry. When I request information, it is often like I am charging the person perhaps somewhere between 10¢ and $100. Now they have to stop and decide whether to answer. Would I be happy to ask to borrow this much money from them? Would others endorse my asking? If not, perhaps I shouldn’t ask, even if the space allows it.

Before I ask it, I can think about whether it is a high priority - whether I would pay to know the answer, if more important than what they are currently doing. I might want to try again to find the answer myself - googling it or asking someone else.

I can think about ways to make the question easier to answer. Most emails can, in my experience, be framed as a set of yes/no questions. Shall I do X? Is $300 too much? If I am talking to a colleague I try to do the work so that my email is easy to answer. I really like these suggestions for making my emails more likely to be responded to.

I seek to mirror the amount of work the other person is doing. If I ask a question and someone responds in a clipped answer, I might not ask another. I dislike twitter users who respond to 1 tweet with 10. It is predictive that they don’t understand boundaries and turn-taking, which doesn’t bode well for future discussion.

How to fix this in systems

If a community or process lets anyone ask questions, I don’t expect it to work at scale.

If it does work there is often something going on to covertly reduce question numbers. I filled in a UK government consultation recently. Anyone could comment on the process, which sounds like an expensive thing to offer for free, unless it was to be ignored. But was about 100 questions long, with submission at the end. They’ll let anyone answer, but only if you are willing to put in the time to click through every box. So it becomes more expensive again. 

Many systems have ways to make questions more expensive:

Limit question asking. On Twitter⁶, new private messages are sometimes limited to people you follow. You have made a choice to interact with someone before they can message you. This adds an additional price to questions. 

Rebalance. It is normal in panel discussions for every question to have a 5 minute answer⁷. There is already the assumption that questions are hard to answer. Debates likewise could have systems where each debater takes the role of ‘asking questions and waiting for them to be answered’. If you just ask 50 hard questions you wast your time and it doesn’t look like you’ve got the upper hand. I suggest such a debate format here:

Voting. Have unlimited questions but only answer the top ones according to some system. This works pretty well as long as those answering actually answer the top questions. In the Civil Service, during the departmental question time,, the top questions were usually about pay and were ignored. This damages trust in the whole process. 

Make questions easier to answer. Stack Overflow is notorious for the rigid style of their questions and answers. I remember once someone removed ‘thank you’ from one of my replies, because Stack Overflow seeks to keep text as succinct as possible. I found that annoying at first, but over time, seeing the quality of replies I saw the benefit of only allowing very high quality messages in a certain format. Increasing the average question and answer makes the site a lot more useful. 

Charge for it. Patreon allows people to interact with their favourite content creators, but often only if they pay the subscription. This provides good incentives for the content creator (who wants money) and for the user (who wants to talk to a high status person) and evens out the discrepancy between them. It’s much more appropriate to ask questions on a members’ area or a reddit AMA than if you see a celebrity in the street.

Is this an externality?

I sense cheap questions are an externality - when the costs of benefits of a transaction aren’t to those involved in the transaction. We have created a system where often questions - in debates, interviews, public interactions, social media - are free to ask, but this imposes costs on the answerer⁸. This leads to them being over-consumed for what is optimal for the system. Most of my solutions here are classic solutions to externalities (norms, regulation, restriction, taxation), so it seems likely it is one or is very close. 

I recommend everyone learn what externalities are. It’s a concept that I think about perhaps once a week, in a very broad range of contexts. Here is a quick video

Conclusion: Questions are too cheap 

If anyone can ask a free question, then anyone can ask 10 questions, or a question that is ten times as difficult to answer. Most systems cannot sustain this and in small groups we have norms to manage it. It is worth noticing how this breaks down at scale. 

Both I and systems I am involved in can find ways to charge for questions, via membership, votes, consent or money, so that they are no longer too cheap.

That’s all folks! Any questions? How hard could they be?

1. There is a 5% chance it’s 1000 years or something. Both are longer than a minute

2. The wonderful Paul Crowley is right that actually this can be solved by web solvers in several second. Ooops. But A) did any of you do than and the other two questions in the time set? B) I think my point still stands

3. “A limbless cold-blooded vertebrate animal with gills, fins, and typically an elongated body covered with scales.”

Some fish have limbs. Are cuttlefish, starfish, jellyfish fish? Hagfish don't have fins, I think. 

LLMs get rekd.

4. This study finds that people assume that quizmasters are more intelligent. I don’t trust social studies in general, but that seems like a pretty good theory.

5. ‘What too cheap thing is being secretly throttled?’ applies more broadly. Green grooms for celebs make sense because we have politeness norms that put too high an obligation on Taylor Swift if she has to say hello to everyone. ‘Just asking questions’ is an insult because some people do attack by repeatedly asking questions; it is very cheap to do so! People say they want houses, but actual houses involve noise disturbance, change, views being damaged; it’s not surprising that people find ways to limit properties being built near them.

6. Formerly ‘X, formerly Twitter’

7. This is one of the many reasons I hate panel discussions. Others include, panellists are rarely well motivated to find their disagreements clearly, questions often focus on what a single person finds interesting, panels are indulgent

8. You might argue that the answerer is involved in the transaction, but I don't think they are. Physical reality rarely gives the answerer an option to reject questions, their ‘cost’ is whatever the cost to the questioner is. You can ask for a question without my consent if you can think of one and expel the sound/ type it out.