How to Get Useful Answers to Your Questions

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I also find that yes/no questions get me answers faster because they’re relatively easy to answer quickly.
Stating your understanding is a kind of yes/no question – “this is my understanding of how X works, is that right or wrong?”. Often the answer is going to be “right in some ways and wrong in others”, but even so it makes the job of the answerer a lot easier.
Usually I’ll interrupt by asking a more specific question, because usually if someone has gone off on a long irrelevant explanation it’s because I asked an overly vague question to start with.
If this happens in a real-time conversation sometimes I’ll literally say something like “wait, that’s surprising to me, let me think for a minute” and try to incorporate the new data and come up with another question.
This really expands the set of people I can learn from – instead of finding someone who can easily give a clear explanation, I just need to find someone who has the information I want and then ask them specific questions until I’ve learned what I want to know. And I’ve found that most people really do want to be helpful, so they’re very happy to answer questions.

rw-book-cover

I also find that yes/no questions get me answers faster because they’re relatively easy to answer quickly.
Stating your understanding is a kind of yes/no question – “this is my understanding of how X works, is that right or wrong?”. Often the answer is going to be “right in some ways and wrong in others”, but even so it makes the job of the answerer a lot easier.
Usually I’ll interrupt by asking a more specific question, because usually if someone has gone off on a long irrelevant explanation it’s because I asked an overly vague question to start with.
If this happens in a real-time conversation sometimes I’ll literally say something like “wait, that’s surprising to me, let me think for a minute” and try to incorporate the new data and come up with another question.
This really expands the set of people I can learn from – instead of finding someone who can easily give a clear explanation, I just need to find someone who has the information I want and then ask them specific questions until I’ve learned what I want to know. And I’ve found that most people really do want to be helpful, so they’re very happy to answer questions.

rw-book-cover

I also find that yes/no questions get me answers faster because they’re relatively easy to answer quickly.
Stating your understanding is a kind of yes/no question – “this is my understanding of how X works, is that right or wrong?”. Often the answer is going to be “right in some ways and wrong in others”, but even so it makes the job of the answerer a lot easier.
Usually I’ll interrupt by asking a more specific question, because usually if someone has gone off on a long irrelevant explanation it’s because I asked an overly vague question to start with.
If this happens in a real-time conversation sometimes I’ll literally say something like “wait, that’s surprising to me, let me think for a minute” and try to incorporate the new data and come up with another question.
This really expands the set of people I can learn from – instead of finding someone who can easily give a clear explanation, I just need to find someone who has the information I want and then ask them specific questions until I’ve learned what I want to know. And I’ve found that most people really do want to be helpful, so they’re very happy to answer questions.