One recommendation: the goal is not just to break a question into smaller questions sufficient to answer the original. The goal is to carve reality at the joints; to structure the search for answers in a way which reflects the structure of reality. This is useful mainly because it allows re-use and generalization of intermediate answers.
In a lot of simple cases, it’s fairly obvious how to structure questions—e.g. query “probability of catching covid when doing X”, rather than “probability that covid came from X given covid”, even though either one might technically be sufficient information for a super-query.
The hard/interesting cases are those where the right break-down is nonobvious. For these cases, remember that it’s useful to carve reality at the joints because it allows re-use/generalization of intermediate answers. Reversing that idea suggests a strategy for generating good intermediate questions: rather than starting from one goal-question, start from several related goal-questions, and then look for intermediate-questions which shed light on multiple goals. Rather than a tree, the question-breakdown should look like a DAG. By forcing intermediate questions to support multiple use-cases, we naturally push ourselves to look for questions which will have general relevance.
One recommendation: the goal is not just to break a question into smaller questions sufficient to answer the original. The goal is to carve reality at the joints; to structure the search for answers in a way which reflects the structure of reality. This is useful mainly because it allows re-use and generalization of intermediate answers.
In a lot of simple cases, it’s fairly obvious how to structure questions—e.g. query “probability of catching covid when doing X”, rather than “probability that covid came from X given covid”, even though either one might technically be sufficient information for a super-query.
The hard/interesting cases are those where the right break-down is nonobvious. For these cases, remember that it’s useful to carve reality at the joints because it allows re-use/generalization of intermediate answers. Reversing that idea suggests a strategy for generating good intermediate questions: rather than starting from one goal-question, start from several related goal-questions, and then look for intermediate-questions which shed light on multiple goals. Rather than a tree, the question-breakdown should look like a DAG. By forcing intermediate questions to support multiple use-cases, we naturally push ourselves to look for questions which will have general relevance.