A couple recent questions made me want to make “subquestions” more tightly coupled into the process.
On the “Does Anti-Malaria Charity Destroy Local Anti-Malaria Industry?” question, an obvious (to me) sub-question is “what local anti-malaria organizations exist in malaria-prone regions?” Once you have some sense of what local companies or nonprofits exist, you can start asking questions about how they have grown or shrunk in the past decade.
My guess is that the default frame of the questions prompts people to think more from the standpoint of “what can I easily armchair reason about?” rather than “what is the most epistemically useful way to approach this problem?”. I think it might be fair important to set things up such that refactoring the question is easier.
A couple recent questions made me want to make “subquestions” more tightly coupled into the process.
On the “Does Anti-Malaria Charity Destroy Local Anti-Malaria Industry?” question, an obvious (to me) sub-question is “what local anti-malaria organizations exist in malaria-prone regions?” Once you have some sense of what local companies or nonprofits exist, you can start asking questions about how they have grown or shrunk in the past decade.
Similarly, for What is a Reasonable Outside View on the Fate of Social Movements, I think a useful subquestion would be “what is a reasonably representative list of social movements, not selected for survivorship bias?”.
My guess is that the default frame of the questions prompts people to think more from the standpoint of “what can I easily armchair reason about?” rather than “what is the most epistemically useful way to approach this problem?”. I think it might be fair important to set things up such that refactoring the question is easier.