Technology, Connected - The Real Reason We Stop Asking Questions

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

Why do we stop asking questions as adults? Philosopher Pia Lauritzen has analysed 30,000 of them, and says nothing was ever lost.The ability stays. What changes is the price. Every question admits you don't know something, and nobody gets promoted for ignorance. Ask in the wrong room and curiosity starts to feel like an interrogation, which is why most of us learn to keep the question to ourselves.She proves it in keynotes. One minute, two rules, and every person in the audience writes one. They could do it the whole time.Full episode with Pia Lauritzen on questions, curiosity and whether AI can think at www.thinkingonpaper.xyzBe curious, stay disruptive.--Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping your life. 🏠 ⁠Buy us a beer on Substack⁠🫵 C⁠hoose your own technology adventure ⁠📺  ⁠Watch our beautiful faces on YouTube ⁠🎧 R⁠emember Steve Jobs on APPLE⁠📺 ⁠Get clips and exclusive videos on Instagram ⁠

kids ask why 300 times a day. Yeah. They are the archetypal question asker. Why do we lose the ability to ask good questions the older we get? I don't think we do. I don't think, I don't agree. I know a lot of people are saying that, but I don't think we do. We don't lose the ability. but we realize that the consequence of questions not being innocent is that it comes with a responsibility. And it's also, when we ask a question, we admit. It's not only acknowledging, it's also admitting that there's something we don't know. That's why we ask.

So it's admitting ignorance. And that's not something that we are being, you know, We're not being promoted for being ignorant. We are not getting good grades for saying, I don't know, please ask someone else. That's not how we progress. That's not how we achieve things in school and in work life. So I think we just stop sharing the questions. It's not like we don't have the ability to ask them.

When I give keynotes, I typically start out by inviting people to write down a question. I haven't said anything. I'm just saying, hi, nice to be here. I'm glad to be here. Nice to see you guys. I want to start by inviting you to write down a question. And it takes about a minute then everybody in an audience have written down a question. I don't tell them how. I don't tell them what to do. I don't even give them examples. I just say, I'm going to trust you to know I'll write a question. So please write down a question. It's just, it needs to be relevant to why we're here today, but it also needs to have some kind of importance to you.

That's the only two rules. Everybody knows how to do that. So we actually don't. I'm just trying to think of it. And like there's so many forces pushing on my brain in that split second to come up with a question which I think is wise or funny or profound or relevant or I don't. Jeremy, what question did you have in your mind just when she asked? Yeah. Why is the curtain system driving us to not want to ask questions because we're scared of looking like we don't know the answer. I think that's where my head goes in a lot of this, I think is.

There's a Tom Waits quote I reference a lot. And we bring it up a lot on the show that Tom Waits says we're operating in a deficit of wonder. So how does wonder and curiosity come into the art of asking really good questions? I actually like to talk about it as the big question family because we have these. There are some things we automatically think when we talk about questions. people say curiosity or creativity or, you know, these are the nice cousins in the family. These are the ones we want to play with. We want to sit next to at the family dinner.

But it's just as I mentioned before, the bright and the dark side, doubt and skepticism, they are also part of the questioned family. And I think that is part of the reason why we get more careful not to ask. questions all the time of all kinds of people because we know that in addition to showing off our ignorance, we are putting some kind of pressure and the people we are asking. So also referring back to this distribution of responsibility that I know that when you ask a question, the spotlight is on me. And you know that I know that. So we can set it up like this in a formal setting. This is a podcast. We agreed to do this. You prepared some questions. I prepared some answers.

Now we're going to do it. But if you just met me, you know, some place and you started asking me all these questions, then it would start looking like something else, and that is an interrogation. And that is, you know, when we want to hold someone responsible for something. And that's not a nice situation to find yourself in, unless you are a lawyer and this is your job. So there are so many traditions and cultural dimensions to asking questions, and because it's kind of a blind spot in our culture when we talk about questions, it's like it's a tool for journalists or it's something that can be used to do a poll or to do a survey.

But we rarely talk about these cultural, philosophical, basic human existential and ethical dimensions of questions. But they constantly have an impact on whether or not we ask and how we ask if we do it.