Questions and Answers

Claude Lévi-Strauss once said:

“The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.”

Of course, that’s true for many areas outside science as well.

In his wonderful book, The Gene, Siddhartha Mukherjee gives an awesome example of the danger of mis-defining something:

“If we define “intelligence” as the performance on only one kind of problem in only one kind of test, then we will, indeed, find a “gene for intelligence”.

In A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the inhabitants of Magrathea didn’t know Lévi-Stauss’ point. They asked their super computer the answer to the “Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything”. After millions of years of computing, the super computer states the answer (drum rolls, please):

“Forty-two.”

The characters in the story were as dismayed, perplexed and disappointed as you probably were by the answer. And so the computer explained:

“Once you understand what the question actually is, you’ll know what the answer means.”

Then there are those who use this very fact, the inability to know the right question, to their advantage, as Thomas Pynchon point out:

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”

And so it’s fair to say that often, the question is just as important the answer.