There’s No Such Thing as a Stupid Question
I once heard a teacher of mine say,
If you ask a stupid question, you’ll look stupid for 5 minutes. If you don’t ask the question, you may end up being stupid for the rest of your life.
Every time I’ve heard another person say “there’s no such thing as a stupid question,” I can’t help but think how wrong they are.
Questions are beatiful. They share knowledge, and if asked for the first time in history, may create knowledge. They enlighten the mind and usually lead to more questions creating a fractal of curiosity.
Take the question, “Why is the sky blue?” It is short but mysterious. Many know the question, yet an astonishing amount of people don’t. Lets use this question as our example for the topic. Is the question stupid? Why of course not. It’s a beautiful question. It in itself may spark the curiosity for further astronomical answer in anybody. Now imagine the same question being asked to a professor who’s in the middle of teaching fourth year music history at an established university. Now, the question is stupid.
My belief, is that a question may be both beautiful, and stupid. It all depends on the time and the place. Similarily, a mirror may be either red or blue, it all depends on the colour of the light that’s reflecting off of it.
In a red light, this mirror is reflecting photons of light that are viewed as the colour red. It’s safe to say that in that instance, the mirror is indeed red. Likewise if there’s blue light being reflected, the mirror is indeed blue. The mirror itself has no colour, it all depends on the light influencing it.
Now lets go back to the question, “Why is the sky blue?” You must understand that the question is not stupid, or smart, or anything really. In a situation where you already know the answer (and you’re not asking for somebody else’s enlightenment), asking the question makes it a stupid question. If you don’t know it, it becomes a good question again. Furthermore, asking a stupid question at the right time, makes it a good question, while asking a good question at the wrong time, such as in a music history lecture, makes it a stupid question.
