The Art of Asking Dumb Questions

When I was a reporter at The American Lawyer many years ago, I used to hear tales of the great Connie Bruck. Before she went on to become an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker, Bruck was a reporter at The American Lawyer.

Her reporting feats were legendary.

Bruck's tradecraft, I was told, leaned heavily on the dumb question.

I didn't initially appreciate or fully grasp the idea behind the dumb question. A junior reporter at the time with little background in the law, I was always trying to hide how little I knew about what I was covering.

I wanted to show my colleagues and sources that I was smart and could speak their language. I was scared of being exposed.

But I soon came to learn how that approach didn't actually improve my understanding of what I was trying to learn. The dumb question, I realized, is often the best; it's the one that returns the most revealing and illuminating answers.

The challenge, of course, is having the courage to ask the dumb question. Asking dumb questions exposes you to potential sneering and ridicule.

I was reminded of this crucial skill while reading Preet Bharara's new book, Doing Justice.

Great prosecutors and great journalists, it turns out, have many things in common. One is that they know how to ask dumb questions.

But dumb questions are important in every field, especially where the stakes are high. We all need to ask them. Bharara puts it well:

"Dumb questions uncover superficial reasoning, reveal bad logic, and expose fake experts. The world is populated, even in rarefied workplaces, with bullshit artists. People are forever using acronyms they can't expand, spouting jargon they can't translate, trafficking in concepts they don't grasp. They parrot shallow talking points and slogans and other people's recollections. When you take at face value everything said to you—even from supposed subject matter experts opining with great confidence—you are at risk of perpetuating everyone's superficial understanding of the matter at hand. There is no shame in asking basic questions, in virtually any context. In fact, it is essential to your personal understanding of any issue. Too often, people like to play in the treetops before working at the roots. That is a mistake in any job and in life generally."