I have been told that I have a habit of saying “good question” a lot of the time when people ask me questions. I can’t deny the allegations; now that it’s been pointed out to me I catch my self doing it very often. The thing is, I don’t know exactly why I say it. It’s not an automatic response, and I don’t say it for every question for the same reason I don’t say “good table” every time I see a table. It usually doesn’t merit comment even if it is a very good table.
I think the habit formed for me around teaching other engineers about code. In my experience, the longer you stay at a software company, the larger the percentage of your time spent on explaining the intricacies of your barely-clinging-together code to newer hires, so there have been a few periods of my life where a lot of my time was spent explaining insane contraptions to people who were, on the whole, very good at understanding insane contraptions. I think in this context, I say “that’s a good question” to mean “that this question occurred to you demonstrates that you’re making correct intuitions about the topic”.
There’s also a case where the phrasing of a particular question will make me form a new intuition about the topic and I’ll say it slightly differently, “now that’s a good question”. I’ll then answer if I can and explain why I thought it was a good question, so we can both co-verify the idea.
Looking back, I think this has been helpful in the specific case where I have a lot of domain-specific knowledge and the person I’m speaking with doesn’t. It’s good for catching misunderstandings early in a very complicated environment where misunderstandings are common and difficult to detect sometimes. I think the practice is helpful in peer discussions too, particularly the explaining of why the question is good. It’s sometimes led to disagreements where I ultimately came around to agreeing that the question wasn’t so good after all (i.e. the intuition that the question relied on was incorrect).
Where I think it gets annoying is in casual conversation, especially at the frequency that I unconsciously do it. What’s odd is that, while I do it a lot, the reasons I say it in casual conversation are much less clear than my reasons in technical conversation. The nearest I can tell it’s “I had a new idea because of that question” which, in casual conversation, happens all the time. Compared to technical knowledge transmission it’s almost all new. So it became a semi-automated response that was firing, frequently, without my ever noticing how often it happened.
So to my question: What makes you say a question is good? do you say it out loud or do you just think it? Or do you think it? Does the idea of a question’s “goodness” even make sense to you? I’m not sure it does to me.
Bonus question: What makes you say “good point”?
Good question!
When I have to think a little before I give my answer (this might mean that I do not know it exactly)
or when I think that the other one is going to learn something important now from this.
(No, I have not read that lengthy text)
It’s an explainer / my own answer, not necessary to the question.
When it makes me see something I didn’t at first. If I already know the answer (the question is for me), I say good question if it evidences reasoning beyond what the average person reasons, or if the answer is leading to a point I was already planning to make.
I would say good question if this is something I’ve talked about with multiple people multiple times and this is the first time anybody ever asked it. (Assuming the question is relevant to the conversation)
In my experience, “good question” generally means one of the following (oh boy here I go sounding like an LLM again):
“I don’t know the answer to that question and I’d like to know about it as much if not more than you.”
“I do know the answer to that, and will enjoy telling you all about it.”
(A combination of the above) “I know a little about that but like you, would like to know more.”
“I know the answer to that, but am unable or unwilling to help you learn about it.”
“Go away.”
Come to think of it, four more of these and you could probably make a full, if wordy, alignment chart meme.
And you could probably reword them all to explain “good point” too.
It’s positive and encourages participation, while also signifying a reluctance to make a knee-jerk answer or judgement of the question. I think more people should say “good question”!
If someone identifies flaws or associations that have not yet been considered, to expand the perspective - especially if it’s phrased as a question, even a rhetorical one.
I use that if i need a bit to think about the different aspects of the question to sort out my argument - which normally makes the question a good one.
