I have a kiddo whose “why phase” is in full swing and I am not actually confident that it’s motivated by curiosity. It’s also not the most efficient way to learn things, or even the most efficient simple way (that’d probably be something like “tell me stuff about $TOPIC”), nor is it obviously geared at that goal.
In particular, my kid (I don’t know how common this is) will typically formulate his questions by re-grammatizing whatever statement was most recently made in his vicinity (“it’s a nice day” “why is it a nice day?” “because it’s a good temperature” “why is it a good temperature?”). This will sure keep the conversation going, but:
He doesn’t retain the information well, sometimes asking the exact same question more than once in a period of just a few minutes, even when the answer isn’t complicated compared to things he understands easily.
He doesn’t seem to care what kind of answer he gets—he will proceed almost identically if the answer to the temperature question above has to do with it having been a similar temperature yesterday, or about the season, or about cloud cover, or if the answer is “I don’t know” (he’ll ask “why do you don’t know”).
He hasn’t noticed any common patterns that end the line of questioning (if he ever asks why he did something, he gets, “I don’t know, why did you do that?”, but hasn’t given up on such questions).
Because of how he generates new questions, he can be led around concept-space in whatever way is most convenient for his interlocutor. He doesn’t circle back to stuff he’s been interested in before except when he’s repeating questions he forgot and settling for the same answers as last time verbatim. There isn’t a sense, talking to him, that he’s aware of the existence of a concept out there he really wants to grasp.
This isn’t to say that he isn’t curious, but I don’t think the “why phase” is strongly related. When he’s really interested in learning about something he wants to go interact with it. He also has other language abilities that he seems to use when what he wants really is information, like “I want to talk about it” and non-why-questions. Why questions seem to be just a button-mash for “make the adults talk to me”.
In light of my reply here (“so I guess even children don’t know how to ask good questions”), I wonder if they’re reaching for something more than answers, maybe my impulse to tell them they shouldn’t ask questions they don’t really care about the answers to, is actually well placed. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe they want to learn about asking questions, and the process can’t start to mature until you let them know that they’re kind of doing it wrong.
(I’m aware that there’s a real risk, if this theory is wrong, of making the child explore less freely than they’re supposed to, which I will try to hold in regard.)
If we assume it has a purpose.. how does learning work? What needs learning?
1) Theories of how people learn: Repetition.
2) A good way to acquire information in theory: get information from multiple sources, and see what matches up.
3) Some knowledge we might take for granted. Perhaps: what topics are taboo, words, sounds, grammatical structure—we might suppose that knowing how to ask questions (Like where the word why goes in the sentence,) will fall out of this (if they get it wrong, it’s an opportunity to find out/be corrected).
The process in question doesn’t sound super effective (to us):
I have a kiddo whose “why phase” is in full swing and I am not actually confident that it’s motivated by curiosity. It’s also not the most efficient way to learn things, or even the most efficient simple way (that’d probably be something like “tell me stuff about $TOPIC”), nor is it obviously geared at that goal.
1) Unless it’s optimizing for repetition.
2) Unless it’s optimizing for multiple sources of knowledge.
3) Unless it’s a way of finding out basic things we take for granted, or what’s taboo.
Why would any working cognitive process require repetition? The feeling I get when I see that is that the process doesn’t know enough about what its pursuing to get there efficiently, and it might never.
Sometimes a cognition doesnt know much about what it’s pursuing due to low conscious integration.. sometimes I guess I have to accept it’s just because of whatever ignorance puts it in the position of pursuing a thing. We could hardly expect, for instance, a person looking for the key to a box in an object archive, to ask for a list of keys of a particular length, because they wouldn’t know how long the key is, nor would they ask for keys with a particular number of peaks, for they could not know how many points it has, they can maybe give us an estimate of its diameter, or its age, but their position as a key-seeker means that there are certain Good Questions that they necessarily cannot know to ask.
Their search may seem repetitive, but repetition is not the point. Our job as the archivist is to help them to narrow the list of candidates to the fewest possible.
Why would any working cognitive process require repetition?
I should have been more specific: Memorization. (Part of speaking any language fluently is knowing words, how to say them, and what they mean—and knowing it fast.)
Aye, I suppose the answer is; many cognitive processes in humans need repetition because they seem to be a bit broken? (Are there theories about why human memory (heck, higher animal memory in general) is so… rough?)
Since hypermnesics do exist, my theory is that that used to be a common phenotype, but our consciousness was flawed, it was too much power, we became neurotic, or something, and all evolution could do to sort it out was to cripple it.
My firm conclusion going into this is the why game is about getting the adult to interact.
But because I love layered explanations, I have been mentally preparing for this phase for a long time. My daughter turned one recently, which means I only have a short while longer to wait.
She has no grasp of the trap into which she will toddle!
Yup, similar with my child. Maybe the first time the question is motivated by actual curiosity, but the following 99 repetitions of the same question have to be motivated by something else.
Most questions I get are repetitions of something that was already asked and already answered, and the child actually remembers the answer.
Getting the impression that not even children know how to ask good questions. It’s a crucial skill that I’ve never seen taught, and I know that I don’t have it.
I’m in the same room as one of my heroes, I know they’re full of important secrets, I know they’re full of vital techniques, I could ask them anything, but nothing comes, I just smile, I say, “nice to meet you”, I spend all of my energy trying to keep them from seeing my finitude. I come away no bigger than before. I never see them again.
I have a kiddo whose “why phase” is in full swing and I am not actually confident that it’s motivated by curiosity. It’s also not the most efficient way to learn things, or even the most efficient simple way (that’d probably be something like “tell me stuff about $TOPIC”), nor is it obviously geared at that goal.
In particular, my kid (I don’t know how common this is) will typically formulate his questions by re-grammatizing whatever statement was most recently made in his vicinity (“it’s a nice day” “why is it a nice day?” “because it’s a good temperature” “why is it a good temperature?”). This will sure keep the conversation going, but:
He doesn’t retain the information well, sometimes asking the exact same question more than once in a period of just a few minutes, even when the answer isn’t complicated compared to things he understands easily.
He doesn’t seem to care what kind of answer he gets—he will proceed almost identically if the answer to the temperature question above has to do with it having been a similar temperature yesterday, or about the season, or about cloud cover, or if the answer is “I don’t know” (he’ll ask “why do you don’t know”).
He hasn’t noticed any common patterns that end the line of questioning (if he ever asks why he did something, he gets, “I don’t know, why did you do that?”, but hasn’t given up on such questions).
Because of how he generates new questions, he can be led around concept-space in whatever way is most convenient for his interlocutor. He doesn’t circle back to stuff he’s been interested in before except when he’s repeating questions he forgot and settling for the same answers as last time verbatim. There isn’t a sense, talking to him, that he’s aware of the existence of a concept out there he really wants to grasp.
This isn’t to say that he isn’t curious, but I don’t think the “why phase” is strongly related. When he’s really interested in learning about something he wants to go interact with it. He also has other language abilities that he seems to use when what he wants really is information, like “I want to talk about it” and non-why-questions. Why questions seem to be just a button-mash for “make the adults talk to me”.
This sounds like another circle game that kids like to play.
In light of my reply here (“so I guess even children don’t know how to ask good questions”), I wonder if they’re reaching for something more than answers, maybe my impulse to tell them they shouldn’t ask questions they don’t really care about the answers to, is actually well placed. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe they want to learn about asking questions, and the process can’t start to mature until you let them know that they’re kind of doing it wrong.
(I’m aware that there’s a real risk, if this theory is wrong, of making the child explore less freely than they’re supposed to, which I will try to hold in regard.)
If we assume it has a purpose.. how does learning work? What needs learning?
1) Theories of how people learn: Repetition.
2) A good way to acquire information in theory: get information from multiple sources, and see what matches up.
3) Some knowledge we might take for granted. Perhaps: what topics are taboo, words, sounds, grammatical structure—we might suppose that knowing how to ask questions (Like where the word why goes in the sentence,) will fall out of this (if they get it wrong, it’s an opportunity to find out/be corrected).
The process in question doesn’t sound super effective (to us):
1) Unless it’s optimizing for repetition.
2) Unless it’s optimizing for multiple sources of knowledge.
3) Unless it’s a way of finding out basic things we take for granted, or what’s taboo.
Why would any working cognitive process require repetition? The feeling I get when I see that is that the process doesn’t know enough about what its pursuing to get there efficiently, and it might never.
Sometimes a cognition doesnt know much about what it’s pursuing due to low conscious integration.. sometimes I guess I have to accept it’s just because of whatever ignorance puts it in the position of pursuing a thing. We could hardly expect, for instance, a person looking for the key to a box in an object archive, to ask for a list of keys of a particular length, because they wouldn’t know how long the key is, nor would they ask for keys with a particular number of peaks, for they could not know how many points it has, they can maybe give us an estimate of its diameter, or its age, but their position as a key-seeker means that there are certain Good Questions that they necessarily cannot know to ask.
Their search may seem repetitive, but repetition is not the point. Our job as the archivist is to help them to narrow the list of candidates to the fewest possible.
I should have been more specific: Memorization. (Part of speaking any language fluently is knowing words, how to say them, and what they mean—and knowing it fast.)
Aye, I suppose the answer is; many cognitive processes in humans need repetition because they seem to be a bit broken? (Are there theories about why human memory (heck, higher animal memory in general) is so… rough?)
Since hypermnesics do exist, my theory is that that used to be a common phenotype, but our consciousness was flawed, it was too much power, we became neurotic, or something, and all evolution could do to sort it out was to cripple it.
My firm conclusion going into this is the why game is about getting the adult to interact.
But because I love layered explanations, I have been mentally preparing for this phase for a long time. My daughter turned one recently, which means I only have a short while longer to wait.
She has no grasp of the trap into which she will toddle!
Yup, similar with my child. Maybe the first time the question is motivated by actual curiosity, but the following 99 repetitions of the same question have to be motivated by something else.
Most questions I get are repetitions of something that was already asked and already answered, and the child actually remembers the answer.
Getting the impression that not even children know how to ask good questions. It’s a crucial skill that I’ve never seen taught, and I know that I don’t have it.
I’m in the same room as one of my heroes, I know they’re full of important secrets, I know they’re full of vital techniques, I could ask them anything, but nothing comes, I just smile, I say, “nice to meet you”, I spend all of my energy trying to keep them from seeing my finitude. I come away no bigger than before. I never see them again.
I want to learn to be better than this.
That’s an interesting skill. Out of the top of my head, there’s no book that comes to mind on how to ask good questions.
CFAR also doesn’t seem to have a question module as far as I know.