OTOH, “what kind of car is it” is a more revealing question, in that it will yield more information about what metadata matters to your interlocutor. (It’s what I’d call a more open question.)
Conversely “what color is it” conveys information about what metadata matters to you. If you think about it, it’s strange for a question to convey information; more often when you ask a question you want to collect information.
Often you’ll want to start an information-seeking conversation with open questions, the ideal being “context free questions”—questions that are likely to elicit an answer irrespective of the situation you ask them in. Then as the answers lead you to generate hypotheses you’ll want to ask confirming questions to probe for false assumptions.
Garbled or missing metadata can cost time and cause fights
Citation needed. (Or an example or three.)
Speaking as someone who asks questions for a living, some of your advice in this post strikes me as dubious. I kind of agree with your caveats about definitions, but they seem weakly connected to the general notion of “metadata”.
(Heavily fictionalized but not made up examples follow):
Interlocutor: Hey, have you read Exemplar?
Me: I don’t think I’m familiar with it.
Interlocutor: Are you sure? We have a copy around here somewhere. It’s by X. Ample and -
Me: Oh, is it blue?
Interlocutor: …How should I know?
Me: I think I remember reading a blue book by somebody with an X initial… did it have a character who kept saying “prithee” at random times?
Interlocutor: I told you, the book is called Exemplar, it’s by X. Ample, have you read it or not?
(And then I have to go physically locate the blue book I’m thinking of to see if it is this one.)
Friend Who Used To Be Willing To Talk Religion With Me: Deploys extended metaphor using the word “authority”.
Me: continues metaphor, leaning on connotations of “authority”
FWUTBWTTRWM: No! Now I’m offended! Rar!
Me: Bwuh? But I just—you said -
FWUTBWTTRWM: No, that’s not what we’re talking about! I don’t mean these six other things I have discussed before that also use the word authority, they’re different! Rar!
I can see how the first example relates to your post. I’m not seeing (yet) how the concept “metadata” applies to the second example. It feels more like “inferential distance costs time and causes fights”.
The first example does raise interesting questions of ontology, with at least three different concepts in play (roughly “book”, “copy” and “story” with corresponding metadata categories of “bibliographic entry”, “physical characteristics” and “narrative structure”). Any particular book you read is going to leave recollections from each of these categories in your mind and it’s not so surprising that you don’t always control how much you remember from which categories. (I hear that writing a review of each book you read helps pin down some of these memories; I don’t typically do that.)
I can see how being explicit about those can be helpful. The choice of terminology might be unfortunate: “metadata” is likely to make sense primarily to people who have some training in computer programming, and that training has already made them (if they’re at all competent) more explicitly aware of these matters of ontology. So in terms of delivering useful advice the post as written might be coals to Newcastle. Maybe you could start off with something like “Programmers have a concept of metadata, i.e. information used to tag other information...” to help a more general audience bridge the gap.
For your own practical purposes, though, in the first example it sounds as if you’re being as helpful as you can and your interlocutor in contrast is being impatient—a matter of attitude rather than a matter of metadata.
OTOH, “what kind of car is it” is a more revealing question, in that it will yield more information about what metadata matters to your interlocutor. (It’s what I’d call a more open question.)
Conversely “what color is it” conveys information about what metadata matters to you. If you think about it, it’s strange for a question to convey information; more often when you ask a question you want to collect information.
Often you’ll want to start an information-seeking conversation with open questions, the ideal being “context free questions”—questions that are likely to elicit an answer irrespective of the situation you ask them in. Then as the answers lead you to generate hypotheses you’ll want to ask confirming questions to probe for false assumptions.
Citation needed. (Or an example or three.)
Speaking as someone who asks questions for a living, some of your advice in this post strikes me as dubious. I kind of agree with your caveats about definitions, but they seem weakly connected to the general notion of “metadata”.
(Heavily fictionalized but not made up examples follow):
Interlocutor: Hey, have you read Exemplar?
Me: I don’t think I’m familiar with it.
Interlocutor: Are you sure? We have a copy around here somewhere. It’s by X. Ample and -
Me: Oh, is it blue?
Interlocutor: …How should I know?
Me: I think I remember reading a blue book by somebody with an X initial… did it have a character who kept saying “prithee” at random times?
Interlocutor: I told you, the book is called Exemplar, it’s by X. Ample, have you read it or not?
(And then I have to go physically locate the blue book I’m thinking of to see if it is this one.)
Friend Who Used To Be Willing To Talk Religion With Me: Deploys extended metaphor using the word “authority”.
Me: continues metaphor, leaning on connotations of “authority”
FWUTBWTTRWM: No! Now I’m offended! Rar!
Me: Bwuh? But I just—you said -
FWUTBWTTRWM: No, that’s not what we’re talking about! I don’t mean these six other things I have discussed before that also use the word authority, they’re different! Rar!
I can see how the first example relates to your post. I’m not seeing (yet) how the concept “metadata” applies to the second example. It feels more like “inferential distance costs time and causes fights”.
The first example does raise interesting questions of ontology, with at least three different concepts in play (roughly “book”, “copy” and “story” with corresponding metadata categories of “bibliographic entry”, “physical characteristics” and “narrative structure”). Any particular book you read is going to leave recollections from each of these categories in your mind and it’s not so surprising that you don’t always control how much you remember from which categories. (I hear that writing a review of each book you read helps pin down some of these memories; I don’t typically do that.)
I can see how being explicit about those can be helpful. The choice of terminology might be unfortunate: “metadata” is likely to make sense primarily to people who have some training in computer programming, and that training has already made them (if they’re at all competent) more explicitly aware of these matters of ontology. So in terms of delivering useful advice the post as written might be coals to Newcastle. Maybe you could start off with something like “Programmers have a concept of metadata, i.e. information used to tag other information...” to help a more general audience bridge the gap.
For your own practical purposes, though, in the first example it sounds as if you’re being as helpful as you can and your interlocutor in contrast is being impatient—a matter of attitude rather than a matter of metadata.