Do's and Don'ts in public questioning

From How to Ask a Question by Peter Wood, a good essay on what to consider when asking a public question. The main point, though he doesn't put it this way, is that a dialogue is a form of conversation and therefore one's primary consideration ought to be how to keep the conversation constructive and flowing. I think Wood is right that far too often the mindset of the questioners is instead focused on how to extract something from the opposition or how to make oneself look better. Here is my list of pointers based on Wood's essay.

Do
Be succinct
Be civil
Be interesting
Help the person being questioned to clarify their point
Ask
Build on the existing dialogue
Serve as a catalyst for the responder to offer insight
Stick to a single point
Maintain contextual pertinence
Lead with Who, Where, What, Why, When or How
Go straight to the question

Don't
Use the question as a platform to demonstrate your own superiority
Scold
Pursue tangents, minutiae or the irrelevant
Declare
Focus on yourself or your point
Make a speech
Seek clarification of or offer additional factual details
Seek to nail down an evasive answer
Don't repeat a question already answered
Lead with your biography
Attack
Offer yourself as a representative of some group

A process of relentless honing and winnowing

I like this from Seer Blest by Sam Sacks quoting Frank Kermode:

“The history of interpretation, the skills by which we keep alive in our minds the light and dark of past literature and past humanity,” he once wrote for the only sermon he ever delivered, “is to an incalculable extent a history of error.”

In this rendition, scholars become the genes replicating intellectual memes down through time, a constant source of variation because they are subject to error. Ideas become refined over time by their survival through faulty replication. A process of relentless honing and winnowing.

The top 50 best-selling classics in France

From Le Figaro, The top 50 best-selling classics by Mohammed Aissaoui. 24% are British or American. Another 16% or so are from countries in Continental Europe. Among the thirty French authors, fifteen are likely to be recognized by your average American high school student (Guy de Maupassant, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas) or you average college graduate (Sartre, Camus, Hugo). Interesting to see just how universal the Western canon is. The list is based on the number of copies sold between 2004 and 2012.

1 Guy de Maupassant: 3,790,000 copies
2 Molière: 3,400,000 copies
3 Emile Zola: 2,900,000 copies
4 Albert Camus: 2,810,000 copies
5 Victor Hugo: 2,710,000 copies
6 Agatha Christie: 2,650,000 copies
7 Stefan Zweig: 2,510,000 copies
8 Antoine de Saint-Exupery: 2,310,000 copies
9 Voltaire: 2,200,000 copies
10 Honore de Balzac: 2,020,000 copies
11 William Shakespeare: 1,510,000 copies
12 George Orwell: 1,350,000 copies
13 Jules Verne: 1,330,000 copies
14 Jean-Paul Sartre: 1,320,000 copies
15 Charles Baudelaire: 1,280,000 copies
16 Jean Anouilh: 1,240,000 copies
17 Boris Vian: 1,230,000 copies
17 Eugene Ionesco: 1,230,000 copies
19 JR Tolkien: 1,200,000 copies
20 Gustave Flaubert: 1,190,000 copies
21 Robert Louis Stevenson: 1,180,000 copies
22 Romain Gary: 1,140,000 copies
23 Albert Cohen: 1,120,000 copies
24 Pierre de Marivaux: 1,090,000 copies
25 Jean Racine: 1,000,000 copies
26 Georges Simenon: 990,000 copies
27 Alexandre Dumas: 980,000 copies
27 Franz Kafka: 980,000 copies
29 Jean Giono: 940,000 copies
30 Primo Levi: 930,000 copies
30 Prosper Merimee: 930,000 copies
32 Jack London 910,000 copies
33 John Steinbeck: 870,000 copies
33 Rene Barjavel: 870,000 copies
33 Isaac Asimov: 870,000 copies
36 Marguerite Duras: 850,000 copies
37 Jane Austen: 840,000 copies
38 Marcel Proust: 790,000 copies
38 Sagan: 790,000 copies
40 La Fontaine: 780,000 copies
41 Pierre Corneille: 760,000 copies
41 Denis Diderot: 760,000 copies
43 Celine: 750,000 copies
44 Alfred de Musset: 710,000 copies
45 Arthur Conan Doyle: 700,000 copies
46 Marcel Pagnol: 680,000 copies
47 Dostoevsky: 670,000 copies
48 Oscar Wilde: 630,000 copies
49 Beaumarchais: 620,000 copies
50 Stendhal: 610,000 copies

Perils which muster in force about you

From Henry James in The Problem, a story in (Henry James: Complete Stories 1864-1874.

. . . he was unable to forget that life is full of bitter inhuman necessities and perils which muster in force about you when you stand idle.

But they shall not be very bad.

I had a post a couple of days ago about Nietzsche's emphasis on the importance in a great artist in knowing what to reject; Indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.

Here is a corollary sentiment from Henry James via Library of America (Henry James: Complete Stories 1864-1874.

While writing and publishing his early stories (many of which he never republished), James was the first to acknowledge that they were apprentice work, created to satisfy popular taste. The year “A Problem” was published, he wrote, “I write little and only tales, which I think it likely I shall continue to manufacture in a hackish manner, for that which is bread. They cannot of necessity be very good; but they shall not be very bad.” Still, even when the young James was slumming it, his tales have an atypically breezy appeal and are of interest to anyone intrigued by the development of one of America’s greatest authors.

It seems as if our schools were doomed to be the sport of change.

Charles Dickens in the Penguin Classics Selected Short Fiction. Included are some travel sketches of his return to scenes of his youth. Here he has returned to his childhood school. Page 152. It captures the the contemporary sense of helplessness in the face of implacable progress and shows that that sense was extant a century and a half ago.

We went to look at it, only this last Midsummer, and found that the Railway had cut it up root and branch. A great trunk-line had swallowed the playground, sliced away the schoolroom, and pared off the corner of the house: which, thus curtailed of its proportions, presented itself, in a green stage of stucco, profilewise towards the road, like a forlorn flat-iron without a handle, standing on end.

It seems as if our schools were doomed to be the sport of change. We have faint recollections of a Prepatory Day-School, which we have sought in vain, and which must have been pulled down to make a new street, ages ago.

The understanding of anthropologists

Women of the Raj by Margaret MacMillan. I found this in a used bookstore with the price tag in British Pounds and a receipt inside indicating that it was purchased June 18, 1994 at Blackwell's on Broad Street in Oxford, UK. I am fascinated by bookish ephemera and the most often hidden genealogy of used books.

The book looks to be a fascinating history of a world that existed up to 75 years ago and yet now is so completely vanished as to seem to have existed centuries past. From the Introduction:

Sometimes they were magnificent. Sometimes, on the other hand, they were awful, as only people who are frightened can be. When a conviction of superiority goes with the fear, then the arrogance is heightened and sharpened. The memsahibs (roughly translated 'the masters' women') - even those who know nothing of the history of the British in India have heard of them. They stride through that history in their voluminous clothes which denied the Indian climate, their only concession to the heat the graceless solar helmet, the topi, which protected their rose-petal cheeks from the alien sun.

[snip]

British women in India certainly behaved badly; they also behaved well. They were brave in ways that are difficult to comprehend today. They might say dreadful things but their actions were often quite different from their words. They did not, it is true, conduct themselves in India with the patience of saints, the understanding of anthropologists. They were merely, most of them, ordinary middle-class women put into an extraordinary situation.

Extraordinary, indeed. The various accounts of the Great Mutiny I have read highlight just how extraordinary. I am looking forward to reading Women of the Raj.

A fairly standard shift

From Europe’s Real Crisis by Megan McArdle.

Since the invention of birth control and antibiotics, country after country has gone through a fairly standard shift. First, the mortality rate drops, especially among the young and the aging, and that quickly translates into a bigger workforce. Then, birthrates drop, as families realize that they no longer need to birth a basketball team to ensure that a couple members will survive to adulthood. A falling birthrate means that parents can invest more in each child; with fewer mouths to feed, more and better food can nourish each of them, and children can spend more years in school, causing worker productivity to rise from one generation to the next. As the burden of bearing and rearing children lightens, mothers can do more work outside the home, boosting both household resources and the national economy.

[snip]

It is somewhat ironic that the first serious strains caused by Europe’s changing demographics are showing up in the Continent’s welfare budgets, because the pension systems themselves may well have shaped, and limited, Europe’s growth. The 20th century saw international adoption of social-security systems that promised defined benefits paid out of future tax revenue—known to pension experts as “paygo” systems, and to critics as Ponzi schemes. These systems have greatly eased fears of a destitute old age, but multiple studies show that as social-security systems become more generous (and old age more secure), people have fewer children. By one estimate, 50 to 60 percent of the difference between America’s (above-replacement) birthrate and Europe’s can be explained by the latter’s more generous systems. In other words, Europe’s pension system may have set in motion the very demographic decline that helped make that system—and some European governments—insolvent.

Limited warnings

From Warn people about two things by Tyler Cowen, a variant of Hayek's problem of knowledge. Tyler gives an example of a range of possible warnings, which two do you choose?

Driving is dangerous
Fight nuclear proliferation.
Don’t let your kid near a bucket.
Politics isn’t about policy.
Beware the Ides of March!
Some people out there suck!

Not sure about these as specific examples but as a father of three teens where I am constantly finding circumstances where I wish to offer a warning but also being cognizant that too many warnings become background noise, I am very sympathetic to the conundrum of warning under conditions of limitation. If you could give only two warnings or admonishments, which would they be? I might go with:

Pay attention
Think it through

But I sure would like to add a frequent one from our home, "Just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should do it."

How are we supposed to decide which books to regard as classics?

From Seer Blest by Sam Sacks

Kermode’s justifications for his borrowing from Judaism’s ancient critical method appears in the lectures compiled for his 1975 book The Classic. Here he asks how, in the secular era, we are supposed to decide which books to regard as classics.

The question is knotty, Kermode writes, because traditionally such literature was known by its revealed grace. Virgil was a classic because, in one of his eclogues, he foreshadowed the birth of Christ. But Virgil also wrote the founding epic of the divinely appointed Roman Empire—and he was preceded by Homer and followed by numerous other poets, from Dante to Milton, whose greatness rested on their prophetic vision of “certain, unchanging truths.”

T.S. Eliot, in a similar set of lectures twenty years earlier, had done his best to uphold this standard for classics, but Kermode recognized that it had lost currency in modern times, in which engraved verities have faded and “truth in art … will have the hesitancy, the instability, of the attitude struck by the New World, provincial and unstable itself, towards the corrupt maturity of the metropolis.” By compelling the classic to adapt with the shifting times, Kermode was inverting its very function. In the past, it was a repository for ultimate answers; now it is determined based on its ability to field the most questions, to enrich the most diverse forms of inquiry.

In essence (though Kermode was suspicious of essences), this is an argument for plurality, for an idea of a classic that does not require any special dispensation in order to understand it. Kermode passionately advocated for the deathless relevance of traditional masterpieces while opposing the tyranny of elect knowledge. It was this combination of conservatism and progressiveness that made him such a unique defender of structuralism, poststructuralism, and the other New Wave schools of literary theory that were cropping up more and more as his career continued.

So a classic in the past was a "repository for ultimate answers; now it is determined based on its ability to field the most questions, to enrich the most diverse forms of inquiry." Whether right or wrong it is at least a proposition.