Answers for Hard-To-Answer Questions

When faced with really tough questions, and especially questions of a critical nature, honesty is always the best policy.

"I don't know." is a perfectly acceptable answer.  This particular response is, of course, of great importance when you really do not know much about the topic within the question.  I consider ambiguity to be a sound response to queries for information, but on those rare occasions when people seek my opinion, I typically reserve the right to ask questions of my own.

"Why do you want to know?"  This will allow me, provided my interrogator is being honest them self, to structure my response in an appropriate manner.  If the opinion needs to have any bearing in fact whatsoever, then I need to impart actual knowledge into my response - which may lead me right back to my original choice of words.  If the opinion is of no great import, and the conversation is light and the context is loose, then I might not worry too much about fact and allow myself to divulge in a degree of bullshit.  If my questioner is clearly seeking to offend me, or they themselves are worthy of offense, then I will consider which opinion to be most likely to yield the greatest shock - or opposition to their own position on the topic.

But opinion questions I find have little merit, except in those situations where the discussion is more about building rapport with another human being, and I really like to talk about bigger ideas, bolder questions, and more challenging data than small-talk typically leaves room for.  Such times do not lend themselves easily to flights of fantasy, and the questions (and the answers, more importantly) may be very challenging.  In short, I do not really expect to come up with any world-changing discoveries on my own, or even in a single conversation.  Complex problems usually require quite a lot of thought.  It is not a simple matter of deciding which pieces to move on the chessboard, because life is not a game, and questions and answers have real implications for real people in a real world.

Problems will not sort themselves out if left alone.  Instead, they will probably compound into complex problems.  We must consider and apply answers, and we must be prepared to reverse our course of action and try a new approach if we discover one method is causing more harm than the trouble it was meant to sort out.  I hope I can find the right kind of people to help find the right kind of answers.

JWilFrick2014