There may well be no such thing as a stupid questions, but there are still some times when you’d prefer to not make yourself look silly by asking the wrong questions in a very public forum. I’ve run across this problem numerous times at colloquia, seminars and conferences, and still don’t quite know how to deal with it.  After all, authentically asking questions helps satiate curiosity (or perhaps even builds it further), gets you known amongst your peers and is a great way to stimulate and direct further discussion. But no one wants to be that annoying person who fires off 50 completely unrelated questions with complete disregard to everyone who’s sitting there bored. Personally, I also don’t want to look like a fool in a large group - I’m completely okay with looking like one in a smaller group, but when there’s some illustrious or argumentative people around, I always like thinking twice before something comes out of my mouth.

I suppose in an ideal case, one would start out with a large ratio of dumb to reasonable questions and as time goes on and the amount of knowledge one has increases, this ratio would go down further and further. Unfortunately, very rarely do people ask enough questions fast enough to get this ratio down quickly, adding to it that when you’re new to the game, you want to test the waters lightly before you dive in.

My strategy has become to try to talk to the person privately or in a small group afterwards. This way, I can spark discussion, and like I said I’m willing to make myself look like a fool one-on-one. This has the added benefit that I’ll have the ability to think about the question(s) for a while longer before they leave my mouth. I know that this isn’t the final answer, but it’s (mostly) kept me from looking like a fool in colloquia and conferences up till now.

Peace,

Mubdi