system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What makes a good question?

There's some frustration among some panelists here about poorly-formed questions.  When I was in grad school, asking a good question was one of the hardest things to learn how to do.  It's not easy to ask a good question, and it's not easy to *recognize* what can be wrong with a question that seems to be perfectly reasonable.  This causes no end of problems, with question-askers getting upset that no one's telling them what they want to know, and question-answerers getting upset at the formulation of the question.

Asking a good research question or science question is a skill in itself, and it's most of what scientists do.

It occurred to me that it might help to ask scientists, i.e. *people who have been trained in the art of question asking*, what they think makes a good question - both for research and for askscience.
gpt
The scientific method is good at answering questions that boil down to "What is the relationship between *X* and *Y?"*

The precise *way* in which the question reduces to that form may not be immediately obvious. For example, take the question "Why is the sky blue?" Or, stating the implicit, "Why is the sky blue and not another colour?"

The most obvious comment on such a question is, well, it *isn't.* Not always. At night the sky is black, and on overcast days it's some or another shade of grey. And at sunrise and sunset, the sky takes on a wide variety of yellow, orange, red and violet hues as well.

Which means the colour of the sky appears to have *something to do with the sun.* Which allows us to restate the question as, "What is the *relationship* between sunlight and the colour of the sky?"

And next thing you know, you've got Rayleigh scattering. You've just done science.

Of course, one might not have gone that way. One might instead have wondered what the relationship is between the colour of the sky and the weather. Or between the colour of the sky and the time of day. Or between the colour of the sky and the temperature out of doors. In all of those cases, the answer is that there's only an *indirect* relationship … but even *that* is doing science. Discovering that there is no relationship where you thought one was, or that the relationship you imagined turns out to be far more complex and interesting than you suspected, is what science is *really really good for.*

Bad questions are those that don't move you toward a greater understanding of the relationship between two things. Speculative questions, hypothetical questions, what-would-happen-if questions, is-it-possible-that questions, what's-the-deal-with questions, what-do-you-think-about questions, what's-the-purpose-of questions, and worst of them all help-me-win-an-argument questions … these are all *lousy.* Because while they might tickle our curiosity, they don't *get us anywhere.* They don't lead us to a better understanding of how the world works.

Things exist. Things happen. Sussing out the relationships between things that exist and things that happen is what that scientific method is good for. If your intention is to do science — and while it's not mandatory that it must be, that *is* what it says up there at the top of each page in this forum — then toward those relationships is where your attention must be cast. Otherwise it's all just nattery and chit-chat.