A habit I am trying to cultivate is that when people are impressed with something I've done and the felt sense of why I can do it and they can't is that this stuff just isn't hard and I don't understand why people struggle at it, I try to identify a specific ability involved.

Often I start with something that feels like the answer is "I'm just really clever" and end up with something where it feels like people could totally train this ability if they wanted.

The shadow questions thread is an example of this: https://twitter.com/GeniesLoki/status/1309411888753762304

People were like "wtf how did you come up with this many questions?" and I tongue-in-cheek answered "I'm very clever".

This is a kind of inverted version of https://twitter.com/GeniesLoki/status/1311074273872818176

I actually am very clever, sorry. I took CON as a dump stat.

But seriously the initial answer to this is that I just... do? I reach into the part of me where questions come from and then I ask the question.

But asking questions seems like a skill one can totally cultivate. I don't even know if it's actually cleverness or whether it's pure cultivated talent for me: It mostly comes from years of being interested in things and trying to understand them.

The easiest way to generate questions is to take a thing and home in the bits of it that don't make sense, then you try to articulate the felt sense of the confusion, and what you would need to know in order to to resolve that confusion.

There's also ur-questions like:

"How do these pieces fit together?"
"What are recurring patterns here?"
"Which parts of this system are load bearing?"
"What would happen if you changed this bit?"

Infinite variations on these.

I don't really know why I'm better at asking questions than most other people (that is, itself, an interesting question). Maybe it's native curiosity? It's probably at least partly trauma grounded. Confusing things feel unsafe and figuring out the right questions helps with that.

Another way to cultivate question asking skills is to help your friends debug their emotions by asking them clarifying questions. I've done that a lot (which is totally not trauma grounded at all I just want everybody to be happy and love me for it perfectly normal instinct).

Totally-just-jokes-because-I'm-very-healthy-and-untraumatised aside, question asking is a really useful skill and it's kinda weird that nobody teaches you to do it.

Here's an exercise I like: Pick a random object in your environment and write a couple pages of observation about it.

There's a follow up you can do: What more is there to learn about this object? e.g. it's history, what it is it made of, etc. Can you come up with 100 questions?

I'm not quite sure how to end this thread. Is there anything else you'd like to know?