When Deepinder Goyal once asked publicly, “Could gravity be the reason we age?” he wasn’t submitting a hypothesis so much as performing a rarer act: visible curiosity. A question can be wrong in two ways: wrong because it’s factually mistaken and wrong because it violates what polite, serious people are supposed to ask. The second kind is the one that quietly moves the world. The internet reacted the way it often does: some people treated it like a breakthrough, others treated it like a joke, and clinicians cautioned that ageing is far more complex than any single factor and warned against quick-fix interpretations. But the most interesting part wasn’t whether the hypothesis would hold. It was what the question revealed about how better thinking actually begins.
We’re trained to respect correct answers, but we’re not trained to respect the role of incorrect questions in generating them. In schools and workplaces, a wrong question can feel like a confession of ignorance. It risks embarrassment, wasted time, and reputational damage. That’s why people often avoid asking the simple thing they truly want to ask and instead perform competence through statements. The result is a culture that optimises for sounding right rather than discovering what’s true. Yet many breakthroughs, be they scientific, creative, or personal, start not with expertise flexing but with someone poking an assumption so basic that everyone else has stopped seeing it.
The first reason wrong questions help is that they expose the hidden scaffolding of a conversation. When someone asks, “Could gravity be the reason we age?” The scientist in you immediately wants to correct the premise. Good. Correction is part of the process. But before correction comes something more valuable: a forced inventory of what we actually know. What mechanisms do we accept as drivers of ageing? In other words, the wrongness creates friction—and friction produces illumination. A safe, conventional question rarely generates that kind of conceptual heat. The second reason is social: questions change the emotional physics of interaction. In one set of studies on live conversations, researchers found that people who asked more questions were better liked by their conversation partners and that follow-up questions were especially predictive of liking. In a speed-dating dataset analysed in the same paper, 46.81% of participants said yes to a second date overall, and the authors report that people who asked a higher rate of follow-up questions were more likely to elicit agreement for second dates. Even more telling: people didn’t anticipate the benefit. In an experiment where participants were assigned to ask many versus few questions, the “high question-askers” were liked more, yet they didn’t predict they would be liked more. We systematically undervalue questions—even though questions are one of the fastest routes to connection, information, and trust.
Now bring that back to the wrong questions in public. A wrong question is often a bid for a different conversation. It invites others to clarify, argue, refine, and test. Goyal’s gravity-aging question pulled a technical topic (aging) into mainstream debate and triggered expert responses about what evidence is required and what oversimplification looks like. That’s nothing. In a world where most people only encounter science as finished conclusions, a wrong question can be a doorway into the methods and limits of scientific thinking (“How would we even test this?”). The public may not remember the details, but they absorb something crucial: that knowledge is constructed, contested, and revised.
Wrong questions also help because they are often the only ones that cross silos. Specialists speak fluent jargon. Non-specialists speak intuitively. When those worlds meet, the first exchange is almost always clumsy. But clumsiness is not a flaw; it’s a signal that a boundary is being crossed. The real danger isn’t naïve questions—it’s the absence of them, because absence means the field becomes a gated neighbourhood where only insiders can speak. And gated knowledge tends to stagnate into self-reinforcing assumptions. There’s also a practical reason wrong questions are productive: they push you toward active learning rather than passive consumption. That’s a useful metaphor for adulthood: the process that makes you smarter often feels awkward, slow, and even annoying. But it forces your brain to build structure instead of borrowing it.
So why do we punish wrong questions? Because they threaten status. In most rooms, the safest currency is certainty. Questions can look like a weakness. Yet the evidence suggests that asking questions can increase warmth and responsiveness in how others perceive you, even when you don’t expect it. The irony is painful: we avoid questions to preserve competence, but good questions often signal competence of a deeper kind—the competence of someone who cares about understanding rather than merely performing.
None of this means we should celebrate every wrong question uncritically. Especially in health, oversimplified claims can mislead, and clinicians are right to caution against viral hacks and to insist on rigorous evidence. Better thinking requires a second skill alongside questioning: disciplined checking. The ideal posture is not gullibility; it’s experimental humility. Ask the strange question, then demand strong methods. Let curiosity start the engine, and let rigour steer. The point of Goyal’s gravity-ageing question is not that gravity secretly explains wrinkles. The point is that asking an odd question in public—one that sounds slightly “wrong”—can reveal what our culture rewards: quick takedowns, tribal certainty, and the performance of intelligence. But progress tends to come from the opposite: the willingness to sound unfinished. The most transformative questions rarely arrive wearing credentials. They arrive wearing awkwardness.
A society that wants better answers has to tolerate the discomfort of messy questions. Because the future doesn’t begin with consensus. It begins when someone, in front of everyone, risks asking the thing that doesn’t fit—and in doing so, makes the invisible assumptions of the present suddenly visible.
Sources:
- Goyal, D. (2025, November 15). I’m not sharing this as the CEO of Eternal, but as a fellow human, curious enough to follow a stranger. https://www.linkedin.com
- R, J. T. (2025, December 13). Don’t blame gravity: Doctors bust viral age-reversal hack, warn against quick fixes. The Times of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com
- Shakurnia A, Aslami M, Bijanzadeh M. The effect of question generation activity on students' learning and perception. J Adv Med Educ Prof. 2018 Apr;6(2):70-77. PMID: 29607334; PMCID: PMC5856907.
- Selcuk Acar, Kelly Berthiaume, Rebecca Johnson, What kind of questions do creative people ask?, Journal of Creativity, Volume 33, Issue 3,2023,100062, ISSN 2713-3745,https://doi.org
- Huang, K., Yeomans, M., Brooks, A. W., Minson, J., Gino, F., & Harvard University. (2017). It doesn’t hurt to ask: Question-asking increases liking [Research article]. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113–452, 430–452. https://www.hbs.edu