Substack by Stefaan Verhulst: “We live in a paradoxical era. On the one hand, data is growing exponentially, computational modeling and artificial intelligence are advancing at breathtaking speed, and knowledge is deeper and more specialized than ever before. Yet on the other hand, rates of transformative discovery appear to be slowing rather than accelerating across important domains, and crises of replication and generalizability seem to be intensifying. Across the world, research outputs remain stubbornly misaligned with the problems societies—and people—describe as most important to them. In short, we are living through an era of both epistemic abundance and epistemic crisis.
Several explanations are offered for this apparent gap. Misinformation is said to be eroding the foundations of shared knowledge. Cultural polarization is often cited as a barrier to the collaborative inquiry and pursuit of objectivity on which science depends. Outdated incentive structures—publish or perish, funding biases, information overload—are also mentioned. Each of these no doubt plays a role. But an equally important source of the problem lies further upstream, at a stage of knowledge production that receives surprisingly little systematic attention: the questions we ask.
Across sectors and fields, many of society’s most significant shortcomings today stem not from insufficient data or inadequate analytical tools but rather from the framing of inquiry itself. Scientific agendas are shaped by questions that are too narrow and overly method-driven. Policy is constrained by electoral cycles and available metrics. Even the private sector, for all its celebrated dynamism, asks questions bounded by existing business models and short-term returns.
The consequences of such misdirected inquiry are not abstract. It is now well established that women’s health remained systematically underfunded and understudied for decades–not because the tools to investigate it were lacking, but because the questions that shaped biomedical research agendas were framed around male bodies and male norms. Likewise, pandemic preparedness in the pre-COVID era was repeatedly optimized for speed of vaccine development while neglecting questions about distribution, trust, information, and misinformation. In both cases, the answers developed by experts were technically competent. The questions they asked were wrong, or at least incomplete.
All these shortcomings acquire extraordinary new urgency in the age of artificial intelligence. As AI systems become increasingly powerful “answering machines,” capable of generating immediate, plausible-sounding responses to almost any query, the bottleneck in knowledge creation is shifting: from generating answers to formulating the questions worth answering in the first place. The cheaper answers become, the more valuable questions are.
For all the sophistication of our analytical tools, for all the power of our new technologies, and for all our acute and pressing social needs, we still have no science of questions: no systematic infrastructure for studying how questions emerge, how they can be improved, or how they shape the knowledge that societies produce. This essay argues that we need such a science of questions. It traces the intellectual roots of a question-centered approach to knowledge (Section I), diagnoses the institutional failures that perpetuate what we call a “question deficit” (II), examines the politics of who gets to frame inquiry (III), and outlines the key elements of a science of questions (IV)—one made both possible and urgent by the rise of AI…(More)”.
