By Ben Jenkins
Co-founder & CEO
Sympler
ben@sympler.co
On November 21, World Philosophy Day passed us by with very little commotion as we dealt with elections, manhunts, and regime changes. But the discourse on all of these things might have been so much more profound and consequential had we only given more thought to, well, thought, or thinking. Specifically, I’m talking about the bigger, more philosophical kind of thought. Yet that sort of thought typically passes us by, just as World Philosophy Day did.
This is a shame because philosophical thought is valuable for its ability to help us ask big questions. Big questions are typically quite tough, sometimes sensitive, and when done right, challenge orthodoxies. They are also essential to solving big problems, and we have plenty of those right now, whether it’s the meta-crisis1 that combines terrifying ecological, political, and technological threats or the more modest (and less terrifying) creativity crisis2, which has produced huge shifts in the marketing industry.
But asking big questions has become rare, even among qualitative researchers, whose business it is to ask questions. Our age has been defined by the AB test and a political squeamishness, both of which have seeped into qual to thwart its ambitions. In this article, I hope to explain why we stopped asking the big questions and how the age of AI may finally have provided us with the means to invite big questions and big ideas back into the discourse—and back into qualitative research.
Philosophy Has a PR Problem
The rarity of big questions could be related to the dearth of philosophers themselves, who don’t seem to be very en vogue today. How many philosophers can we even name? Deceased philosophers are far more famous, further contributing to the sense that the calling of philosophy is for another age—one where aristocrats had the time and the privilege to sit and idly reflect on existential questions without lesser distractions such as making a living. The discipline of philosophy has a PR problem; today, it has neither big ideas, big names, nor any real goodwill. Philosophy seems to either confuse, bore, or frighten people.
If philosophy frightens us, perhaps that’s one reason why we as a culture seem so afraid of asking big questions. In fact, it seems we have become unaccustomed to asking any kind of question. Have you noticed how the honest question is embarrassingly absent from so many of the domains it used to occupy? Innocent questions about provenance, race, and gender are either avoided or obfuscated in so much code that we remain eternally ignorant or afraid to initiate a conversation. As our interactions became more physically alienated, we lost the lifeline of body language, so essential for the art of conversation.
Tech-mediated communication became more fractious, recasting questions as merely rhetorical or passive-aggressive. Politicians appear less inquisitive about us than ever as they slice and dice us into “data.” Some contemporary market research boasts of never having to ask questions, as “spying” on our online movements does the trick, thank you. Nobody seems interested anymore in our inner worlds or how we’re all connected.
Could philosophy’s transformation from the realm of big ideas to impenetrably stodgy, celebrity-light status be the reason we don’t debate any of its ideas these days? Is this why we’ve lost our appetite for big questions?
Philosophy Is Friction
I have another theory. The job of the philosopher is in stark opposition to a society so entrenched in technological idealism. One living (therefore unfamous) philosopher, Clare Chambers of Cambridge University, describes philosophy as “the pursuit of truth, but in the most difficult way possible.”3 How brilliantly unappealing and unfashionable! In a culture of efficiency, ease, and frictionlessness, this statement borders on the heretic. As a born contrarian, I feed off such obstinacy, but I fear this near-belligerence may drive much of philosophy’s problem: it is willfully and proudly difficult in an era that canonizes ease. In addition to our tech monotheism, we now live in a society that’s developed a pathological refusal to ask questions that produce embarrassment or discord, making the art of the question a relic. So, it’s no surprise we’re living in a philosophy drought, in need of enlightenment.
Progress in the last 20 years has been mostly around efficiency, and so has favored quant. The AB test was born in 2002 and has been the workhorse of Silicon Valley UX designers intent on removing friction from hot new apps. Incremental changes, but in huge quantities and at great speed, more than satisfied the tech bros. In a world that idolized efficiency, qual was a bit of a pariah. “What does ‘love’ mean for Boomers?” and similarly existential questions were swept out along with the methodology.
With our tech overlords preaching the word of “move fast and break things,” their products breeding impatience, outrage, and polarity, and our society incubating fear and incuriosity, you would think we’re not in the best place for a new enlightenment. But I believe the next technological revolution may hold some keys to the antidote. Counterintuitively, given our unstable times, the key is in AI’s tendency toward chaos.
AI is the first technology since the Industrial Revolution that does not force us to make a choice between the rational and the romantic (or the emotional). For 200 years, we put these two in conflict with each other, and the rational mostly won, subjugating the emotional as of lesser value. This makes for an efficient but ugly world. As the philosopher and author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,4 Robert M. Pirsig, says, “What’s wrong with technology is that it’s not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. So, it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that.” But he also tells us, “Don’t run away from technology but find yourself in it. Situate yourself in any situation you find yourself in.”
While Pirsig did his thinking in the 1960s and ’70s, he could have been writing about our time, as AI finally helps us unshackle ourselves from the orthodoxy that has the “reasonable” and rational tech dominating and suppressing the good and the beautiful in the name of efficiency.
The New Philosopher Is a Cyborg
AI does allow you to “situate yourself” in its presence and breaks us free from this orthodoxy by deprioritizing numerical certainty. Whether or not AI does this deliberately is unclear (even to its designers), and this adds to the charm. But the result is a degree of friction, chaos, serendipity, and even doubt that invites us, the humans, back into the process to play and “jam” with the machine as we might with another human. Without the empirical certainty of previous machines, our capacity for critical thinking is restimulated. We are given back our agency, but in the most delightful and animating way, for these machines don’t just recite and regurgitate; they inspire, encourage, and make creative leaps. For generations, operating machines skillfully required us to hone our left-brained linear thinking and ignore our right brains. AI joyfully invites the romantic back into the debate.
What does this mean for qualitative researchers? While quantitative research rushes to leverage technology for greater scale and efficiency, qualitative research demands critical thinking. AI’s taste for hallucination has been well-documented as a threat to “truth” and objectivity. But a well-trained qual practitioner has honed her critical thinking skills to such an extent that she’s quite at home in hunting out the lies and hallucinations with AI. Unlike quant folks, who demand absolute objectivity, qualitative thrives in a place of debate and conflict. So now we can focus on the lesser-known traits of AI—traits that help to expand our human powers of imagination, creativity, and debate—and use these to get to big ideas.
With a creative partner like AI, we are well on our way to rediscovering the near-forgotten art of deep thinking, the kind of thinking that leads to big questions that inform genuinely new creative avenues for clients. After nearly two decades of tweaking what was already working, we have an opportunity to interrogate the deeper meaning of brands, identities, and life decisions. Just when we thought our tech-ruled world had dried up our instincts, a new system has arrived—rather like the philosophers of old—to restimulate the power of the question through the medium of the prompt. The new philosopher is a cyborg. While AI ably assists and cajoles with more animating prompts, it is we who do the big thinking. AI privileges us with the space, time, and resources for “idle thinking,” making aristocrats of us all—should we choose to benefit from it.
Three Ways to Think Bigger with AI
Here are three ways I think AI may pull us out of the age of efficiency into a new age of big questions and a new enlightenment.
- AI allows us to start with small questions and then coaches us to develop bigger questions.
One solution to big questions is starting with small questions. As we observed already, some of us even struggle with small questions, due to fear of judgment, asking the wrong questions, or offending people. This can be addressed with baby steps through harnessing technology. Today’s AI can already stand in as your nonjudgmental, impossible-to-offend sparring partner. She may challenge you, ask counter-questions, and help you sharpen your own questions in a safe space. This is one of the ways we can invite tech to coach, encourage, and reanimate our instinctive skills. Our child selves had no problem with asking questions, so we know the capacity to do so is still in there somewhere.
In qualitative research, we’ve been encouraged by how discussion guides can be generated through collaboration with our AI agents. However, we don’t start out by outsourcing the whole task, but by entering a student-coach relationship. By beginning the process with the aim of improving our scriptwriting skills, we stretch the scope. This puts us into a more creative state of possibility where our instincts for discovery kick in. AI prompts and pushes us into new ways of expressing ourselves and removes us from the curse of our own “expertise.” Writing becomes more of a coaching experience without any of the shame of not being perfect from the start.
When we are entirely at ease with the smaller questions, as a toddler is with her barrage of “whys,” we slip more effortlessly into the big questions—such as what makes us who we are. What does “nation” even mean? What needs to change to make society less fractious? If you’ve ever watched a child racing down a “why” path, you’ll have noticed that it invariably slips into the existential.
- AI democratizes philosophy through play.
Once we’ve opened ourselves up to the idea of AI as a coach, then play, practice, and trial become the norm. These more dynamic interactions with big questions act to drag philosophy out of stuffy classrooms and pompous podiums and give it to the people. Those one-way forums stifled our ability to truly engage with bigger ideas because they put up barriers. Incidentally, some of the greatest philosophical movements loathed this piety. Socrates refused to write down ideas, asserting that the conversation was the sole realm of his discipline. The Cynics eschewed traditional ways of living—they were the original trolls—and championed an anarchic, dog-like playfulness.
Like these historic, more irreverent movements, AI can help us become more irreverent again and, thereby, redevelop more critically alive brains. AI brings barriers back down by tapping into our instincts. While it may be hard to change the educational system, we can reacquaint the child in us with the art of questions by turning our process into a game. Through play, we remove the fear of questions and add joy, thereby normalizing bigger questions, which were once an instinctive part of our everyday lives.
We can make this kind of playful question-asking approach instinctive again in our everyday life—including our lives as qualitative researchers.
Here’s an example of how we playfully leaned into the possibility of using AI in qualitative research. We asked AI to take on different personas to analyze data from those personas’ points of view. When AI is interrogating the qualitative conversations en masse, it has free rein to show up as a comedian, therapist, or, indeed, a philosopher. We prompted our AI to review a collection of findings in the stye of a Jungian psychoanalyst—asking it to seek out the lies people were telling themselves and why they felt the need to do so. The resulting account of a smart voter fearing their loss of agency and relevance in the democratic process triggered an insight that would have taken much longer to unearth from human analysis, and it was well substantiated with quotes, as my suspicious, qual-trained brain demanded an oversupply of proof. When charged with adopting new personas, AI can wildly tilt your perspective and enable you to inhabit different personalities and roles.
- AI allows us to design permissive, dynamic environments.
It’s not enough to make tools and teach people to use them. People also need to have a space to practice their newfound talents. Again, technology can help by providing a sandbox.
However, we mustn’t consider big thinking to be just one part of a process. We need to inject the seeds of big questions into every part of the qualitative research process. Big questions cannot be discussed in small-minded systems, so every touchpoint must be designed to encourage an opening of the mind.
Take briefs, for instance. Big thinkers don’t accept assumptions. They argue with even the opening premises. So, a more dynamic conception of a brief forces questions into places formerly seen as nonnegotiable. If you animate the typically rigid briefing process, you’re more likely to spark loftier questions in the discussion guide. If you’re AI-coached, your contrarian self explodes the scope of the brief, and then the chances that you’ll rip open the debate with participants are dramatically improved. Baking dynamic questions into the fabric of the system—like the precocious child asking “why” over and over again—makes questions a cultural imperative and renders all assumptions odd-shaped and, therefore, up for debate.
When something looks unusual, we’re instinctively triggered to ask more questions, rather than being told to cross items off a checklist. An environment that tilts, slows, rotates, and upends things is one that keeps things in a state of motion. Such an environment removes certainty so that the researcher remains in an intellectually dynamic state (on their toes rather than on their bums). It’s hard to get stuck in small thinking when your environment is constantly pushing you to move around your data and ideas.
CONCLUSION
The good news is that this is all much easier than you think. Half the battle is penetrating this lofty discipline. But by reanimating the qualitative researcher’s natural joy in asking questions, AI will make a Plato of you yet!
Be the first to comment