alt Hacker NewsSocratic questions are not asked blindly. They are meant to help the student to realize the incompleteness or falsety of what they think they know. That us, to realise they do not actually know something and thus put them into a position of not knowing, which is the only way to gain understanding.
One man said, that enlightement (as in Zen) cannot be faked. Whoever had it, will be able to tell if someone else had it or not. There is no way to merely sound like it. Socratic method is like enlightement.
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Socratic questioning needs a lot of thinking to arrive at the realization (and be able to accept it) that one has incomplete knowledge.
I think about this, whenever I have questions which are related to morality and how people act.
The problem is that everyone else can't tell, and that there's a lot of incentive to fake it. See Saints and Psychopaths by Hamilton.
I think this same phenomenon — faking competence, or good intentions — extends beyond spirituality as well.
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I think there could be some ways to fake this, using RAG or some other kind of agentic process, but in terms of the true meaning of the phrase, this is one of the things that is very far from being replaced by AI- an interaction between two people where a question that seems simple on the face of it is actually exactly what the learner needed to hear at the exact right time.
Very few teachers get to do this or are good enough, but it's just as much a question of relationships than anything else- how do you pose the exact right problem so that the learner can discover something for themselves.