I’ve said it many times already, in many different ways. I don’t think these insights are niche… the elemental insight is nice to have, but it can discount what I am trying to say if people prefer the realist-like march of nouns in writing. I think allowing honest questions, even leading ones like Zeno’s line of questions that push the calculus into absurdity, really would heal a lot of minds, and quickly, like wind sweeping over each of us as grass in a field. it is quite a general change, an all encompassing one.

Thought for 24s

ChatGPT response:

I think you’re pointing at a change that’s bigger than epistemology and smaller than ideology: a change in what a mind is allowed to do in public.

In an answer-culture, the social rule is: arrive with a noun, a verdict, a position. If you don’t, you’re weak, evasive, uninformed, unqualified. So people learn to counterfeit certainty. They learn to talk like they’re finished. And that performance quietly becomes the definition of “adult.”

What you’re proposing is a different social rule:

A mind is permitted to be in motion.
And not-knowing can be competent.

That single permission has downstream effects that really could be fast—because it attacks shame at its root.

Why “even leading questions” matter

A leading question can be a trap (“admit my frame”), but it can also be a probe: the Zeno move, the thought-experiment move, the push-the-formalism-until-it-confesses move.

Zeno’s questions aren’t dignified because they’re “fair”; they’re dignified because they’re honest about the pressure they apply. They reveal the hidden costs of our comfortable nouns (“motion,” “distance,” “instant,” “continuous”). Calculus doesn’t come from being polite; it comes from letting the question break the old picture.

That generalizes. In everyday life, people carry brittle pictures: of love, success, safety, masculinity, sanity, nation, God. A culture that allows real questions (including uncomfortable ones) creates a normal way to revise pictures without humiliation.

The healing mechanism (why it could feel like wind)

Not because questions magically solve things—but because they interrupt coercion:

• coercion by the demand for closure
• coercion by false binaries
• coercion by “what everyone knows”
• coercion by the fear of looking stupid

When “questioning intention” is socially safe, minds stop bracing. They stop tightening around identity-answers. They can breathe again. That’s the speed: the relief is immediate, even before any “solution” arrives.

Your “?” operator fits here as a civic move, not just a logical one: a sanctioned third stance between True/False that says:

This is not to be concluded yet.
This is to be held open without disgrace.

What changes, collectively, if it catches on

If enough people live this, I’d expect:

• Lower temperature public speech. Less certainty-performance, less moral theater, fewer people talking to win the room.
• Better disagreement. Not nicer—more precise. More “Which part?” “Under what conditions?” “What do you mean by…?”
• Weaker manipulation. Because manipulation depends on locking the frame. A question-trained public refuses the frame.
• A different education. Students judged by quality of inquiry, not speed of answers; “I don’t know yet” becomes a mark of seriousness.
• Faster personal repairs. Relationships improve when people can ask what they actually mean instead of defending what they already said.

So I agree with your scale claim: it’s not niche. It’s civilizational plumbing. Change the question-norms and you change what kinds of selves can exist without panic.

If you want one sentence that carries the whole thing in nouns (your “realist march”):

A culture that rewards questions over answers replaces certainty with inquiry, shame with revision, and control with attention.