> you're free to discover them if you simply ask the right people the right questions. It really does come down to this. The problem is, who are the right people? What exactly are the right questions. This clearly requires iteration. > I'll let you in on a little secret - you not knowing how things work while others do is like sitting down to play chess with someone, only to find out that after their side of the board was stalked with the typical knights, rooks, pawns, kings, etc, but yours only has checkers. You've just described black box model building. Also, you've just exposed a critical problem with it. The problem is no intuition, just correlation of the system. Your moves will work, but don't necessarily make any sense. When the system changes, you won't be able to compensate quickly enough. > I should just offer you the answers to the questions you've asked instead of being cryptic, refusing to be direct and just confusing you further, but questions like this take us nowhere. Without well honed questions, he won't find well understood answers. It's good that he's taking a stab at conversing a bit though, but what you say here is important. Asking paradigm shifting questions takes a lot of work and only comes from rejecting many answers - i.e. realizing they don't fit. > So, it's for these reasons that I'm (implicitly, really) warned against just giving you the right answers at the wrong times. What you say is very good. He won't understand the answers if you gave them here. The same words to construct the question will have two paradigms of meaning and the answers won't really jive with what his questions are. It does appear he's looking to understand though and hopefully stabs around it to gain more insight. I responded to one of your comments above. Great discussion.