The easiest, most common form of question-asking is to ask yes/no questions: “Is intelligence inherited?”. But meaningful human-scale topics are almost never so black and white, and often the most important details are in the edge cases. When trying to Get curious, it’s almost always more interesting and instructive to ask “to what extent is X true?” or “when is X true?” than it is to ask “is X true?”.
Another angle on this is that it’s better to ask “how likely is X?” or “what would have to be true for X to be true?” than to ask “is X true?”. Here’s Paul Graham, in “How to Think for Yourself”:
Fastidiousness about truth means more than just not believing things that are false. It means being careful about degree of belief. For most people, degree of belief rushes unexamined toward the extremes: the unlikely becomes impossible, and the probable becomes certain. 5 To the independent-minded, this seems unpardonably sloppy. They’re willing to have anything in their heads, from highly speculative hypotheses to (apparent) tautologies, but on subjects they care about, everything has to be labelled with a carefully considered degree of belief.