[zogrodea]

It's sometimes thought that specific questions yield the most informative results rather than general ones. R. G. Collingwood talks about this again and again in his Autobiography (which is less about the man himself and more about his thinking - quite readable).

For example, when you are debugging code, you usually have an idea of where the error might be. So the process looks like: print at line 43, is everything as expected? yes, so print at line 48 and try inspecting values at the suspected code path in search of errors.

The same detective-like work (which he calls question and answer) is used by historians and archaeologists to reconstruct historical narratives. If you don't have specific questions in your head and a way to falsify them while trying to answer a question, you likely aren't going to learn as much.