Maezawa here—I’ll answer as well.
First of all, I don’t think there were any particular restrictions on what could be asked. (Of course, questions that are obviously unreasonable by ordinary social standards would be inappropriate.) So it’s not as though you can only ask questions that serve some clear purpose.
Even if the person answering responds, “What’s the point of asking that?”, I’m asking out of genuine curiosity.
I’m not sure where the line is between speaking condescendingly and not, but depending on how you look at it, the statement:
“Wouldn’t simply saying ‘I can’t answer that’ be enough?”
could itself come across as condescending. However, I don’t think it was meant that way, and at least I didn’t take it that way. (If the point is, “I’m talking down to you, so you should be able to tell,” then it would have to be written in a much more condescending way for that to come across.)
Besides, even if someone answered exactly as suggested—“I can’t answer that”—it could ultimately turn into: “You know the answer but refuse to give it? How condescending can you be?”
In that sense, answering something the other person doesn’t know, or making suggestions like “Wouldn’t it be better to do this?”, can also potentially come across as condescending, depending on how it’s perceived.
Perhaps people may also feel there’s a hierarchy simply because:
knowing something > not knowing something.
That said, “Then you just shouldn’t answer” is a fair point.
But I answered because I wanted to. So even if my answer happened to be, “What’s the point of asking that?”, it came from the feeling that answering that particular part wouldn’t actually help resolve what the questioner was struggling with.
At the same time, I’m also thinking:
“Maybe there’s something I haven’t noticed?”
“Perhaps they misunderstood that part, or maybe they’ll ask again to clarify what they meant.”
So my stance remains the same: I answer the questions I want to answer, and I don’t answer the ones I don’t.
