I was going through the new-student induction at UTIAS and one researcher asked if we had any questions. Everyone else was silent, and I got the feeling the guy was feeling bad about it so I asked a question about his research.
I fumbled the question, he made me look like an idiot.
One anecdote isn’t everything, but “just force a question” is not a foolproof strategy.
I have a similar story. It was first day in a machine learning class in a computer science majors (not real ml, baby ml class) and the professor made a point to tell us to ask questions and how there are no stupid questions Bla bla. Just about fifteen minutes later, he was deriving an expression or something but my calculus was rusty so I asked him to elaborate how he went from one step to the next. I vividly remember him saying that is the most stupid question he had ever heard. I don’t think any student asked him any subject matter question all semester (only administrative questions like what’s on the test, project grading, and so on).
I fumbled the question, he made me look like an idiot.
One anecdote isn’t everything, but “just force a question” is not a foolproof strategy.