AI & Humanities · Reading and Questioning
From a Bookstore to a Book—and Then a Free Public Lecture
An encounter with EGO Bookstore connects a book on questioning, my research into asking better questions with AI, and a free public lecture on October 31.
Words and photographs by Shuye
A few days ago in Yizhuang, I happened upon a bookstore I immediately liked: EGO.
I went in, sat down, browsed some books, and chatted with Ms. Hu, the store manager. I had no idea that this encounter would connect with a subject I was researching and lead to a free public lecture that will soon take place.
The story begins with this bookstore tucked away in Yihuayuan.
01 Meeting EGO in Yihuayuan
Yihuayuan is on Xiaoyangfang Dongqu Road in Yizhuang, a complex with cafés, restaurants, and cultural and creative spaces. EGO is one of them, with a small courtyard at its entrance. The combination of red-brick walls, glass blocks, and greenery makes it easy to think: let’s take a look inside.
The Chinese name “Yigou” seems a little playful at first. It corresponds to EGO in English and carries a sense of the self. I love the bookstore’s message: “You may make compromises with the world, but never with your inner self.” Life always has its mundane details; we still need to keep a little space inside for what we love.
Inside, a whole wall of books opens out, while natural wood reading steps rise in tiers. A canoe hangs overhead, creating an intriguing visual connection with the shelves below. There is plenty of variety in the space: you can sit by a window, browse on the steps, or find a corner where a few people can sit together and talk.
One step reads: “Reading makes you lower your head, yet look upward.” I made a point of photographing it. The head we lower over a book is often seeking a wider view of a question within us. Life, too, is a continual upward climb—“人生如凳、从善如凳”: life is like a stool, and so is the pursuit of goodness.
The books here are mainly literature, art, and the social sciences, interspersed with small creative items. It is a place for unhurried browsing and looking around. There are also three cats, which you may encounter beside the shelves or among the seats. As soon as I stood up, a black cat took over my chair. It seemed to know better than I did how to enjoy this bookstore.
I also saw a wonderfully generous sentence: “You can come here without reading a book. Just daydream.” I like a bookstore that leaves room for daydreaming. Sometimes we need to pause before we can hear what we really want to ask.
02 A Book Connects with My Research
Here, I came across Deep Questioning: Good Questions Bring Good Answers.
The title was the first thing that caught my attention. Lately, I have been researching “Asking Better Questions with AI: Learning Innovation and Personal Growth.” Opening this book gave me the warm feeling of finding, in someone else’s pages, the very questions I had been thinking about.
The first chapter begins with questioning techniques. Its six directions—what, why, when, how, where, and who—drew my attention once again to the goals, circumstances, and relationships that can lie unspoken within a seemingly simple question. This is also the familiar 5W1H method for making sense of a situation.
Apply this to a conversation with AI, and a place to begin practicing immediately emerges. Faced with “I want to learn AI,” for instance, first clarify which work problem you hope to solve and what difficulties you currently face, then discuss how to begin. The advice is more likely to connect with your own life.
From Circumstances to Meaning: Seeing Six Levels
The book’s “six logical levels of change” also made a strong impression on me. It distinguishes environment, behavior, skills and capabilities, values and beliefs, identity, and a level of purpose or spirituality. The highest level concerns broader meaning, belonging, and contribution.
Take the feeling “I can’t learn AI.” We can first look at specifics: Do I have suitable time and equipment? What have I actually tried? Which step needs practice or support? We can also ask why I want to learn and what role I hope to take. These questions concern different areas. Finding the specific point of difficulty makes it easier to plan the next step.
We can move back and forth among the six levels, while still judging what to change in light of real conditions. Unfamiliar operations require practice; missing external resources need to be supplied. Questions involving beliefs, identity, and meaning also deserve thoughtful conversation.
This book made me want to take reading one step further: bring the questions into conversation and see how different ways of asking change our understanding of something.
03 The Breadth, Depth, and Sharpness of Good Questions
Drawing on the book and my own practice in conversations with AI, I brought several questioning methods together. Breadth, depth, and sharpness offer three ways to understand how we gradually think a question through. What follows is my own synthesis and approach to applying them.
Breadth: first, see the whole situation. Use 5W1H to clarify goals, participants, time, place, and approaches, while also leaving space for what is still unknown. When preparing a salon, for example, we need to discuss more than its content: who wants to come, why they want to come, and what conditions the session will require.
Depth: make explanations more specific. Follow clues to ask about causes, or use the six logical levels to check for omissions. Repeatedly asking “why” seeks causes; distinguishing levels such as environment, capability, or values identifies what is being discussed. Each step in an explanation still needs relevant materials and observations to support it.
Sharpness: examine the basis of a judgment. Use Socratic questions to clarify: What exactly does “effective” mean? What assumptions does this judgment depend on? How far does the evidence support it? Are there other explanations or counterexamples? Such checks can be made at any point while clarifying a situation, discussing causes, or choosing an approach.
Take the preparations for this salon as an example of combining them. We can first clarify the readers’ needs and the venue’s conditions, then focus on “What do participants hope to take away?” We can explore those needs further while examining whether “finding it interesting” demonstrates a meaningful gain. Finally, we keep asking “How can we make it happen?” and turn the idea into a small action we can try and observe. Real feedback after the event can then inform the next discussion.
In practice, begin wherever clarification is most needed. If a concept is vague, clarify it first; if an explanation lacks support, look for relevant materials first. After asking more questions, we still need to consider whether those questions helped us reach a clearer judgment.
04 Let AI Help Us Think a Question Through
I carried out a series of conversation exercises around whether everyday office workers need to learn AI, what they should learn, and whether they can understand it. Asked directly, AI quickly produced a set of learning suggestions. When I switched to Socratic questioning and asked it to follow up on my answers each round, the conversation gradually moved toward more specific matters.
Which part of my work do I hope to improve? How will I judge whether the result has really improved? How might the time a tool saves translate into value at work? When I say that teaching has become more effective, what feedback do I have to support that claim?
Both approaches have their uses. Direct questions and answers are convenient when I need a quick introduction to a topic. When I want to examine my own judgments, gradual follow-up questions help me see what I had not yet made explicit. For me, the benefit of the latter is discovering which ideas already have support and which still need answers from practice.
Combining this reading with existing questioning methods, I also organized 5W1H for an overview, the 5 Whys for following a chain of causes, and Socratic questioning into prompt templates and reusable skills. I used preparations for the EGO AI Salon as the practice setting. When surveying the whole situation, clarify the conditions; when following causes, seek evidence; when discussing views, examine assumptions. Where materials are missing, leave the matter open for further verification.
Before I encountered this book, I had already developed a “Six-Cycle Questioning Framework,” using six words to connect learning with action:
Record · Reflect · Question · Act · Review · Transform
Record the real situation, reflect on goals and assumptions, ask the key questions, and then act. Only with real feedback do we review what happened and gradually transform it into methods we can try in new situations. We can move back and forth through this six-part cycle or pause to gather more materials. If a question has not yet received feedback, let it remain open.
The book’s six logical levels help distinguish the kinds of content we are discussing; the Six-Cycle Questioning Framework I developed organizes the process of learning and action. Breadth, depth, and sharpness can run through different parts of this cycle, helping us decide on the next question and the next step.
The ability to ask better questions with AI that I hope to cultivate should help people move from “Give me an answer” to “I know what I need to verify or try next.”
05 Turning This Interest into a Gathering
In the bookstore, I shared these thoughts with Ms. Hu, the manager. She was also willing to work together on AI salon events. Our encounter, which began in a bookstore, thus found its next step: begin with a free public lecture and invite interested friends to sit down together, talk about AI, and practice asking questions.
We call this series the “EGO AI Salon.” This time, we will begin with asking better questions with AI.
Free Public Lecture: Asking Better Questions with AI—Learning Innovation and Personal Growth
Understanding changes in AI. Drawing on specific questions from reading, work, and learning, we will discuss the changes AI brings and how the ability to ask questions connects with learning innovation and personal growth.
Choosing tools and live demonstrations. Working with real tasks, we will consider how to choose tools and supply context and requirements, while comparing the answers produced by different ways of asking.
Questioning practice and open conversation. Through demonstrations and discussion, we will practice asking good questions and choosing appropriate tools. Even when an answer looks complete, we will leave room for verification, further questions, and our own judgment.
Bring a small question that has been troubling you lately: something in a book you have not understood, an aspect of work you keep wanting to improve, or a learning plan you have not yet begun. We will start with these concrete matters.
Time: Saturday, October 31, 2026, 15:00–16:30
Venue: EGO Bookstore
Address: Unit 10-1F-0316, 1st Floor, Building 10, Yihuayuan Creative Ecological Park, No. 6 Xiaoyangfang Dongqu Road, Daxing District (Yizhuang, Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area), Beijing
Event type: Public-interest lecture; admission is free
EGO Bookstore on WeChat
From a bookstore I liked, to a book I happened upon, to an event we were willing to try together, this small experience has given me a very everyday sense of what it means to ask questions. Some questions make us want to find someone to talk to as we read; some ideas make us willing to try something as we talk.
When answers are within easy reach, the ability to keep asking becomes all the more precious.
Come to EGO on the afternoon of October 31. Let’s practice asking good questions together.
About Shuye
Shuye | Professor Quwei Ye
Education researcher, professor, and designer of AI teaching systems.
He previously served as vice president of Peking University Founder Education Group and president of Xi’an Technology and Business College. He holds a master’s degree in artificial intelligence and expert systems from the National University of Defense Technology and was a visiting scholar at Connecticut State University in the United States.
His work focuses on asking better questions with AI, learning innovation, and personal growth. He developed the Six-Cycle Questioning Framework and hopes to bring reflections from educational research into conversations about reading and everyday life.
Contact
Personal website: www.treeye.cn
WeChat: tree_ye1961
Email: shuye_1961@qq.com
Recent Teaching and Research
Teaching practice: Teaches Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, develops interactive courses and course knowledge graphs, and provides training for teachers in applying AI.
Agent development: Develops AI-PBL-TDA teaching agents and architectures for collaboration among multiple agents, supporting problem-based and project-based learning with an emphasis on teacher leadership and evidence review.
Knowledge graphs: Conducts research on knowledge graphs and graph retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG), producing thematic reports and interactive graphs to support connections among concepts and traceability to original sources.
Questioning: Developed the Six-Cycle Questioning Framework—Record, Reflect, Question, Act, Review, and Transform—and explores AI-assisted questioning, reflection, and the transfer of experience.
More work: University Teaching | AI Teaching Lab | Research