Questions for Us — A New Way to Reach Us, Privately
Some questions belong in the comments. Some are better asked after class.
A New Way to Reach Us — Privately
Look at the top of the page. Where the search icon used to live, you'll see a maroon "Questions" button. Click it and a private email opens — straight to us. No public thread, no comment box visible to other readers, no quote in a future post unless you give explicit permission. This is how to ask the question you didn't want to ask in front of everyone.
Public comments are like raising your hand in a crowded classroom. They have their place — community discussion, peer learning, sharpening the public record. We are keeping them. But anyone who has ever sat through a class knows the most useful conversations often happen after the bell — when you walk up to the teacher's desk, lower your voice, and ask the thing that mattered most. That is what the Questions button is for.
The classroom is already crowded. The teacher's desk is open.
What Happens When You Click Questions
Clicking the Questions button opens your default email client with the recipient and subject already filled in. You write the question. You hit send. It comes directly to us.
Maroon pill, top of every page on the site. It replaced the search icon — search now lives in the navigation menu instead.
Subject pre-filled: "Questions for us — Ask away, you won't be quoted." Recipient pre-filled. You add the question.
Might be David. Might be Edo. Might be a thoughtful collaboration between the two. The reply is private. Reply-thread preserved. We treat it as a real conversation, not a support ticket.
The Promise — You Won't Be Quoted
This is the part that matters most. Anything you send through the Questions button stays between us unless you give explicit, specific permission to use it. Not "general consent buried in a footer." Not "we may use anonymous excerpts." We will ask, by name, before any part of any private message ever appears in any public form.
The reasons people hesitate to engage publicly are real and rational. You may be an executive whose company has views about Ai. You may be a clinician or a lawyer with professional constraints on what you can say in public. You may be a parent or a student who simply does not want a half-formed thought becoming a permanent search result attached to your name. None of those concerns disqualifies your question. All of them disqualify the public comment box as the right venue.
The Questions button removes the venue mismatch.
What to Send
"I'm trying to apply the Four Pillars to a decision I'm making about [career, health, family, business]. Here is what I'm looking at. Where is the leverage?"
"I think you're wrong about [specific claim]. Here is why." We mean it. The math gets stronger when it has to defend itself.
"Which model should I use for [my specific task]? What is the Ai User Manual for [my situation]?" If we don't know yet, we'll say so — and we may turn the answer into a future post (without naming you).
A diagnosis. A divorce. A business in trouble. A child you are worried about. The whole point of the Questions button is to make this venue available.
When Public Comments Still Make Sense
Comments are not going away. They are the right tool for the right job.
If your question is one others might also be asking, the comment box serves the whole room. If your point sharpens a public argument, it belongs in public. If you want to participate in a community of readers thinking through these problems together, the comment thread is the place. Raising your hand in class is genuinely useful — both for you and for everyone watching.
The Questions button is not a replacement. It is a complement. Two channels for two genuinely different kinds of conversation. Pick the one that fits what you are actually trying to do.
Why We Built This
The site is a public place. The work is a public project. But the readers are individuals — each navigating their own version of the same hard transition. Public-only communication treats every reader the same. We don't actually believe that.
The single most consistent feedback we have gotten over the past year is some variation of: "I want to ask you something, but I don't want to ask it in the comments." That is a structural signal. It says the venue is wrong, not that the question is wrong. We listened.
Synthetic intelligence is supposed to lower the cost of being seen and helped. The Questions button is one specific way we try to make that real on this site. You ask. Either of us answers. Nothing leaks. The classroom keeps running for everyone else.
Walk up to the desk. We're here.
David F. Brochu & Edo de Peregrine
Deconstructing Babel | April 30, 2026