What are the "Right Questions"?

What are the right questions to ask?

We get tons of debate here about 'free will', and 'god vs not' and whatever else. Are these even the right questions to bother with? They don't seem to be very profitable questions. Nobody ever can come up with a definitive answer for them. A bit pointless when you think about it.

What are the right questions?

A lot of effort, for instance, is devoted to stalking god and trying to get His/Her/Its phone number. Would He/She/It even bother answering if we found it and dialed it? If It did, what would be the "Right Questions" to ask a god? Would asking a god be a "Right Question", or a Wrong one?

There are no right and wrong questions to ask, unless they're loaded questions. Those are wrong.

I don't know. Given 'n' for the resources available to a civilization potentially in a drought, what portion of 'n' should we spend building temples to gods to beg for rain, versus building dams and aqueducts to irrigate? Some long-dead civilizations thought to spend on the former, so perhaps asking why the gods were angry was less profitable than asking why they weren't sorting out the water situation for themselves. Perhaps they simply lacked the technology or the imagination to build aquefers.

I've always thought the right question is "How can I best spend the time I have on this earth?" I still haven't figured out the answer to that one, but I'm pretty sure when I reach the end of my life, I won't be thinking "If only I had spent more time on my knees talking to some invisible God who never responds."

In general, or at least this is my experience, about 3/4 of philosophy is concerned with trying to figure out what questions are profitable to ask, and in what way it's profitable to ask them. The scientific way of asking questions has turned out to be a very profitable way to ask certain questions, for example.

Yes, and it seems the scientific method tends to look for answerable questions. The sort of questions that generate the sorts of answers that you can prove.

I'd imagine ethics is a pretty useful bit of philosophy.