Answering Unanswerable Questions

A workshop on how people give and take advice when a question has no rational answer. Sarah Meiklejohn and Patrick Gage Kelley run it as a group exercise rather than a lecture: participants share the approaches they actually use, and the room compares what emerges. Part of the session looks at how the source changes the advice — a partner, a stranger on a forum, or a chatbot — which is where it stops being a philosophy evening and starts being about what we are all now doing with LLMs. The workshop itself runs about an hour, with food and drinks before and after and alumni from earlier Newspeak cohorts around. Why go: an unusually reflective hour with two serious security and privacy researchers, in a format that gets people talking instead of listening. Best for anyone building or researching AI systems people turn to for judgement.