Hexagram 4 contains the clearest instruction the I Ching gives about how it should be used, and it is embedded in the judgement rather than in any commentary.
The text says, in substance, that it is not the teacher who seeks the young and inexperienced but the young who seek the teacher; that at the first consultation an answer is given; and that to ask a second and a third time is importunity, and importunity receives no answer. Wilhelm renders the operative word as importunity; Legge's 1882 version is close; other translations use pestering, or simply say the oracle will not speak twice.
This is the text legislating for its own use, and it is remarkable for coming from the oldest layer rather than from a later commentator anxious about misuse. Whatever the Zhou diviners thought they were doing, they thought it could be spoiled by repetition.
The rule is still observed in most serious practice and routinely ignored elsewhere. It has an obvious practical justification, a questioner who consults repeatedly is not consulting but shopping, and an equally obvious tension with the fact that circumstances change and a question asked in March is not the question asked in June. Practitioners resolve this in different ways, generally by distinguishing a genuinely new situation from a refusal to accept the first answer.
The hexagram's name, Meng, refers to something covered, obscured or immature, and the folly it describes is not stupidity but inexperience that has not yet recognised itself.