100 Questions

In my younger and more vulnerable years, I wrote ~100 questions I was interested in for a rationality camp application. I have since discovered the answers to some while problematizing others.

Nowadays I am less interested in questions and more interested in critical thought; I find wide-eyed curiosity grating. Here are a few– substantially fewer than 100– questions that interest me as at this past weekend.

1. My models of other people are inadequate. Yours are too. People are wonderfully complex; our observations, interpretations, and thus understandings of them are woefully lossy.
   1. How can I get better at knowing people? 
      1. The solution may be “ask more questions” but I come from guess culture, not ask culture. Asking a question shifts the epistemic balance. It imposes an obligation on the other person to respond. A non-response is much worse than not-responding to a question that was not-posed.
   2. I would like to be known, as all people do. I must render myself legible. What is lost when one renders oneself legible to another for the purpose of interpretation? What is kept? How can one protect oneself from poor self-knowledge? How can one do so while allowing others to understand one’s mind? 
      1. Intellectual intimacy is one of the highest pursuits. It is beautiful to know someone’s mind and generate with them. In this way I am jealous of Deleuze and Guattari and how their names appear together
2. I am uncomfortable with probabilities for one-off events. I understand a frequentist perspective of probability but I don’t know how it’d be possible to create a probability for something that happens once. Either we are on the world-path where it happens, or we are not.
   1. Someone once told me to think about expected value: what would I bet on? But expected value is an insufficient way of thinking about probability. Take the Sleeping Beauty problem under Bostrom’s →infinite wakeup modification. An EV-taker would claim that Sleeping Beauty should have →zero credence in a fair coin coming up heads. This seems obviously untrue.
   2. What, then, is probability when it comes to one-off events? How can it be defined?
   3. Prediction markets like Kalshi do not provide a satisfactory answer. The current probability displayed represents the market belief of an event happening, but I do not buy that the market belief is a probability in itself.
3. Why do some trust their subconsciouses more or less than others? Some have better discernment on which subconscious impulses to follow and which to ignore. 
   1. Where are these subconscious thoughts generated?
   2. Psychoanalysis seems like the best place to look for an answer, but I am not fully convinced most personality development happens during very early childhood.
4. I do not have epistemic access to any mind other than mine. My field of imagination is constrained by my lived experiences. 
   1. What is it like to be colourblind? 
   2. How does the degree of internal monologue impact someone’s relationship to language? I generally do not have an internal monologue. At times I am pierced with a sentence, but my thoughts typically come in concept clusters that flow and move in bubbles. I play fast and loose with word definitions perhaps consequentially. 
      1. Language is useful insofar as people agree on word-signs. But the hegemony of the signifier over the signified is unstable (and the signified itself is unstable). I wonder how people ever come to agreeance
   3. Are any experiences really shared?
      1. Define “shared”, I suppose. All terms just require a degree of sufficiency
      2. When sharing experiences with others in conversation, we often expect our conversational partner to relate. But not everything feels like something else
5. With youth protests across Asia, the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York, and discontentments with global neoliberalism as seen through the weakening of several multinational trade deals, I think we are at the beginnings of a changed economic order
   1. What does a world outside of neoliberal subjectivity look like?
   2. What do I want it to look like?
   3. Is there optimism to be had?
      1. Sometimes optimism is cruel. 
   4. With the United States’ step back, the global political order is changing as well. What will come of Canada’s place in the world? I predict more defence spending, but I am unsure of its consequences.
6. If there must be a state, it ought be benevolent. I think the worst-off are better-off under a biopolitics of improvement, but the biopolitics of improvement also produces and defines a worst-off class. 
   1. To what extent do people in imagined communities have to those worst-off? Ought we draw these imagined communities in the first place? Where is their utility for those worst off?
7. I forget things quickly. Sometimes my friends will surprise me with a story of myself. When I read old journal entries, I wonder how I could possibly have had those mental processes. I stopped listening to music a few years ago; I forgot that it gave me pleasure.
   1. If I experience pain, and then forget about experiencing that pain, did that pain exist? After all, harm is person-affecting.
   2. If my self has discontinuities, to what extent is it a complete self? If others remember me through time, who has a more “correct” model of my self?
   3. When my parents die, how long will I be sad for?
8. I find some things unconsciously easy and others terribly difficult. Microeconomics is intuitive; I enjoy the logic. On the other hand, studying for my corporate finance course feels like chewing glass. The opposite is true for some of my peers.
   1. How do people’s preferences change over time? Why do they change?
   2. Where do preferences originate? Ought we moralize about them? 
   3. I read Amia Srinivasan and Andrea Long Chu a few years ago and am not satisfied with either of their conclusions; the state of the literature remains vague to me.
9. The DSM-5 is a necessarily constraining and at times arbitrary way of seeing psychiatric disorder.
   1. What does it mean to have an illness? As if it were part of oneself?
   2. Physical health problems are not categorized by symptom appearances: there are not fever-diseases, rash-diseases, etc, they are categorized by cause: viral, bacterial, cancerous, etc. Why aren’t psychological health problems categorized by cause? How would research have to change to make this possible? 
10. Desire is not the root of all suffering; desire is not simply a relation of being to lack. But it is too cold to say desire is just an affectively-modulated force that organizes how beings orient toward possible worlds
    1. So, what is it? How does it operate? How do I bridge the gap between lack and affect? 
11. How can we kill the fascist impulses inside us? Or at least displace them in the ordering of impulses? 
12. I can be a heteropessimist but in some ways I am a techno-optimist; I hope for women’s liberation through artificial wombs and expansions of romantic independency 
    1. What would making childbearing redundant really truly look like? Gay/lesbian couples are, on average, less monogamous than heterosexual couples– does this predict based on non-reproductive lines?
13. Adverse selection appears everywhere, I can think of many real world examples from empty subway cars to dating apps. 
    1. I think beneficial selection is much harder to notice. What are real world examples of beneficial selection? I can think of one– a reach professor accepting your recommendation letter request very quickly reveals you’ve undervalued your initial position.
    2. Perhaps it’s a little sad that it is easier to find adverse selection than beneficial selection through market logic 
14. I enjoy things more when I have the language to describe them. Reading poetry, for example, became more pleasurable after I learned the terminology for meter and assonance. But I still do not buy strong Sapir-Whorf.
    1. Models (and theories) cannot cleave reality at its joints. To do so is predicated on reality having joints upon which one could cleave. Reality is messy. How much truth is sufficient for something to be useful, and true colloquially?

I invite your commentary. See Gavin Leech’s post Ways we can fail to answer.