100 Questions

April 2023

For the SPARC 23 application, one of the prompts asked applicants to generate a list of 100 questions that piqued their interest. I thought it was a cool question, so here we go.

Can a sense of responsibility be engrained in people without authority? Although, I have a better sense of obligation now, most of the things I feel like I have to do were once prescribed by teachers, parents, etc.
Would I ever be able to get to the same level of fluency and comfort with the English language if it wasn’t my first?
Why did it take me so long to come up with 100 questions? What does the amount of time this took say about me?
Would you consider humility to be a virtue, how do/would you act in accordance to your opinion on this?
Civilization has gone to its primitive state, post-catastrophe and you’re deemed the leader (f.ex, come up with a scenario where this makes sense, you have the most knowledge about a pre-catastrophic world). In which ways do you attempt to govern?
You have 20 years to gain the most power on a global scale, what steps do you take? Some might say becoming the president of the US, I would be curious to see if anyone has more interesting ideas, like finding a way to commoditize water to the extent that by 2032, when droughts are more common, they have a significant amount of leverage, etc?
If wellbeing is relative, what’s the moral harm in bringing everyone down to a hunter-gatherers standard of living?
How could one design a really good ecology class? What if instead of teaching classroom norms (i.e. sharing) we had a rudimentary explanation of the Tragedy of the Commons, Free-riders, etc. How would this impact the adherence to the norms we wish to have in the first place.
What’s the % drop-off in culture generationally for those who immigrate to Western Countries? What would the measures be? (number of local dishes you can make, language fluency, etc.)?
How susceptible I am to joining cults? If I was indoctrinated to joining the People’s Temple would I have been one of the earlier to leave before drinking the Kool-aid.
Why is my humour the way it is?
Why don’t we apply the gale-shapely algorithm to college admissions? A Questbridge/national residency match program seems good for all parties?
Is being able to give “unconditional love” just widening the range of things you’re willing to accept from the other person while still caring about them?
If I found absolute passion for computer science in the modern age. Is an alternate industrial-age world one where I don’t have any passion of similar magnitude?
How much worse is my “organic” spelling due to auto-correct?
How would my life look different if I spelled “distraught” correctly in the 6th grade spelling bee? I could have come first instead of second, sigh.
Should philosophy “education” always be complimentary?
If philosophy is necessary and wants to exist as a stand-alone field, why don’t we have philosophy practitioners at every major organization/field of practice?
Why did I prefer writing in pen so much more when I was younger?
Why was there a time when I took my handwriting so seriously?
If I go to university in France, will I hate myself for not holding onto a group of friends that I already like?
At what point is my yearning for exploration going to come at a major cost to my personhood?
Is stability and comfort worthwhile?
What does it look like to implement psychedelic therapy at large?
What are the worst possible scenarios with having experienced ego death?
What would it take for the field of human computer interaction to go extinct? What if technologists became especially rudimentary, realizing user-optimization was utterly useless? How much worse off would we be?
What would a life without knowing your birthday look like? How would classes be divided? Would alcohol laws become more stringent (using experimental methods) or less stringent?
If a latte is coffee with milk. Would a single drop of coffee make a cup of milk, a latte?
Why are physicists among the best writers that I have encountered. From Feynman to James Jean, prose is prolific among the rotators of physical matter.
How are abrahamic prayers constructed. Is it a matter of mimetics that some have staying power? Survival of the ones with the most aliteration (lol).
At what point does free-riding lead to market failure for Netflix subscriptions? (I'm still salty smh)
Do we need to redefine our sense of purpose in the age of GPT? I always thought that I could lead a life of servitude to replace my guilt and dread. Do I just wallow on abundance in a post-scarcity world?
What’s the best minimal closet that I can make? What would the MVP for my closet look like that would be appropriate for 90% of situations.
What traits could you identify in kindergarten that would assess how strong a philosopher they would be in the future?
How much of my caffeine intake is signalling that I’m a busy person?
How much worse would my career prospects look like if I had a non-western accent?
What does it actually look like to build sustainable community with clear motivations for doing real things?
How much is the rise in polyamory is linked to more effective cross-national/long-distance travel? As in the need to constantly be coupled means traditional romantic structures need to be reanalyzed?
What food would most efficiently (per dollar) get us to minimum viable calories for the world’s population with the highest nutrient density and variety? (No soylent lol)
Am I an aesthetic hedonist?
How can we map musical preferences in the brain?
Could outdoor classrooms for young students reduce nearsightedness?
How many students in impoverished areas have undiagnosed visual and auditory disabilities?
How and are consulting firms prosecuted for giving advice to organizations that lead/have led them to commit illicit acts?
To avoid the blow to ego when I realize my skills are menial relative to AI, is it worth trying to have global impact in a third-world country and moving there as well?
What does empowerment media as an altruistic intervention look like at scale?
How do I facilitate more honest communication?
How do I become even more attune to non-verbal cues from others and iterate on my ways of interacting and personality as such?
How does one get better at scoping out opportunity in barren grounds? Scoping out completely new fields of research, for example?
How does one get better intuitions for their own optimal stopping points (I.e. maintaining a relationship, pursuing a research project). How many opportunities have I missed out on by not pursuing things further. How many other things could I have been doing if I stopped sooner?
Is the average philosopher (or average academic in the humanities) net-negative by virtue of the resources they have taken and looking at the tail-heavy distribution of academic impact?
What does it look like to have plural-style philanthropic voting in developing nations? How does this work in practice? What’s holding us back?
What does it look like for me to have immense integrity when I don’t even know what I stand for. I have a somewhat coherent view of what is good and I try to abide by this? Is it worth having 100% confidence and conviction in my actions if the grounds on which they lay are shaky?
Will I regret attending a Liberal Arts College?
Will I amount to the expectations others have for me?
What would it feel like to have deep “okayness”. Am I predisposed or anti-disposed to reaching this state?
Why do I find the act of teaching so enjoyable?
How do I captured the essence of traditional pedagogy in practice and translate this to a career, idea or project that scales?
I think silent film is a beautiful way of bringing people together behind a single narrative (mushy, I know) in the absence of language? What can I do to resurrect this (mostly) lost art?
Why is idiosyncrasy more valued as we get older?
How long would it take to become reasonably proficient in Opera singing?
What does intellectual attribution and property rights look like in the age of AI-supported innovation?
What’s the most disparate community (the antipode) of the communities I’m in now. How do I find them? How much would I benefit from the differences?
Is the startup space a form of brain-drain - taking away top talent from working on the counterfactual? Is the counterfactual better?
What would be the ideal city for me to spend my early adulthood?
Who came up with the idea for stuffed animals?
What have been concrete downsides by a decrease in humanities majors over the years? What can we point to in a society that's been a product of this?
Are we more creatively repressed as a society than we once were?
What is the most accessible explanation for the dicursive dilemma?
What does Stephen wolfram’s articulation of utopia look like?
How would the world’s poorest articulate what an ideal future (say beyond 2500) looks like for them?
What are the first set of alums at Deep Springs College doing now?
Should ozempic be readily available as an OTC drug?
Historically, what forms of media were "binge"-consumed, like tv shows, social media content, etc. are today?
What exact shade of hue do I perceive the most often?
How much better would alumni outcomes look like at universities if roommate matching was more systematic?
What is the most effective set of questions that can be asked to test for friendship/workmate compatibility?
What are the economic impacts of having medical training take ~8+ years relative to ~6+ years in the UK?
How do we fix Dubai’s medical personnel shortage problem?
How does one stop writing with happy endings?
What are the greater, more universal dynamics that led The Fréchet Distribution to be the exact reciprocal of the Weibull-like distribution in the same year, despite being developed independently?
Can someone explain to me why ancient classical pieces that “withstood” the test of time aren’t just to satisfy pretentious people whose egos won’t let them admit that they’re boring?
What are the biggest ways that I can change my mind right now based on my current set of beliefs (premise: I don’t think I have super strong takes on most things)?
What are some productive arguments that I could have now that would make me change my mind the most?
Should I pursue the carnivore diet?
What is the best argument for why selfishness is always self-defeating?
Are the economic benefits of tenure a heavy-tailed distribution? I think I need someone to explain why some pressure of pursuing public/faculty-approved work isn’t a good thing for research?
If I had a month to develop the most important skills for dealing with a survival situation? What would my syllabus look like? Who would I reach out to? What supplies would I need? What are the best modes of learning?
What would the world like if we navigated it in terms of North, South, West and East instead of Up, Down, Left, and Right?
How can high school writing instruction improve? Why do we teach the 5-paragraph essay model in the first place?
Is sleeping in hammocks long-term actually beneficial? What’s the best sleeping arrangement aside from beds? Are beds even the best one? Should we be sleeping on the floor, in beds, hammocks, in chairs even, etc?
What is the actual most readable font?
What studies could we run that test name-based determinism? From seeing if the effects of having a name that starts with “A” to having the meaning of your name be connected with the concept of “success” in some sense? (My name means praiseworthy...this question is wishful thinking).
Why is it so hard to change email addresses?
What’s the optimal video call setup?
How can I improve my lifting form?
Could suicide helplines be reasonably replaced with Chatbot systems with audio functionality? Could ethical experiments be done?
Will we ever form a coherent model for how consciousness works (solving the “Hard” problem specifically?)
Was answering these questions a waste of time?
Is the precautionary principle, as seen in France, a bad thing? What post-mortem (lol) insights do we apply to emerging tech?