Open Questions

These are open questions that I’m personally exploring, and not necessarily open questions in general.

Education/Learning/Knowledge

• How can we get more infectiously curious, intelligent, and agentic people to want to be elementary and middle school teachers?
  • Other related questions here
• How do you build environments that foster curiosity and agency?
• To what extent is human knowledge inherently dual use? Michael Nielsen presents a disturbingly compelling case here: https://michaelnotebook.com/xrisk/ (cmd/ctrl-f “dual use”).
• In direct contradiction with that; “As a general matter, a lot of oral knowledge in the world is still not readily available, and reflection on this fact might lead one in many interesting directions. One obvious application is helping people more readily understand the present state of affairs in different domains. If I want to know “how we’re doing” in, say, antiviral drug development, I could spend a few hours hunting for top researchers, email a few, and perhaps get on calls to obtain their candid assessments. Are we making good progress? What are the most important open problems? What’s holding things back? And so on. How can we make all of this knowledge publicly available across all fields?” → https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/12/work-on-these-things.html
• (Related to the above) Closing the research debts of fields is tremendously important
• Answers that are relevant for both questions
  • For the most part, the issue here is that it’s just not worth it for most frontier researchers to be spending much of their time writing this down. Some ways that we can work on this:
    • Use Distill as inspiration: how can we make it more worth it for frontier researchers to contribute?
    • Having contributors who spend a lot of time with frontier researchers (assistants, interns, etc)?
    • Cultivating a centralized community of motivated people who go out and do what Tyler Cowen did for the fields that they’re interested in and then make it public in some central journal?
    • Cultivating a centralized community of motivated people who go out and do what Tyler Cowen says he does for the fields that they’re interested in and then make it public in some central journal?
• Making an environment that is bad for deliberate practice better for that is incredibly useful.
• How can we remove the schlep from insert X important thing?
  • Hack Club Bank is a good example of schlep-removal for payment processing for high school non-profits
  • Stripe is another good example of schlep-removal for payment processing

Memory Systems

• The core ideas behind spaced repetition systems (automated scheduling for something repetitive based on your choices) could and should be generalized to other aspects of life. I explore some of these applications in Cron for the Mind. What does an effective system that helps you do this look like?
• From the canonical tft essay: What would a virtuoso use of memory systems look like?
  • ”What does a memory system look like for a driven creative genius who is an expert with the system?”

Software design so often focus on the first few hours of someone’s experience. Yet what you really want is to max out the experience someone is having in their thousandth or ten thousandth hour of use. Pianos seem designed primarily for experts and only incidentally for beginners. If you were designing the piano with modern software design practice in mind it would have 8 white keys, no black keys, and no pedals. It’d be easy to play some simple songs, and that’s it. What we’re really looking for is ideas which can be the foundation for long-run improvement, with an extraordinarily high ceiling. - Michael Nielsen

Tools for Thought/Human-Computer Interaction

• What can the concept of feeds for good be used for? Outside of tasks, what about a media playlist of sorts? Even further, outside of Twitter, I love feeds as an interaction design choice. What do read-it-later apps, email, etc look like as feeds?
  • I think this connects to the “Cron for the Mind” question in the last section in an interesting way
• Search
  • What in the world does the future of search look like w/ LLMs? Even with the new search features added to GPT, I still use Google for almost everything, but maybe that’s just because it’s slightly faster.
  • How should search evolve as “spatial computing” emerges? I think just putting standard 2d search into a 3d environment feels wrong. There’s something about search that feels inherently 3d to me.
    • Some exploration into this idea
• How can we build on on Alexander Obenauer’s ideas around the itemized operating system?
• What does a note-taking system look like that is fundamentally built around thinking? I think it’s a highly effective memory system + some of these ideas by Linus Lee
• Wacky: Programming languages are fairly high fidelity notation for your thoughts. What does a programming language for ideas look like? Inspiration

AI

• Guiding AI to do what you want while coding is hard, because plain English is not always the highest fidelity notation for your thoughts. What does a programming language for working with AI-generated code look like? Deep explorations into prompt engineering techniques would probably be useful for this.

Misc

• (For myself), While avoiding dangerous “miracle” solutions, how can we help the poor? People are working hard on this, and I need to spend more time understanding their research.