A year ago I took Tiago Forte course Building a Second Brain. If you’re ready to be done organizing forever because you’ve spent hundreds of hours designing complex systems that don’t work, I highly recommend BASB.

One early exercise was to write our 12 Favorite Problems.

These 12 Favorite problems are supposed to help focus and prompt me, but it appears I was in a philosophical mood. Not sure how focusing these questions are:

  1. Why is suffering necessary? Why is violence necessary? Is competition possible without violence in some form? Do non-competitive people need to be protected from competitive people?

  2. Do the ends justify the means?

  3. Are there things that can’t be reduced to data or science? Do completely unknowable things have value? Perhaps more value than knowable things?

  4. Can great things (in incredibly expensive fields) be achieved without opportunistic investment? Can resources be equitably distributed?

  5. Why is privacy sacred (because it is)?

  6. Can anything, even the most volatile, radioactive material, be diluted out with enough water? Can the deepest darkness actually be overwhelmed by the tiniest amount of light?

  7. Can a human being actually help more than they hurt?

  8. Does guilt and shame actually serve a useful purpose?

  9. Which presumed “Rules of Nature” are actually just cultural/human-designed rules that can be changed/discarded?

  10. Are there things that feel like suffering that are not, in fact, suffering?

  11. Are people basically good? Is there a grain of good at the core of even the most evil acts?

  12. If free will is the last bastion of magical thinking, does that change anything about how we must act?

Are these problems still my 12 Favorite Problems today? Mostly, I think, yes. But there are some more real, tangible problems that I explore in my day-to-day that might point toward these things.

These types of questions don’t seem to respond as well to direct inquiry.