What I'm asking
Questions
The questions I keep asking, big and small.
I ask about a lot of things, and I’m still startled to find a subject I hadn’t been asking about.
- What is thinking for?
- What does time actually do?
- What does it mean to belong?
- How should a curious person live?
- Is most ambition unresolved pain?
- Why do bad systems beat good people?
- Was Mehmed VI the last Roman emperor?
- Why does every age feel uniquely fast?
- What matters enough to justify refusal?
- How did tiddlywinks become competitive?
- Did medieval people love their children?
- Why does maintenance always feel optional?
- What would it mean to reenchant the world?
- Where does a self stop and the world start?
- What is light doing between here and there?
- Have we lost agency, or did we ever have it?
- Why does the burnt bit work only as an accent?
- How do founding promises outlive their founders?
- Is the Great Filter ahead of or behind humanity?
- Is everyone selling you something you don’t need?
- What is worth doing if it isn’t obviously useful?
- Can we know something is useful before we need it?
- How much of the world is projection mirrored back?
- Why do doors, windows, and mirrors seem so strange?
- What is the difference between knowing and understanding?
- Why does hitting off a mat differ from hitting off grass?
- Why does continuous improvement so often make things worse?
- What should we make of giants, trolls, enchanters, elves, dwarves, gnomes, and brownies?
- How can humans who are not members of one immediate family act together repeatedly as though they constitute some larger unit?
Reading paths
Six of these questions, each with a few essays that keep asking it.
What does time actually do?
- Why you cannot notice the last time: the moment that can’t be marked as it happens
- Perceived time as a fraction of age: a year, measured against a life
- Why life-changing moments feel ordinary: when big moments arrive without ceremony
- The year turns slowly, not at midnight: a season the calendar has no name for
How should a curious person live?
- Why curiosity is lonely: what asking costs
- Montaigne and the essay as attempt: writing as a way of trying
- Why a summary cannot replace reading a book: what the hours are for
- Wisdom as recovered innocence after experience: where all this might lead
Why do bad systems beat good people?
- Forced ranking as a control system, not meritocracy: a ranking at Ranger School, and a quiet rebellion against it
- Critique of Dee Hock’s complex rules maxim: what rules do to judgment
- How the powerless come to police each other: when no outside enforcer is needed
- Rome fell from institutional mismatch, not age: a system outgrown
- The republic as something each generation must keep: what no founding can settle
Where does a self stop and the world start?
- Identity as a self-authored story: who is doing the editing
- Why childhood defenses feel like adult personality: what passes for personality
- Consciousness as intentional activity, not a thing: whether there’s anything to locate
- Agency without a self or free will: what’s left to act
What is worth doing if it isn’t obviously useful?
- Why merely useful glasses get forgotten: a small judgment at the front door
- Tasting diluted cocktail ingredients: a liter of water and some notes
- Anatomy of a 90-minute downtempo playlist arc: attention to a running order
- Practicing animism as a perceptual habit: attending to a tree as if getting to know it
What is the difference between knowing and understanding?
- Practice precedes theory: working comes before understanding: steam engines before thermodynamics
- The gap between understanding and doing: why insight isn’t enough
- Heisenberg on how methods of questioning shape knowledge: how the asking shapes the answer
- Why the say-nothing rule fails thinking out loud: speaking before you know what you think
This is a questions page. The idea comes from Joshua P. Steele.