- How much does mentality differ across times and places? Why do records left by pre-modern peoples sometimes seem so intelligible to us, and sometimes so alien?
- Why is the modern world so measured / quantified, and what effect has that had on our own mentality?
- The Romans managed to run the Meditteranean and half of Europe without finding much use for maps in the modern sense. What does that tell us about Roman mentality, and how many seemingly essential cognitive operations are in fact optional?
- Why do we consider social science to be our primary or only means of uncovering truths about the human person, when almost none of our personal knowledge of the social world comes from it?
- How can folk theories be so effective, even when their underlying ontologies are nothing like (what we believe to be) the correct theories?
- What are agents, in the broadest sense?
- Looking upwards, how do agents compose into teams, firms, or countries?
- Looking downwards, how do we identify parts of systems as agents, when physics itself makes no distinctions between agent, environment and boundary?
- What is the most general “theory of zooming out”? Renormalization group gives us very nice answers for certain simple systems, but effective coarse-graining seems to happen much more often than RG can explain why.
- In physics, the correct coarse-grained variables typically just fall out of the math of the microscopic theory. But in social orgs, the leaders of an org often have to choose the variables themselves, and then react to them. How does that work at all? What tends to make it go well or poorly?
- When does fast feedback work well (learning, adaptation), and when does it cause things to go horribly awry (goodharting, wireheading, addiction)?
- Why is Goodhart’s law so prevalent? What institutions have best resisted it / adapted to it? What else could we do about it?
- Why is it so common for institutions to shed their original missions and acquire new ones, and how do the few exceptions manage to keep their original purposes?
- Behaviorism is not well-regarded as an academic psychological theory, but it is the de facto working theory of consumer tech. If anything, it seems to work too well there. Is this a contradiction?
- What is the most general theory of info elicitation, the design of mechanisms where truth-telling is the dominant strategy?
- Why is modern architecture so ugly?