From time to time I would like to share here a question, which I think is worth thinking about.
Asking the right question is a difficult problem. You don't wanna ask trivial questions, because you wouldn't learn anything from answering them. Too difficult questions also don't do any good, because you can get stuck with them for a long time without any guarantee of learning something. What's the meaning of life? - I don't know.
One promising idea is that the ideal question should be the easiest one which you are yet not able to answer (Schmidhuber, 2011). The reasoning behind it looks like this: if you can find the answer, you must have learned something, and if you can't, you wouldn't be better off by trying anything else, because this is the easiest question.
It is nice that we defined what we are looking for, but what about how we should find it? I think we could break this down into these two subproblems:
- How do you know a question is the simplest one and there is no other, which would be even simpler? (talking about the unanswered ones)
- Is there a global minimum in the space of all possible unanswered questions and their difficulties? In other words, is there a single simplest question? And if not, which one of the many simplest questions is the best to start with?
Looks like there might be a pattern, doesn't it? We started with one difficult question and now we have another two, hopefully less difficult, questions.
Another problem is that the difficulty of questions is subjective. A question hard for one might be quite easy for another. Which brings us to an idea that there might be two kinds of questions: the ones worth answering and the others, more interesting for me personally, worth asking.
Let me expand on this. For the first kind of question the value lays in their answers. What do I need for cooking ham & eggs? While questions of the second kind are those which nobody else but me can answer. Or maybe somebody could, but it wouldn't help me much, because it is much more valuable for me to think about the question and eventually find the answer myself. The process of finding the answer is valuable itself, because it pushes me to explore all the alternatives, understand them, and only in the end pick the most suitable answer.
Also the first kind of questions can be easily empirically verified (just follow the recipe and try cooking some ham & eggs), while the second one can't. That's why it's important to answer them ourselves, because who else should we trust?
Ok, for some questions it looks like we'd better do the work ourselves. But can we help each other somehow? I think we can. What I'd like to do is share interesting questions, discuss them, and take inspiration from each other. What do you think?