- How do we create a just, equitable society?
- How do we live sustainably?
- What is a life well-lived?
- How do I make the place where I live better?
- How do we make computer systems that empower people?
Richard Feynman reportedly kept in mind a list of his twelve “favorite problems.” Whenever he encountered a new idea, he would compare it against each of these problems to see if it helped him with the problem. I’ve come across this idea a couple of times in the context of “personal knowledge management” where the twelve favorite problems are often used as kind of heuristic for determining what ideas are worth capturing in your notes.
As I’ve been putting together my list of problems, I’ve found that it’s also a really useful tool for me to clarify why I’m interested in some topics. There are a variety of topics I enjoy reading and learning about, but it wasn’t immediately obvious to me why I was so interested in some of these topics. I had to start asking myself, “what do I hope to achieve by better educating myself in these areas?” For example, my first favorite problem—How do we create a just, equitable society?
—arose from me contemplating my interest in economics, labor, and urbanism. My interest in urbanism also feeds into questions #2 and #4 (by defining what I think of as “better”).
Another possibly instructive example is question #5: How do we make computer systems that empower people?
I added this one as I was interrogating myself about my ongoing interest in the IndieWeb movement. I am no longer a professional web developer, and I aspire to make this website something other than a web development blog. And yet I find myself drawn back to the topic of the IndieWeb both in what I read and in topics I consider writing about here. So I had to ask myself why that was, because clearly this is a problem I like to think about. And the conclusion I reached is that what I’m really interested in is how we can make empowering computer systems, instead of extractive computer systems. Now I have a new frame that I bring to other topics that interest me, such as open source software development.
My list is incomplete, as you can plainly see. Five is, after all, less than twelve. As I get more comfortable with this framework, I hope to flesh out the rest of the list and begin to use it as a way to organize my notes and my writing—perhaps it will even become an organizing principle for my website.