Highlights from my Quora Writing
I used to write on Quora. Here is some of what I wrote.
If you are a subscriber to my substack then that probably means you like my writing, in which case maybe you’ll like some of the content I wrote on Quora, back when I worked there.
This isn’t a complete list of all my Quora answers, but it’s a selection of the ones I feel less embarrassed about.
Philosophy & Society
What is consciousness?
Thought is like a Fourier transform of matter. A dual and equally real representation of reality.
What can deep neural networks teach us about human thought?
A lot of lessons we’ve learned from building neural networks apply to people too.
Does prayer work? What's your evidence or experience for prayer working? How do you demonstrate that it doesn't?
It works because your subconsciousness is listening, not because God is listening.
What are the fundamental causes of peace?
Peace comes from the enforcement of mutually beneficial truces.
Does God exist?
God exists in the same way that money, companies, and countries exist.
Where do original ideas come from?
All ideas are incremental. If you think an idea is novel you don’t know what it built on.
Are sports programs in high school and college worthwhile investments, or a distraction from academics and/or real-world career preparation?
Sports teach kids important lessons about resilience, pain tolerance, and risk.
Which theory best explains why humanity screws up?
Society is a collection of games within games. Sometimes those games go wrong.
Do schools in the US put enough emphasis on teaching students how to be moral, ethical people?
By focusing on tests, schools might actually be teaching immorality.
What is it like to interview a terrorist?
Probably not the wisest decision of my life.
Tech & Business
What technological changes will create the most opportunities for new startups over the next 2-3 years?
More of a 2-3 decade prediction than a 2-3 year one.
Which industries and jobs will self-driving cars and trucks disrupt in a positive fashion, a negative fashion or just entirely destroy?
Self driving cars change a ton of assumptions and will disrupt a lot of things.
How might technology make parenting easier in the future?
To know what might be easier in the future, look at what is easier today than in the past.
What do organizations and government agencies need to do differently to protect themselves from hackers?
Make security easy, or your employees will bypass your rules.
When pitching to an investor, how does one answer the question: "What's to stop Facebook from just implementing this feature?"
There are lots of things a startup can do that a big company can’t.
What is the future of personal transportation?
Electric scooters and public transit go together very well.
How did the Bay Area / Silicon Valley become a hot spot for startups?
Cold war military spending. But nobody likes to talk about it.
Is Google evil?
The difference between a kitten and a tiger is that the tiger is bigger.
Life Advice
How can I get into a top university?
Be the kind of person others would expect to go on to do great things.
What are some of the best studying techniques?
Do the exercises before reading the material.
What are the best ways to invest money?
Spend money on things that will make you smarter, save time, and reduce stress.
What are the best tips for saving money on a wedding?
Ignore “the Wedding Industry” and just have a big fun party.
What are some good tips and strategies for writing an academic paper?
Align yourself with the culture and beliefs of the community you want to publish with.
How do I speed read effectively?
The point of reading a book isn’t to read all the words but to understand all the ideas.
What is the best way to change careers?
Use experience in one area to get you a job where you can learn something else.
How can I become creative?
There is a trade-off between being creative and being right. Let yourself be wrong.
How can I write better?
Focus on surprise.
Politics
What could cause US politics to become less polarized?
Less concentration of power.
Who will win the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and why?
I correctly predicted that Trump would do better than polls suggested..
What percentage of news on social media is fake?
Almost none of it is “lies” but almost all of it is “deliberately misleading”.
How should the US education system best prepare students to engage in the democratic process?
Students need to understand why people previously thought bad ideas were good.
What mix of ideas from different political ideologies do you personally believe in? Which do you disagree with?
I agree with the “best intentions” of pretty much all ideological groups
How do liberals and nationalists misunderstand each other’s beliefs about multiculturalism?
The importance of distinguishing between moral culture and peripheral culture.
Should creationism be taught in school?
Science is about prediction and experiment. Discuss it in that context.
Should someone who is tolerant tolerate someone who is intolerant?
All societies are intolerant. They are just intolerant of different things.
Why are American left-wing people called ''liberals''
Liberals and leftists are different, but for a while it made sense for them to join forces.
In our current situation, I can't help focusing on your answers around polarization and multiculturalism. Mistrust of those who we believe have different moral cultures may be the defining issue of our time, especially because it is so often now a domestic as well as an international phenomenon, and political-tribal in origin rather than ethnic- or religious-tribal.
Introspectively, for example, I observe that it is hard to understand how anyone who shares my moral culture could possibly support Trump in 2024. And the more I hypothesize that Trump supporters must have a very different moral culture from mine, the worse I feel about sharing a polity with them. On the other hand, it seems to me that much of where the social justice left has gone wrong is in trying to dictate that all decent people must affirm fealty to moral culture norms that (a) most people still don't in fact believe in, and (b) almost nobody believed in ten or twenty years ago. Resentment of this sudden high-handedness is probably one of the significant contributors to Trump's support.
Devolution, as you suggest in your polarization answer, is a promising path in part because it helps populations with different moral cultures coexist. But there are always limits to how far our contending moral cultures will allow us to let that devolution happen. Abortion is the classic present-day example, slavery the classic past one.
One of the reasons I love Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series is that she grapples very deeply with these limits. In her future world there are Hives that have *almost* complete autonomy to set their own rules-- except that there is a short list of globally-binding Black Laws that all Hives must agree on to be regarded as legitimate. The contents and history of those Black Laws, and the difficulty of interpreting edge cases and agreeing on what does or does not break them, drive much of the conflict in the books, as well they should.
The most optimistic spin I can put on the present situation is that perhaps it will spur us to be more explicit, and more deliberative, about exactly what our moral culture norms are and why, and what it means in practice to support them. That could make it easier both to integrate people into plausible consensus moral cultures, and easier to "agree to disagree" as much as possible in order to drive polarization-reducing devolution. But there'll be a lot of very dangerous conflict before we get there. I am reminded of Jacques Barzun's emphasis, in his history _From Dawn to Decadence_, on how religious toleration arose less from deliberate moral progress and more from the exhausted stalemate of the Thirty Years' War.