UnFrequently Asked Questions

Questions I cannot answer

Some questions I've been turning my head around, without finding an appropriate answer. At some point I will try to get a better understanding on these concepts. For the moment it's just a sketch of things I appreciate input on.

What is life?

Despite the title of Schrödinger's book seems to bear the answer, I still struggle to find a satisfactory definition of life. I believe that it should somehow be relate to work and the second principle of thermodynamics, but I do not visualize how. Also, I would be enthusiastic to see a first-principles model reproducing a system that we would agree to call living.

What is consciousness?

I find this one even harder. It is addressed somewhat satisfactorily by some eastern cultures, but I would like to understand it within a scientific (Galilean, Popperian) framework (though who knows if it is possible).

Does power corrupt?

My sensation is that, at least to a degree, it does. This would imply that people with greater power should be particularly careful of not abusing it (which is not the same as the 2000-year old quote from Spiderman). A corollary would be that powerful people are more likely to have a corrupt soul (though they might as well not). A solution would be avoiding power imbalance at all. This wouldn't mean that positions of great responsibility wouldn't exist, because great responsibility can come without great personal power.

Does private property make sense in the digital world?

Our society is built upon a concept of private property. Leaving aside the observations on its ill-definedness, I noticed during my youth how with the advent of digitalization this concept fell apart, and we struggled to keep it alive with a lot ad hoc regulations. Was this the only way to deal with digital private property? Am I the only one to think that some kind of sharing that seemed admirable in the 80s is now borderline illegal? I really do not have a clear idea around this, but in some part of my mind I feel that we did not openly and transparently lay all the options on the table.

Questions I can more or less answer

Should knowledge be freely accessible to everyone?

Yes, and this makes me doubt the legitimacy of private intellectual property. This does not mean that I am advocating to get rid of it, since this would require a complete restructuring of society, which is beyond the scope of what I feel comfortable advocating for here.

Does society need to be restructured?

Global inequality and environmental deterioration are two major reasons demonstrating that we should change the way our society functions, the sooner the better.

Can science answer any question?

Even with infinite time, I do not think so. My understanding of Gödel's completeness theorem is that within a formal system (science) not all true theorems are provable. We can still go for approximate results or simulations, but it seems presumptuous to think that the scientific method will be sufficient. Even more than the scientific method itself, the limit might be related to the human mind. In any case, I do not think it is useful nor healthy to be too ambitious. Do we need to know everything?

Are rich people smarter?

They are not. Randomness and privilege play a major role. I will elaborate more on this in a future version of this page.

Should being smarter justify privilege?

Set aside the fact that the concept of being smart is subjective, the answer to this kind of question is subjective as well, since it depends on our personal moral and ethics. According to my personal moral and ethics, the answer is no.

Are some genders/collectives smarter than others?

This kind of question is often used to justify discriminatory attitudes. There is no reasonable evidence in favor of this kind of statement, though there is a ton of material showing how discriminated collectives such as women or African Americans (just to name two out of a plethora) suffer from systematic biases that make their lives much harder. If any such kind of statement needs to be done, it is that northwestern white cis males should by now all be semi-gods given the amount of privilege they enjoyed. Since they are not, we should perhaps start doubting their talent. Of course, the real answer is that our world is complex and cannot be trivialized by any kind of such statements.
The point here is well-made in a statement by Michael Harris:

[...] given how little we know about the relation between mathematics and the brain, why is it urgent to establish differences between the mathematical behavior of male and female brains? The gap is so vast between whatever such studies measure and anything resembling an appreciation of the difficulties of coming to grips with the conceptual content of mathematics that what really needs to be explained is why any attention, whatsoever, is paid to these studies. Ingrained prejudice is the explanation that Occam’s razor would select.

Besides, even though these questions are malevolent, I cannot exclude that in a far future it will be clear that different collectives have different kinds of abilities (as in Orwell's Animal Farm). The question could be then: Would these differences justify any kind of power imbalance or even oppression? I tend to think that even if some kind of superiority of a collective were demonstrable, this would not be a sufficient reason to grant it a higher degree of power.

Is a totally free market desirable?

A totally free market would privilege the most powerful, so I do not desire it. In addition, there is a good amount of literature in economics showing that it is not, unless you're at the tip of the pyramid. But beware, only at the very tip. In fact, under mild assumptions it can be shown that in an unregulated market the inequality increases all the way to a Gini index of 1, which indicates a single person having all the wealth. So, in a free market, even if you're rich, it is just a matter of time before you become incredibly poor too. In other words, for long enough times, an unregulated market is undesirable for all humans except one (and probably that single human wouldn't be a happy folk either).

Did you copy the idea of UFAQs from D.Knuth's webpage?

Yes. I lack imagination but stand on the shoulders of giants.