Welcome to Stuff I Thought About Last Week, a personal collection of topics on tech, innovation, science, the digital economic transition, the finance industry, and whatever else made me think last week.

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In today’s post: Finding the right questions to ask is increasingly more important than knowing the answers. This week I explore the lost art forms of asking questions by looking in detail at four different methods of interrogation. Before diving into the topic of inquiry, we'll look at rodent facial recognition, the evolving prescription drug delivery market, the rising risk of disruption to the credit card complex, the replication problem in AI, and the surprising decline in podcasts.

Stuff about Innovation and Technology
Rattus Recognition
Rentokil is deploying facial recognition in the battle against rats. According to the FT, the pest control company live streams rodents to central command where AI is deployed to predict where to hunt them down: “With facial recognition technology you can see that rat number one behaved differently from rat number three. And the technology will always identify which rat has come back, where are they feeding, where are they sleeping, who’s causing the damage, which part of the building are they coming from, where are they getting into the building from, whether it’s the same rodent that caused the problem last week.”

Prime Rx
While major chains cut back pharmacy hours due to the ongoing pharmacist shortage, Amazon is offering all-you-can-eat (or, rather, swallow) generic prescriptions for a $5/mo flat fee delivered to your door. I covered the increasing use of robots to offset the pharmacist shortages in Rxbots. 

AI’s Reproducibility Problem
MIT researchers developed a deep learning AI that can predict the risks of getting lung cancer up to six years in advance with a single CT scan. It’s increasingly common to hear about such AI radiology advancements, but what’s less publicized is the reproducibility problem many of these systems face. While they are very good at predicting and diagnosing the images they were trained on, when faced with new images, they struggle to achieve the same results, according to this Nature article. In one case, accuracy dropped from 90% to 60-70% when applied to data outside the training set.

Indebted CC Holders Fund Rewards
Bloomberg reports that credit card users who don’t pay off their balances on time are funding around $15B of reward points systems for the people who don’t carry balances. I’ve often discussed the negative sumness of the credit card ecosystem, lamenting that no one has taken a serious run at creating a new, closed-loop system with higher win-win for consumers and merchants. I certainly don’t have my hopes up, but, if you squint hard enough, you can start to see the potential for the mega platforms, notably Apple, Google, and Amazon, to create a new model for consumer banking. Of course, we might not be any better off with these folks as our financial overlords than the current crop of misfit profiteers, but at least it might allow for a little faster pace of innovation. Banks, for their part, are said to be increasingly nervous about the threat, as the WSJ reports: credit-card-kings Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America are teaming up to leverage Zelle to create a digital wallet to counter the rise of Apple and others. 

Podcasts Plummet 
In a world inundated with infinite content, one form of entertainment is on the decline. Active podcasts peaked at 670K in 2021, at the height of the pandemic, before dropping to 471K in 2022. So far this year, new episode releases for existing podcasts are down to 316K. New podcast debuts have plummeted even more drastically – almost 80% – from a high of over 1M in 2020 to only 221K in 2022, according to stats from Listen Notes.

More Q, Less A
Outside the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, the educational systems of our formative years largely taught us how to memorize and repeat back facts – we learned a lot of answers to a narrow range of potential questions we might be asked. Owing to the rapid innovation in AI, however, simply knowing a bunch of answers is of decreasing value, as answers proliferate for anyone to access anytime. In SITALWeek #375, I suggested that we’re reaching another technological milestone with AI chatbots and LLMs, and that humans once again need to reassess how best to employ our time and resources. Just as the computer and Internet obsoleted the arduous search for answers using a card catalog and physical volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica, now that we have AI answer engines, we need to move to the next level of problem solving and dot connecting. As I wrote last year:
One of the broader consequences of the rising intelligence of AI models is that humans will be able to (and, indeed, need to) move to a higher level of abstraction, reasoning, and creativity. All tools that replace manual labor and/or thinking allow us to focus on the next level of challenges and problems to be solved. Indeed, AI implementation may enable an entirely new level of innovative idea generation and assist in bringing those ideas to fruition. The AI Age is essentially once again changing the game of what it means to be human, so the burden is now on us to figure out where to look next to move the species forward. When the cart and wheel became ubiquitous, not only did we spend less time lugging things around on our shoulders, we also invented entirely new ways of living, like farming instead of hunting/gathering, and a slew of creative and academic endeavors (e.g., formalized writing systems, poetry, metalworking, mathematics, astronomy, you name it). Regarding the AI Age we now find ourselves entering, I think humans can focus attention on developing/honing three major skills: 1) determining which questions to ask rather than trying to answer existing questions…; 2) editing and curating will be much more important to parse the explosion of AI-generated answers/creations and determine what is of practical value (see Edit Everything); and 3) improving decision making processes by incorporating the surplus of new AI generated content and tools (#1 and #3 are subjects I address here).

I’d like to spend some time exploring point number one above: asking better questions. Unfortunately, this topic hasn’t been addressed by mainstream education (at least in my experience in the US). As noted above, the core of my education was rote learning, i.e., here are some facts determined to be historically important – memorize them and repeat them back. Learning to connect concepts in new and interesting ways was rather marginalized, and, outside of advanced science classes, learning to formulate questions was entirely ignored. Granted, the ability to build a mental map and remember lots of things has provided a foundation for the many endeavors of generations of graduates. Now, however, we have an incomprehensible extension of the brain with the Internet and rapidly advancing LLMs like ChatGPT. 

For the last few months, I’ve been struggling to find resources to help me learn how to ask better questions (if you know of any, please send them my way). I am not sure if I’m just looking under the wrong rocks, or if asking questions is a relatively unexplored area of human cognition in modern times. Have we been that discouraged from asking questions? As I searched, I kept coming back to my dog-eared copy of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM). I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this book is a favorite of many famous inventors (e.g., Steve Jobs). While many of the concepts covered are highly abstract, there are concrete lessons for problem solving. I’ve struggled in the past to encapsulate this book for those who haven’t read it, so I am going to resist the temptation to distill a book that defies distillation. But, ZAMM is the best resource I have yet found for thinking about the topic of asking questions.

Reviewing ZAMM has helped me derive three key pathways of inquiry: 1) beginner’s mind; 2) Socratic questioning; and 3) Sophist rhetoric. I’ll cover each of these briefly.

Beginner's Mind
Let’s start with beginner’s mind, a concept from Buddhism that informs a childlike openness. Whenever I think about beginner’s mind, I think of Tom Hanks as ten-year-old Josh Baskin in the 1988 movie Big. Thrust into the body of an adult, Josh tries to navigate the seemingly alien behaviors of adults. Josh is fond of saying: “I don’t get it.” Followed by, “I still don’t get it.” Robert Pirsig explores the beginner's mind in the face of “stuckness” in ZAMM. You can get mentally stuck (e.g., due to an inability to adapt or an overdose of rational objectivity) or physically stuck (e.g., by a piece of malfunctioning hardware). Pirsig writes about a stuck screw that has rendered a motorcycle unusable: 
Normally screws are so cheap and small and simple you think of them as unimportant. But now, as your Quality awareness becomes stronger, you realize that this one, particular screw is neither cheap nor small nor unimportant. Right now this screw is worth exactly the selling price of the whole motorcycle, because the motorcycle is actually valueless until you get the screw out. With this reevaluation of the screw comes a willingness to expand your knowledge of it.
With the expansion of the knowledge, I would guess, would come a reevaluation of what the screw really is. If you concentrate on it, think about it, stay stuck on it for a long enough time, I would guess that in time you will come to see that the screw is less and less an object typical of a class and more an object unique in itself. Then with more concentration you will begin to see the screw as not even an object at all but as a collection of functions. Your stuckness is gradually eliminating patterns of traditional reason.
In the past when you separated subject and object from one another in a permanent way, your thinking about them got very rigid. You formed a class called "screw" that seemed to be inviolable and more real than the reality you are looking at. And you couldn't think of how to get unstuck because you couldn't think of anything new, because you couldn't see anything new.
Now, in getting that screw out, you aren't interested in what it is. What it is has ceased to be a category of thought and is a continuing direct experience. It's not in the boxcars anymore, it's out in front and capable of change. You are interested in what it does and why it's doing it. You will ask functional questions. Associated with your questions will be a subliminal Quality discrimination identical to the Quality discrimination that led Poincaré to the Fuchsian equations.
What your actual solution is is unimportant as long as it has Quality. Thoughts about the screw as combined rigidness and adhesiveness and about its special helical interlock might lead naturally to solutions of impaction and use of solvents. That is one kind of Quality track. Another track may be to go to the library and look through a catalog of mechanic's tools, in which you might come across a screw extractor that would do the job. Or to call a friend who knows something about mechanical work. Or just to drill the screw out, or just burn it out with a torch. Or you might just, as a result of your meditative attention to the screw, come up with some new way of extracting it that has never been thought of before and that beats all the rest and is patentable and makes you a millionaire five years from now. There's no predicting what's on that Quality track. The solutions all are simple-after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

Are we still talking about screws here? Not exactly:
Right now this screw is worth exactly the selling price of the whole motorcycle, because the attitude of "beginner's mind." You're right at the front end of the train of knowledge, at the track of reality itself. Consider, for a change, that this is a moment to be not feared but cultivated. If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas.
The solution to the problem often at first seems unimportant or undesirable, but the state of stuckness allows it, in time, to assume its true importance. It seemed small because your previous rigid evaluation which led to the stuckness made it small. 
But now consider the fact that no matter how hard you try to hang on to it, this stuckness is bound to disappear. Your mind will naturally and freely move toward a solution.

This is the first type of questioning, and it’s a primal, childlike way to form enquiries on a subject. By removing the barriers of preconceived notions, conclusions, and biases, you can let your mind quest its way to the solution, becoming open to any possible truth about the situation, no matter how inconceivable it might have first seemed. You have to throw out all preformed models of what something (e.g., a stuck screw) is and see it as something completely different to be probed.

Socratic Questioning
Now let’s look at the second type of questioning: the Socratic method. While the term might sound familiar, it’s not necessarily a concept most of us deploy daily unless we have a philosophy or law degree (of which I have neither, so what you read here is simply the spirit of the idea that I’ve twisted to my purposes). The Socratic method is a type of inquisition that helps someone get to the root, or basic assumptions, of their beliefs about a topic. I think of it as a way to drive toward first principles, i.e., an idea boiled down to its core. The Socratic method is what Pirsig refers to as the “Church of Reason”, and it’s defined by placing rationality on a pedestal. Logic, rational thinking, and the scientific method are used to uncover the real facts or motivations behind a belief or idea. The Socratic method is intended as a confrontation between two people where one is interrogating the other. An analogy I like to use for this is a therapist and a patient, where the patient is blinded by something that keeps them from seeing the real reason for a problem in their life. If you just keep asking questions (starting more broadly and then with increasing precision), eventually you can reach an “a-ha” lightbulb moment. This video contains an explainer on the Socratic method by dissecting a scene in the movie Pulp Fiction.

Rhetoric
The third and form of questioning I’ll mention here is Sophist rhetoric. Sophists reason by arguing multiple, opposing views of a particular question, regardless of their own beliefs on the topic. We often think of a rhetorical question as one asked without expectation of an actual answer. However, Aristotle defined rhetoric as: "the power of perceiving in every thing that which is capable of producing persuasion." History calls it specious reasoning, but I define rhetoric as the art of bullshitting. Venturing out of Ancient Greece and into the 21st century of fake news and broken reality, bullshitting transforms into grounds for inquiry. As longtime readers know, I often discuss the human brain’s penchant for storytelling. We tell stories about everything, to ourselves and others, nonstop. Most of the time, these stories are nonsense, or only very tenuously related to objective reality. However, in these stories lies a type of questioning that entails making stuff up and seeing where it goes. There is an element of childlike beginner’s mind to it, as well as an element of a Socratic back and forth, like swinging a pendulum to try and hit upon the truth. But, in the end, it’s a way to explore alternate realities, i.e., different potential truths, to see if we stumble upon a narrative that illuminates the key questions we should be asking. 

Pirsig’s alter ego, Phaedrus, struggles throughout ZAMM as he tries to tear down modern socioeconomic constructs built entirely on logic and rational thinking. In reality, we have become so enmeshed in – and fooled by – faulty logic and rhetoric that we can no longer distinguish truth from fiction – we actually believe the stories we tell ourselves and hear from others. Overapplied logical reasoning can also fail us by excluding ambiguity, subtleties, and the vast interconnectedness of everything. These are all key aspects of nondualistic thinking that a Western upbringing tends to exclude, or, in most cases, denies the existence of entirely. For example, science can’t possibly pin down any one single definition of normal, rational human behavior, yet humans have all sorts of arguments about myriad behaviors we see as unequivocally right or wrong. Reintroduction of nondualism to our reasoning can help us to spot ideas interconnected in strange and unexpected ways – ways that might defy our sense of logic but end up being closer to the truth. This, I believe, is the heart of Pirsig’s elusive concept of Quality: by combining nondualism and pre-logic concepts with logic and scientific reasoning, we can make more progress towards understanding than we would by relying on either dualistic or nondualistic thought alone.

Thus, to learn to ask better questions, I believe we must travel back in time to that foreign period before Plato, when humans used a different framework for interrogating the world around them. Specifically, we need to thoughtfully combine the Buddhists’ beginner’s mind and the Sophists bullshitter’s mind, both of which rely on nondualistic thinking, before we add a dash of the more modern Socratic logic and scientific inquiry. (Note: the modern conception of the Socratic method is a concept that comes from Plato’s representation of Socrates rather than Socrates directly, and I am glossing over and simplifying a very complex disagreement between Sophists and Socrates because [1] I am not an expert, and [2] I am merely using Greek philosophers as shorthand for the points I am making).

I’d like to overlay this framework with a supplemental fourth type of inquiry: editing. Editing is becoming one of the most important human skills in a world filled with infinite answers accessible through AI. Editing itself is a form of questioning: is this important? Is this of value? Or, as Pirsig might ask: can we find Quality in something? The Buddhists have a way of editing with two simple questions: Is it true? And, is it useful? The former is increasingly difficult to determine, but the latter is a little bit easier to suss out: if a question leads you to a useful answer, then pare down everything else that appears untrue or not useful.

The ultimate goal of questioning, of course, is to make sense of the complex world around us and glimpse probable future paths by identifying cognitive biases and excluding unhelpful stories of fantasy and misdirection. However, the four paths of inquiry I’ve discussed here – beginner’s mind, Socratic questioning, Sophist rhetoric, and editing – do not work nearly as well when practiced in the isolation of one person’s brain. You need someone else, or ideally a small team, with which to engage and hone the complex artform of asking questions. Be prepared for a learning curve given the lack of prior emphasis on such skills. However, learning to ask better questions is becoming existential as we find ourselves increasingly awash in a sea of answers. Given these circumstances, we’re better off determining which questions shine a light on key truths rather than endlessly sifting through noise and misinformation. AI may have all the answers, but the journey of interrogation is a creative endeavor that, at least for now, is still within the domain of humans.

✌️-Brad

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