• How does IARPA work? What are its successes?

• Are we not creating some things because of cultural values the same way the Greeks and Romans did?

• Do programs that fall out of scope for present institutions have a large threshold cost? If so what is it?

• Where are there other areas where temperature is a limiting component?

• Is it possible that there are just different scales that value capture can happen on?

• Do patents work better when firms are smaller or more uniform size?

• Are there any research search software systems that focus on researchers and lab groups instead of papers?

• How did Deepmind Start?

• Why didn’t new husbandry techniques occur until 1500?

• How do the statements about video games compare and contrast to statements about drugs?

• Why was the separation of silver from copper ores so important?

• What makes a Florence start being a Florence?

• What are the different startup versions that have established sales channels?

• How do we get more awesome sci-fi shit?

• If we ever encountered alien technology, could we even reverse engineer it?

• How does the Zettlekasten system deal with concepts?

• How can you tell if an expert has a minimum level of proficiency to wield power or speak to a platform?

• How do you systematize going against the system?

• Could you actually build a video game to find talent, or would you simply need to use a video game that exists?

• What open problems are there in crypto?

• Why were rails necessary for railroads (ie. Why didn’t they just invent giant steam powered carriages?)

• What do you do when you just see a connection between two pieces of literature?

• Where would a 2D picture converted to a 3D model be useful?

• How do you operationalize trust?

• Is electrical engineering moving fast?

• What if there were an API for more resources in the physical world?

• Why is working on 5 different things at 20% worse than working on 1 thing at 100%?

• Were there other corporations that created R&D labs to avoid anti trust?

• Where was the locus of research in the industrial revolution?

• How much does hope matter for technological progress?

• What does a future with quantum computing look like?

• How do you turn open systems into closed systems?

• Is it essential that a research org is a small fraction of the money factory’s budget?

• Have they tried combining 3D printed engines with generative designs?

• Are there proxy questions for how to pitch something to someone?

• How often do people realize a Florence while it is still a Florence?

• Is it better or worse to have more categories of goals?

• How successful did DARPA look ten years in?

• Has anybody come up with a way to map institutions?

• How do you identify where a technology is on an S-Curve?

• In startup studios, how are the incentives set up to stay vs. spin?

• What are the principles of a shared zettlekasten?

• What is the evidence that anti-monopoly restrictions harmed the economy?

• What are the success rates of incubators?

• Can you get VC-level returns by funding research?

• How do you deal with the tradeoff that technology commoditizes things but high margins are necessary to invest in technology?

• Why didn’t the romans create lateen sails?

• Is there a valuable dataset in research science and technology

• How do you find the note that is on the tip of your mind?

• Why aren’t there anonymous podcasts?

• Is the gap between best practice and average practice described in lever of riches during the renaissance still the case?

• How does patent analysis currently work?

• What does it mean to be 100 years behind technologically?

• How do you do reference notes for fiction?

• What if everything had an expiration date or term limits?

• Why weren’t buttons invented in Asia?

• Are there ideas that create a lot of value for a big company but would make terrible startups?

• Are there more interstellar objects entering the solar system or are we better at detecting them?

• Which places are world-class without being a top city?

• How does biochar work?

• What tools does the video game industry need?

• Where could you find a list of inventions that were rejected because there wasn’t a business case?

• Does spaced repetition on friends make Dunbar’s number go up?

• How do you find counterfactuals?

• How can you systematically avoid Parkinson’s Law?

• What if you had someone at the top of each research institution whose job is to see what’s cool inside?

• What makes a Florence stop being a Florence?

• Could you genetically engineer high quality wood to grow quickly?

• Why was Bell Labs Different?

• Why is “advance technologies that could be critical to national security” quantifiable but “revolutionizing our understanding of the human brain” is not?

• Do communities necessarily need not-busy people to curate them?

• If you were to use video games as recruiting tool, which of the traditionally valuable skills could you capture and how would you do it?

• What ‘humanities’ discipline is the most rigorous? Ie hardest to bs or laze your way through?

• How do you send personalized messages at scale?

• Are there counterexamples to the idea that it is important for big things to start small?

• Where are the lines between the slip box and resources?

• Why are quantum leaps important?

• Are there more places where instead of spending a lot of effort to get a high quality thing, you could just couple a high variance process with inherent value with strong filtering?

• Is it possible that there is a relation between financialization and missing progress? What is it? Which way does causality run?

• What if you had a list of all the labs in the world?

• How do you make something recession proof?

• How do you structure attention so that you connect to the right microexpertise at the right time?

• Do we perceive knowledge as an accurate prediction engine?

• What gave Israeli VC’s more patience?

• How does Mokyr’s Invention and Innovation compare/contrast with Invention and Discovery?

• What is a spin-triplet superconductor?

• Has anybody studied what made Paris Paris?

• Being propelled to a new stratosphere to achieve more things - can it happen to everybody who deserves it?

• What are the implications of the definition of invention in Lever of Riches?

• What are the passed-over ideas today?

• Are there examples of successful “gameification” where there was a successful game that actually obeyed another goal?

• Where could you find a list of patents that failed to gather sufficient evidence?

• Does the additively manufactured motor get better or worse with size? How?

• When is it better to work on things secretly and when in the open?

• How do people handle units in databases?

• Does the money factory need to necessarily be one organization?

• What do learning curves look like for different fields and jobs?

• What if your mission was “create technological surprise?”

• Are there examples of successful reverse engineering more “advanced” technology in history? Where are the limits?

• Why was the breast wheel not invented until the industrial revolution?

• Why is it important to have friends you can share slices of life with?

• What are the implications of investing being a manufacturing process?

• What other organizations are similar to Lux Research?

• How do you set up a system where reality is incentivized?

• Why do we seem to be in a world where humanity is retreating into a world of digital imagination?

• Where else has Wright’s law applied? Where has it not applied when it should have?

• Which inventions does the dispensability axiom not hold for?

• Is pouring money into adventures similar to pouring money into startups?

• Why did funding breakthrough research only focus on DARPA and ARPA-E?

• What is a Cooper Pair?

• Do clear standards actually lead to more innovation because you have a target?

• What makes a Florence Sticky For People?

• Why does breaking a Cooper pair kill superconductivity?

• Has anybody come up with a good theory of risk aversion focused on innovation?

• What is the history of Universities with respect to research?

• What would a 50 percent increase in power density enable that hasn’t been?

• What is keeping additively manufactured electric motors from getting to 50 percent efficiency?

• What was Robert Mushet’s thought process when he figured out how to improve steel?

• Has anybody written about how the structure of organizations and their funding are coupled?

• Why do companies want R&D off their balance sheets?

• Has anyone done something like the polymath project outside of math/cs?

• Why don’t we have ground effect vehicles?

• Are we actually living in a world where humanity is retreating into a world of digital imagination?

• Why hasn’t the challenges slide about ceramic engines been updated since 2015?

• If lit notes should be resummarizations, what about the juicy details or examples from references?

• Why was Europe slow to adopt paper?

• When is externalized research better than internalized research and vice versa?

• What are examples of technology being combined well?

• How do public-private partnerships start?

• When you’re working on something crazy, how do you tell a well meaning person that you don’t want to have to justify it to them right now?

• What if instead of doing knowledge maps where you draw connections between papers, you model it with people as the nodes and papers as the edges?

• How do you know which concepts in each discipline are most powerful?

• Is there something underlying the obsession with talent - ie. Is it the sign of a slack system?

• What is the status of Steel-slag based cement systems?

• Who will make the best PARPA PMs?

• Was Bell Labs an anomaly?

• Is it more effective to just present a vision and see if people are bought into it than trying to axiomatically build up the argument?

• How does DARPA strike a balance between problem-focus and solution focus?

• What is the knowledge that you can get only by physically going to a place?

• Why hasn’t Bell Labs been replicated?

• What are IARPA Seedlings?

• How does the definition of invention in Lever of Riches compare with the definition in Cycles of Invention and discovery?

• What do you think will work to enable more quantum leaps?

• How many high-alpha resources can there be?

• Does more valuable research actually happen on the coasts or are there just better commercialization mechanisms there?

• How do you predict where phase transitions occur in materials?

• Where does “you need buy-in from the top down” not hold in Big Companies?

• Why doesn’t economics use a probabilistic physics model per quantum physics?

• What made Florence a Florence?

• Why haven’t people started building airplanes with ceramic engines?

• How do you have an interview that isn’t just secretly answering the question “do you like this person?”