"Applied Rationality Training Regime" #16: Hamming Questions

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 January 16. I look at Training Regime Day 16: Hamming Questions and see that Hamming, of the eponymous error-correcting codes, had a habit of asking Hamming Questions:

"What are the important questions in your field?" (and later: "Why aren't you working on them?") 

 And suddenly the year is 1981, my PhuD on "Infinite Structures in Programming Languages" is less than a year old, I'm teaching at the UDel CIS Dept which is very much in crisis mode and the guy asking me the basic Hamming Question is Bob Caviness, newly arrived as department chair.  Umm... okay, now I know it can be called a Hamming Question. Back to 2021. Mark Xu's take on CFAR's take is that at this point we ask what are the important questions in our lives and why aren't we working on them? And of course, to some extent I think I am, right now: the basic prerequisite for answering questions correctly is (some version of) rationality, and the basic prerequisite for working successfully on a project is (some version of) applied rationality. So I'm okay with that. I was going to write something about the questions I think are important in my life, but not now; maybe if I come back to this post and update it, which I'm now thinking about doing systematically with this sequence.

 (And back to remembering 1981, at the beginning of which I'd learned that the compilers course I was about to teach had last been taught by a guy using fake ID and of course fake credentials, with different names at the different places where he taught. So, rather than bring in my actually relevant PhD diploma which hadn't physically arrived yet [I'd spent a full day in December back in Philadelphia printing out pieces of dissertation in between computer crashes, shoving most of the pages through an IBM Selectric twice with a change of typeball in between]  I showed my students my Doctor of Zoology diploma, from Epsom Chapel Nursery School & Kindergarten, 1958.)  

  And today is Bruce Schneier's birthday: Bruce Schneier knows Alice and Bob's shared secret.