November 25, 2024

List of Mysteries

Here’s a few things that I personally still find mysterious. If you have recommendations to read up on any of these, let me know!

• What is the origin of interest? Being genuinely interested in something is a superpower. If you’re interested in something, you’ll be willing to spend more time on it than anyone might reasonably expect. Having “motivation” is even the first step of Ericsson’s deliberate practice — but where does motivation come from? The psychological literature, at least as far as I’m familiar with it, hasn’t studied this topic in detail — is it nature, or nurture? Can we direct what we’re interested in? Why hasn’t psychology as a discipline studied this topic? Or, if psychology does provide answers, why aren’t they better known?
• Why does alcohol remove inhibitions specifically? Inhibitions feel like a very high-order thought process — “I shouldn’t do this, because in the future, there will be consequences”. Isn’t it bizarre that there’s a common substance that’s non-toxic in reasonable quantities and, among other reasonable effects, quietly turns off inhibitions, such that you don’t even notice that inhibitions have been turned off?
• Why don’t people RTFM? My wording is slightly cheeky, but I’m genuinely curious. With many tools and services, problems can be easily solved by consulting manuals, documentation, or other written resources, and reading the whole manual can provide pointers to useful features you’ve never heard of (or, as Hillel Wayne recommends, “search less, browse more”). But even in high-literacy disciplines like software engineering, many people don’t even think of checking the docs when they have a question, even if their question is specifically called out in the docs! Why do so few people actually read the docs?
• What was really going on in the Lead Masks Case? In 1966, in one of Brazil’s smaller cities, a boy flying a kite discovered the bodies of two men, each wearing a formal suit and a homemade eye mask made of lead. There were no signs of a struggle, but each had an empty water bottle and a small notebook that told them to, at a particular time, “ingest capsules, after the effect protect metals await signal mask”. Investigators discovered they were electronics technicians from a town a few kilometers away and that they had suddenly arrived a day or two before their death, appearing very nervous. By the time the autopsy was conducted, the bodies were too badly decomposed to test for toxic substances. As far as I can tell, all this is strictly factual. The best explanation, dug up by Skeptoid, is that they were members of a local community of “scientific spiritualists” who were apparently overdosing on psychedelic drugs to see spirits. Which I suppose makes sense, but still... what? At this point even most “paranormal investigators” throw their hands up and mumble something about UFOs. What did these two think they were going to see?
• Why is the modern horror genre so metatextual?: Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, three of the leading lights of contemporary horror fiction, have all written novels that take place on horror film sets or comment on the nature of horror films.¹ Scream, one of the longest-running slasher franchises, is based on the idea that the characters know they’re in a slasher film; The Cabin in the Woods, too, is a half-serious parody of horror film. Many of the best SCPs and creepypastas work by blurring the lines between fiction and reality or commenting on the nature of horror itself. There’s just as many horror works that are completely straightforward, but in the contemporary genre, metatextual questions are always just below the surface. In comparison, romance and mystery may love the trope of “the romance reader who’s actually the love interest” and the “whodunit fan who solves the mystery”, and there’s examples of sci-fi and fantasy worlds where the characters know they’re in a story — but commentary on the genre itself or fiction as a whole feels comparatively rare. Literary fiction has its metatextual strain — Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler among the commonly-cited examples, although it arguably goes all the way back to Don Quixote — but even there, the more straightforward narratives of Elena Ferrante or Sally Rooney are more popular. What makes the modern horror genre so amenable to metatextual maneuvers? What primes modern horror creators and audiences for metatextuality? Or, if other genres comment on themselves just as aggressively, why does the horror genre appear more metatextual?
• Why are some drivers so aggressively hostile to cyclists? Even I am frustrated by cyclists that speed through stop signs or duck-and-weave in traffic. But the level of vitriol some drivers fling at cyclists is far out of proportion to impact — cyclists have merely chosen a different form of transportation that, at most, mildly inconveniences drivers. Those drivers seem personally threatened or offended by the existence of cyclists — but why?
• Why does the Anglophone world hate dubs so much? English speakers strongly prefer subtitles to dubbing, especially for live-action. But my understanding is that in other cultures, like most of Europe and Latin America, dubbing is much more common. Why is that the case? Is it related to the much earlier deployment of synchronous sound in English-language filmmaking?² Is it because of the hegemony of English-language media in most of the world? But, presumably, subbing is cheaper than dubbing — how does economics play into this? And why is this preference so strong among English speakers?
• Why was materialism unpopular in the ancient world? In ancient Greece and Rome, Epicureanism expressed a recognizable materialist atomism; in India, the Cārvāka tradition likewise promoted a naturalistic form of philosophy. Both of these traditions eventually died out, though Epicurean works did influence proto-scientific Renaissance writers. I’m not familiar with other major materialistic philosophical traditions in other cultures, though I’d suppose they must exist. Today, however, materialism is popular in Anglophone philosophy, thanks partly to the influence of the Scientific Revolution. Why was materialism so unpopular in the ancient world, and why did it suddenly become popular again in the modern world?
• Why is it so hard to remember names? Remembering names is a basic social skill, even in the small-scale societies humans originally evolved in. So how come I find it so hard to remember names, even when I see people semi-regularly, even when I remember other basic facts? And how do some people remember every name they learn, even two years after a five-minute conversation?
• Why do I unconsciously mix up names? Sometimes I’ll unconsciously refer to my wife by a close friend’s name or call my brother by my dog’s name. Usually, I don’t even notice when this happens, until someone points it out. This is probably due to some higher-level association — I’m close to my wife like I’m close to my friend — but then why does it only happen for names? Why don’t I ever mix up, say, a job title and refer to someone as a product manager when they’re really a software engineer? Or why don’t I mix up neighborhoods or other locations? Why does it seem specific to names?
• Why do I retain information better when reading than when listening? Anecdotally, I prefer reading to listening, because when listening I more often have to repeat passages or realize after that I absorbed nothing. My understanding is that the “learning styles” so popular in the psychological literature a decade ago were a victim of the replication crisis and aren’t widely considered valid today. So why do I read better than I listen? Is it simply case of paying more attention when reading than when listening? But, if so, then why is that the case?
• Why do some people hate running? Why do some people love it? Evolutionarily-speaking, running seems like a very basic human skill — either to hunt prey or escape predators. Given that, why do some people hate the physical act of running, even if they “want to” run. Why don’t they feel the “runner’s high”? On the other hand, running is energetically-intensive and, frankly, kind of a pain. So why do some people loving running so much they run ultra-marathons?