Appendix: Hamming Questions — LessWrong
Author's note: these questions were usually the prework for an activity called "Hamming Circles," in which four or five people sat down and spent 20-30 minutes with each person's Hamming Question at the center of a slow, intimate discussion. The Hamming Circles activity is not fully described in this sequence, but these are the prompts given to participants before engaging in it. Richard Hamming was a mathematician who worked at Bell Labs during the 1940s-1970s. He had a habit of sitting down with scientists in other fields and asking them “What are the important problems of your field?” After they explained their field's most important open problem, he would ask them: why aren't you working on that? Though somewhat annoying, these questions are also extremely helpful for focusing one's attention on problems that are worthy of one's efforts. (See Hamming's talk “You and Your Research” for more.) It is valuable to pose an analogous question to oneself: What are the most important probl