There's a wide range of tasks that most people get why they’re hard. And then there are activities where I think a lot of people might think to themselves “what's so hard about that?”

On the one end of the continuum, you can have a visceral sense of the difficulty of a given task. On the other, you’ve never even given any thought.

Things that people appreciate are hard: playing basketball well, solving math puzzles, drawing lifelike pictures, memorizing human anatomy. The commonality here, I think, is that these are the kinds of activities that most people have some experience with. A typical school experience will have you try these all out and you will find that throwing a ball with exactly the right force in exactly the right direction is tricky.

Even something that is pretty foreign to people, let's say “rocket science”, might feel hard because people know it involves physics and math, and they’ve tried doing some physics and math.

In contrast, there are tasks that, not having tried them, people don’t feel like that should be that hard. That includes me. Until I fired a gun for the first time, I did not appreciate the [...]

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

November 13th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qnMwwwzmnfaQHvymc/what-s-so-hard-about-a-question-worth-asking

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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