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Questions to Challenge Your Beliefs 


It’s probably impossible to perfectly align your beliefs with your behaviors. The world is just too big, and too complicated.

A few examples: many people who are ‘really into politics’ can fully articulate their position on abortion but not have a single informed idea about foreign policy. Many people who are opposed to the legalization of marijuana may not be able to explain why they think alcohol should be legal. Many people who eat meat would be horrified if you asked them to kill an animal. You are probably reading this essay on a device that was built, at some step of the way, by using unethical labor practices (and we doubt you are in favor of those practices).

So no, we can’t build bulletproof arguments defending everything we do. Still, most of us could probably do better. We could challenge ourselves more often. To that end, we wrote a list of questions to get you started. 

The idea is not that you can ever be a perfectly consistent person, or that you should scramble to change everything about how you live. The point is to get you thinking, and to illustrate that the world is more complicated than we like to believe.

  • Do you eat beef? If yes, would you kill a cow?
    • [Repeat the above for any living thing that you eat.]
  • Are you good at your job? How do you know you are good?
  • How much of the food you eat could be produced for the next 500 years at current levels without causing extreme damage to the planet?
  • How many of the companies you have invested in create products that are designed to harm people?
    • Why do you invest or buy products from those companies?
  • If there was a follow-through score that showed the percentage of time you follow through with exactly what you say you are going to do, what would the percentage be? Would your guess and your coworkers’ or friends’ guesses about you differ?
  • When was the last time you donated money to a cause you care about? How much?
  • Do you think the death penalty should be part of our justice system? If yes: would you remain in support of the death penalty if you were sentenced to die for a crime you know you did not commit?
  • Do you pay attention to how your seafood was raised and caught? If not, why?
    • [Repeat this for anything else you eat, like meat and vegetables.]
  • If you were offered $10M per year to promote gambling to kids, would you?
    • [Revealed preference shows that lots of Twitch streamers would answer ‘yes’.]
  • Figure out the median time it takes you to answer a message from someone. Then ask: is this more or less than the amount of time I would like other people to answer my messages in?
  • Do you think heterosexual marriage should be legal? Gay marriage? What about polygamy? If you don’t have the same answer to all of those questions, why?
  • Do you consider yourself a hard worker? If so, what do you do all day? You wake up - what happens? How much do you get done and what specifically do you spend your time on?
  • How much of the success in your life is attributable to things outside of your control? If you come up with a very low number (<10 percent), write a detailed memo explaining why.
  • Do you have a strong opinion on any international conflict? If so, do you think you could give me a 30-minute presentation right now with a well-educated, mostly accurate, sound argument for your opinion?
    • [Repeat this for any strong opinion you hold about anything significant.]
  • What percentage of your day feels meaningful? Why isn’t it higher?
  • Do you call yourself a creative person? If yes, when’s the last time you made something meaningfully creative? What was it?
  • Write down a list of your 5 worst traits. If I interviewed the 10 people you interact with most and asked them for your 5 worst traits, would they align? If not, where would the discrepancies lie?
  • What do you keep telling people you want to do (learn a language, learn the guitar, etc.)? What specifically have you done to get closer to that goal in the last 30 days?
  • When you meet someone and they ask about what you do for fun - what are the first 5 things you say? How long did you spend on each of those things in the last 60 days? Is there anything you do for fun that you spend more time on (e.g. scrolling TikTok) that you wouldn't have mentioned?
  • Do any of these questions make you feel defensive or upset? Why?


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