Hamming Questions

Hamming Questions

A guided introspection technique based on Richard Hamming's provocative question: "What are the most important problems in your field, and why aren't you working on them?" Adapted by CFAR for personal life and career strategic review.

Three Modes

1. Design Mode — Help create a structured Hamming introspection session
2. Practice Mode — Walk through the question battery on a specific domain
3. Execute Mode — Run a full Hamming session to surface the user's real priorities and bottlenecks

The Question Battery

Present these in sequence, giving the user time to reflect on each:

Core Problem Identification

• "What's the biggest problem in your life right now?"
• "If you think about the gap between your current life and a better version, what would close the largest fraction of that gap?"

Limiting Factor / Bottleneck

• "What's the limiting factor on your growth and progress?"
• "What's the key resource you have the least of?"
• "The speed of a chemical reaction is determined by the slowest step. What's yours?"

Recursive Bottleneck

• "What's preventing you from solving that bottleneck?"
• "Is there a meta-problem whose resolution would unlock solving many other problems?"

Suppressed Problems

• "What do you feel you're 'not allowed to care about'?"
• "What do you generally not think about because it feels too big or impossible?"

Genre-Savviness

• "If your life were a novel, what would be the obvious next step?"
• "Where is the plot dragging?"
• "If someone isn't making major impact in 5 years, what would have stopped them?"

Quantity-Sensitivity

• "Which problems have effects that are the largest order of magnitude?"
• "Where would a 10% improvement have the biggest impact?"

Facilitation Approach

Individual Session (30-45 min)

1. Settle in (2-3 min): Quiet contemplation, deep breathing
2. Initial brainstorm (10-15 min): Work through the question battery. Write freely, don't filter.
3. Bottleneck exploration (10 min): For the biggest problem, dig into what's preventing progress
4. Suppressed problems (5 min): Check for things felt to be "too big" or "not allowed"
5. Synthesis (5-10 min): What patterns emerge? What surprised you?

Pushing Past Surface Answers

• When someone gives an answer, ask: "And what would solving that enable?" (upward)
• Ask: "What prevents you from solving that?" (downward)
• "Is there a more general pattern here?"
• When someone says "that's impossible": "What makes it impossible? Is that truly immutable?"
• "If you had unlimited resources, what would you do first?"

Common Patterns People Discover

• Alignment failures: Working on expedient/safe problems rather than important ones
• Suppressed dreams: Things marked "impossible" that are actually addressable
• Meta-level bottlenecks: The constraint is belief about ability, not actual ability
• Temporal blindness: Prioritizing urgency over importance
• Lack of reflection: The biggest bottleneck is not having systematically thought about what matters

Practice Exercise

1. Pick one domain (career, relationships, health, projects)
2. Work through the full question battery for that domain
3. Identify the #1 Hamming problem
4. Identify the #1 bottleneck preventing work on it
5. Generate 3 concrete next steps to address the bottleneck
6. Murphyjitsu those next steps

Hamming Circle Format (Group)

Optimal group: 4 people, ~20 min per person:

1. One person presents their Hamming problem
2. Others listen, then ask questions to deepen understanding (not solve)
3. Focus on: "Is there a more general pattern?" and "What assumption haven't you questioned?"
4. Person summarizes what they got from the conversation

Recommended frequency: every 6-18 months.

Integration

• Goal Factoring: Factor the Hamming problem into sub-goals
• Murphyjitsu: Stress-test plans to address it
• Internal Double Crux: When the bottleneck is internal conflict
• Resolve Cycles: "Just try to solve it right now" for 5 minutes