Request for Research
Y Combinator has Requests for Startups - a list of ideas they wish someone would go build. The list works not because the ideas are guaranteed to be good, but because saying a problem out loud makes it feel addressable. Most people carry around a vague sense that something is worth doing and never name it, and so it never gets done. In the same vein, here's my current working list of research topics people should seriously consider, seriously:
- Sugar and happiness. Does sugar make us happier, and how long does the high last? There's surely real research on this, but I want granularity - bakery by bakery, café by café, boba shop by boba shop. Someone has to find the happiest croissant in the city, and it should be peer-reviewed.
- Dogs you don't own. Correlate happiness with the number of dogs you pass on the street, not the ones you own. (Because we all know that owning a dog is guaranteed happiness, so it's pointless to conduct further research on that front.)
- The marginal dog. At what number of dogs does owning one stop making you happier? 2 or 12?
- The entropy of a room. Measure how much extroverts move and mix versus introverts. Thermodynamics, for parties.
- The sex appeal of intellectualism. Follow Substack writers around and measure their game against equally good-looking non-writers. Take readings at 1 day, 1 month, and 10 years.
- Prediction for ghosting. Someone please benchmark what predicts a post-first-date ghost.
- Consumption of LOTR videos after 1am. An analysis of the demographics. You know who you are.
- Escaping the permanent underclass. Just one word: how?
That's all for now.