“Answering a child’s questions” by Alex_Altair

I recently had a conversation with a friend of a friend who has a very curious child around 5 years of age. I offered to answers some of their questions, since I love helping people understand the world. They sent me eight questions, and I answered them by hand-written letter. I figured I'd also post my answers here, since it was both a fun exploration of the object-level questions, and a really interesting exercise in epistemics.

Thank you for your questions! I find that asking questions about the world and figuring out some answers is one of the most enjoyable ways to spend life.

For some questions, like "what is 2 + 2?" or "where is my phone?" there is a single clear and correct answer. But for most questions, and especially most of the interesting ones, it's more about bringing your attention to the topic and finding out whatever you can. I could have answered each of your questions with pages and pages of information. And different people would have given you different answers, each of which would give you different information relevant to the question.

Some questions you can spend your whole life getting better answers to. [...]

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Outline:

(01:55) What is electricity? Can I see it?

(03:49) If the earth had hair, what would it be?

(04:35) Why do birds fly, but I cant?

(05:16) Who built Boston?

(06:26) Do clouds eat?

(07:03) Do ants have friends?

(07:35) What is inside the fridge that makes it cold?

(09:10) What if the floor was lava for real?

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First published:
December 5th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bWJfniJ9kqsp5behg/answering-a-child-s-questions

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.