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What are your impossible problems?

by Raemon
15th Nov 2025
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Rationality
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What are your impossible problems?
4Jay Bailey
2Raemon
2mishka
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[-]Jay Bailey2h40

I don't know how much context you need for the more personal examples, so I figure I'll give them without context and then if you need more you can ask:

  • Having both the motivation and the mental stamina to work 60-hour weeks reliably.

  • Gaining 15+ points of IQ or the thing that IQ is measuring.

  • Becoming good enough at a field (abstract mathematics, mechanistic interpretability) that I've previously tried and found myself to be not that good at or interested in, such that it would then be worth my pursuing it as part of a research direction. (Another way you could write this is "Taking something that isn't my comparative advantage and making it that way")

  • Convincing an arbitrary person my values are good and worth adopting within a sixty-minute conversation. (I don't actually WANT to do this in full generality! But it sure does seem impossible and it sure would be nice to do things that are closer to that area, sometimes)

  • Becoming a professional tennis player at the age of 33 with little tennis experience. (Again not something I actually want, but it sure does seem impossible. I figure if this is a bad example, you can just not include it.)

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[-]Raemon2h20

For a couple of those (whichever ones you most actually want), what exactly is impossible about it? Say you just were going to set this as your goal and get started, where do you run into the thing that is "impossible" rather than merely "hard."

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[-]mishka44m20

Losing weight slowly and sustainably without serious drugs (e.g. BMI 30 => 25).

The main problem is that for many people this thing works like a ratchet, it’s easy to get +0.5 BMI very quickly, and if one lets a few days after that slip, then one is often stuck at that new level.

As a result, both going down and staying there often require consistent discipline, and the whole thing is rather unforgiving in terms of slip-ups, social occasions, and such.

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My followup to "What's hard about this? What can I do about that?" is going to be called "What (exactly) is impossible about this?". 

It's a somewhat similar move to asking "what's hard about this and what can I do about it?". But, in practice, the things people label in their brain as "impossible" are noticeably different from things they label as "hard".

Often, things that seem impossible, are not, actually. If you list out exactly why they are impossible, you might notice ways in which it instead it is merely Very Hard, and sometimes not even that.

Unfortunately, this is difficult to write a post about because, for pedagogical purposes, I need examples that are a) real-feeling, and b) simple enough that I can demonstrate diagnosing them in ~3 steps, and c) cover a variety of "types of impossibility", to demonstrate the versatility of the technique.

It would be nice to have more Real Impossible Examples.

Some existing examples on my mind

I started asking around for Impossibilities. One person brought up "dealing with depression", another was The impossible problem of due process. 

The former is a bit of an edge case because depression distorts your thinking which makes things meta-level-hard. In some sense dealing with depression is harder than solving peace in the Middle East, because I can at least think clearly about the latter. I do think I will probably include the depression example, but it kinda needs to be a special case.

The latter is a fine example but it has like 8 different impossible subcomponents. I could make pick a subset of them, but, I'd prefer a cleaner example where you can see the whole thing working.

The motivating example is "deal with AI takeoff before AI takes off", but that's going to be more like the payoff at the end of the post, rather than one of the intro examples.

 

So, with that in mind, what are some impossible-feeling problems you have? (For now, don't worry about whether they're a good fit for the blogpost, just seeing the array of what people feel is impossible is pretty useful).