Daily question, August 15, 2026
Politics
Has nuclear deterrence made great-power war less likely, or has it only raised the cost of the one that eventually happens?
Source: A standing question in deterrence theory
Decades without great-power war support one answer; the scale of a single failure supports the other.
Mathematics
Should significance testing set a fixed threshold like p under 0.05, or should it report the full strength of the evidence instead?
Source: A standing question about statistical inference
The replication crisis put this argument at the center of applied statistics; one side blames the method, the other blames its abuse.
Physics
Why is there far more matter than antimatter in the universe, when the known laws treat them almost, but not quite, symmetrically?
Source: A standing question about baryon asymmetry
The known asymmetries in particle physics are far too small to account for the matter we actually see.
Psychology
Libet found brain activity that precedes a person's conscious decision to move. Does that rule out free will, or just relocate where it happens?
Source: The readiness potential problem, after Benjamin Libet
Later work questioned whether that early signal is a decision forming or just noise the brain later narrates as one.
Philosophy
This sentence is false. If it is true, it is false; if it is false, it is true. Which is it?
Source: A standing question about self-reference
The liar paradox has outlasted every proposed fix for over two thousand years, from Eubulides onward.
Biology
Does selection act mainly on genes, on whole organisms, or sometimes on groups? Biologists who agree on the math still argue about the right description.
Source: The units-of-selection debate
Kin selection and group selection can produce the same predictions while telling very different stories about what selection 'sees'.
