Meaningful Questions Have Return Types

One way intellectual progress stalls is when you are asking the Wrong Questions. Your question is nonsensical, or cuts against the way reality works. Sometimes you can avoid this by learning about how the world works, which implicitly answers some question you had, but if you want to make real progress you have to develop the skill of Righting a Wrong Question. This is a classic, old-school rationalist idea. The standard examples are asking about determinism, or free will, or consciousness. The standard fix is to go meta.