A question being permanently unanswerable or currently out of reach (or "too big") doesn't make it a poor question. I agree that academics focus on questions at the edge of reach with currently available tools, and that's fine and important from a practical standpoint. But I don't think that the validity of the question is determined by whether or not we currently have the tools to attack it. If you're interested in the important political and economic questions that face us today, that's fine, and I agree that in practice it's more immediately valuable to debate and resolve those questions. But I do think that the larger (and possibly unanswerable) questions are interesting to ponder. Maybe I picked a poor list as I wrote the original comment, but as the sibling poster said, the types of questions asked at edge.org are what I'd like to see more of.

I'm surprised that everyone is responding to my list of questions instead of the meat of the post. I just threw that list out there as an illustrative list, the real point I'm trying to make is in the body of the post. I also think that all of those questions I listed have mostly settled answers in academia that aren't popularly accepted by society. (e.g. people still cling to the idea of a "soul" separate from the information content of your brain)

EDIT: I also think that the most interesting work happens when asking questions that are at the edge of being taken seriously.