alt Hacker NewsThere isn't an "underlying selection of the questions" here, they're open ended, vague and look like they're chosen by a disconnected academic trying to be topical.
They're looking for a certain type of person, but we can't figure out who that is from the questions. We could probably do some cold reading just from knowing that it'll be a bunch of academics doing the assessing and they do tend to see the world in a certain way but there isn't anything to glean from the paper.
They’re looking for the type of person who can make an argument. That really is both what they say they are looking for and what they actually are looking for. No cold reading would be helpful or necessary.