Problems
Diagrams | Matrices
What is the most valuable problem you can do something impactful about right now?
| Challenge/Problem | Category | Alignment | Conviction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trust | |||
| Crony Capitalism | |||
| The Industrial War Complex | |||
| Attention (Values) Manipulation | |||
| People desire fame over building character | |||
| Digital pollution and Scams from AI | |||
| The young can't afford a home, technology is leaving the old behind, both share loneliness. | |||
| Food contaminants | |||
| Our soil is dying |
Meta:
- Category: What mindset best matches the challenge?
- Alignment: The problem gained consensus of being defined accurately?
- Conviction: Size of bets made to solve it?
There is no point in complaining, take a sad song and make it better
Context
The Metacrisis
Trying to solve the metacrisis by giving lots of control to central authorities could lead to oppressive dystopias.
- Technological risks: Potential catastrophic impacts from advanced technologies like AI, biotech, cyber weapons, etc. becoming more accessible and powerful.
- Environmental issues: Climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, unsustainable resource extraction, etc. driven by an economic system requiring exponential growth on a finite planet.
- Fragility of global systems: Increasing vulnerability of interconnected global supply chains, institutions, and international order to disruption.
- Coordination failures: Inability to adequately address global challenges due to multipolar traps, arms races, short-term incentives, etc. that prevent necessary cooperation.
If everyone does their own thing without [coordination], things will likely end in catastrophe. The key challenge is finding a "third way" that avoids both catastrophic outcomes and dystopian centralized control.
Root Problems
Millions of people will soon have their jobs replaced by AI and will need to deal with losing income and identity while reinventing a skillset and sense of identity, this is on the backdrop of a global debt crisis, this has historically been a catalyst for people/agents with the power of persuasion to start wars.
Short term thinking combined with a lack of honesty, integrity, humility and trust across society to prioritise investing time and energy into understanding the problems that will have a critical impact on future survival.
Systems of government are outdated for modern complexity while leaders driven by desire for status are not incentivised to make meaningful changes that are required to make real progress. See the metacrisis and other domain centric problems.
The principal-agent problem arises when the interests of a company's owners (the principals/tax payers) are not aligned with those of its managers (the agents) who make decisions on their behalf. This can lead to conflicts of interest, as managers may prioritize their own goals over the objectives of the company's owners.
- Who really owns your state's assets?
- Do they have your interests at heart?
- What can you do about it?
Vote directly with your wallet
Domain Specific
Everything comes back to balancing the path to fulfilment
Trust
Trust in our institutions is at an all-time low. The media, government, and corporations are all distrusted by large numbers of the population.
- Proxy Governments
- Massive Debt
- AI Pollution
Crony Capitalism
- Nepotism
- Ego over ethics
- Short-term thinking
- Cannot trust centralised power
- The rich keep becoming much richer
Technology
The enemy within. Technology shapes our perception of reality.
The dance with evolving technology that empowers can also destroy us. Technology shapes humanities perception of reality far more than we shape it.
Some technologies more reliably make the world better than others. We need active human intention to choose the directions that we want, as the formula of "maximize profit" will not arrive at them automatically - Techno Optimism, Vitalik