What's the most important problem in the world? Are you working on it?

Maybe a nitpick, but Aaron Swartz was probably quoting Richard Hamming:

And I started asking, "What are the important problems of your field?" And after a week or so, "What important problems are you working on?" And after some more time I came in one day and said, "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?" ... If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.

It is the main idea behind his lecture/essay "You and your Research", which is worth reading: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.pdf or watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw

Education. I think there's no good reason why only elite schools have access to great lecturers and great materials. Great lectures with great contents should be recorded once and be made digitally accessible to all schools. Teachers should be focusing on student developments at personal level instead of reinventing the wheels of preparing for lectures!

I was working on this as a startup, we did have some good results, but the challenge was to take it at a bigger scale. Unfortunately underserved schools/parents just don't have the spending priority nor the awareness on how important great education is, making it hard to make a profitable startup out of the idea. My next direction is to take it as a non-profit organization, and so I'm striving to start a different business which I can live off and hopefully cross-subsidy this non-profit idea. My journey is still long way to go :(

Pervasive pessimism.

Fueled mostly by omnipresent ragebait media targeted directly at our lizard brain.

Things are better than ever and yet our attention is mostly spent on what’s wrong and who we can blame for it.

Look at how utterly dystopian the average sci-fi book/show/movie is. As tech and its makers continue to grow in influence, is it any wonder that the world seems to resemble Black Mirror more each day?

A friend and I are addressing this problem. We’ve started by building a community to envision positive futures: https://reddit.com/r/TheFutureIsGood

We invite other optimistic builders to submit ideas for good future that are almost inevitable given all the progress we’ve made! We’re using AI generative art to materialize these visions for now, with traditional art also being considered.

Thanks for the great prompt and opportunity to plug a creative project.

Finding ways to overcome the effects of childhood and ancestral trauma, so we can stop perpetuating it.

Although there are lots of therapies which claim to do this, I don't believe that most of them work very well. We've hardly begun to recognize this problem, let alone solve it. But once you start to recognize it, you see that its effects are so profound that little else is of primary importance.

The limited compassion of human beings.. Most people don't care that much unless they're directly affected. This limits the willingness of society to do what's arguably in our best interests, like preventing severe environmental problems by limiting unnecessary consumption, or contributing to a culture where we help provide everyone with basic necessities like food - we may be the ones needing help in the future. I think not caring that much for others also contributes to meaninglessness, unhappiness, and mental health problems.

I don't know the solution, but am trying to "work on it" through e.g. donations & vegan advocacy - I think reducing the abuse of animals in factory farms is a "low-hanging fruit" for reducing suffering & ecological problems - it's usually much more efficient to eat plants directly instead of feeding them to animals.

The biggest problem I can personally address is the lack of capability based security[0] in our operating systems. It's so bad that most people don't even know what it really means. I've been spinning up comments and explanations to try to shift the Overton window in small increments for a decade now.

In your wallet, a $5 bill is a capability, you can't accidentally give away your car by handing someone $5. It stands alone. There's no way in a computer to just give a program access to ONE file, at run-time.[1]

Because we don't have capabilities, our computers have to blindly trust code, which is why we have virus scanners, which can't actually work in all cases.[2][3]

So, in effect, we can't trust our computers. Which means we effectively must ride the upgrade/security updates treadmill to try to stay ahead. Which forces things like the Python 2/3 breakage into our lives. The amount of badness from the simple inability to do what you could previously do with an IBM PC XT with dual floppy diskettes is maddening to me.

But I keep pushing, and trying to figure out ways to make the case, and help raise awareness. I hope it helps. Otherwise I could be learning about kinematic mounts[4] or something else fun.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security

[1] I know about app-armor which isn't really a capability based secure system.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confused_deputy_problem

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinematic_coupling

The coming wave of next-generation gene therapy and its implications. I think it might not arrive in full in 20-50 years, but eventually a point will arrive when we will be discussing reversion of somatic mutations and its implications for aging, and wrestling with what it means to be a "bad person" when the means of changing self and personal identity are within society's ability. It's one thing for our notions of justice and worth to point to ideas (implicit or explicit) about a particular person as an immutable quantity; it's another to not have any excuses, environmental or genetic, for changing that, even deep into development, especially when aging is slowed dramatically. Society is going to have to wrestle with some deep issues that aren't being addressed at the moment.

Am I working on it? I guess I don't know how to best do it in terms of my abilities, opportunities, and impact (writing? nonfiction or fiction? research? if so how?) and also feel pushed out of the loop in some ways that I've tried.

Sexual violence and abuse.

It's mostly directed at women and girls. The potential pool comprises half of humanity.

Is it coincidence that women still struggle for parity with men? That STEM, leadership, and governance roles are still dominated by men? That society expects women to sexualize themselves - even in subtle ways that qualify as 'normal'?

Feminists have long argued that the crises humanity now faces are the consequences of a patriarchal society: competition, industry, exploitation... What if they're right? What if this really is the result of an unbalanced civilization?

I'm guessing most of the readers here are male. Go and talk to your female partner or relatives - too many will have a one degree connection to a victim of sexual abuse. That is shocking and dismaying.

We should be furious. But sexual violence and abuse is an intimate crime that usually happens in private. By its very nature, it crowds the victim with feelings of shame. It's embarrassing for others to talk about. Yet the consequences are devastating and far reaching; chronic sexual abuse absolutely affects development (I have a citation, but not with me at this moment).

War related sexual violence is a vast, unacknowledged, collateral crime with victim numbers comparable to military casualties: gang rape, maybe on multiple occasions, sometimes with forced pregnancy, sometimes with genital mutilation - how does one recover from that? How does a society deal with that?

Sexual violence and abuse are endemic the world over; not specific to any culture or society (again, I have citations). This suggests it's a flaw within humanity itself...

What am I doing about it?

At the moment, I'm working with the author of this unique book: https://www.consentcollective.com/courage to produce translations into other languages. It's free to read online, and book sales enable the author to keep working on, arguably, the most important problem in the world.

We need reliable systems of democracy & general governance. These systems should begin with the individual and naturally aggregate into collective management. They should be auditable, transparent, highly accessible, lack centralized points of failure or control, and minimize the requirements of trust in any finite groups of humans.

Solving this problem area is my core focus. I want every human being on Earth to have a voice in controlling their destiny. I want everyone to determine where their public fund contribution should go (if they so desire), who should represent them (if anyone), and be able to fully audit the entire trail of government spending / lawmaking / legal precedent/ contracting / resource planning -- all in an accessible way.

I want people to engage with the governments of Earth directly, or voluntary cede their voice to someone that they believe represents their value -- while always retaining the power to take back their voice. This is a form of Liquid Democracy.

Cooncidentally, I believe this same system is the key to AGI. It is essentially a type of mass cluster consensus of neurons. Each human brain -- a node in the network -- is an Earth neuron. With ~8 billion humans, if connected in an optimal way, reducing latency and enabling any neuron comms with any other neuron, without any censorship nor friction, a mass higher intelligence forms. The tech stack enabling this intelligence can also be utilized with synthetic neurons.

Although I believe this will cascade into solving every other problem (if you organize minds properly with todays resources, we can trivially solve every conceivable immediate problem we collectively face. That is a fact), I approach this in a relaxed and nonchalant fashion at my own pace. I have relatively no resource allocation in society and have little desire to pursue that in the confines of existing systems, so if others don't value this dream, I have plenty of time still.

If I had a stable spot in the mountains far away from people and well supplied, I'd have this built within 5 years. It is sad to live in a time where you can't just chill by a river in nature without the sounds of engines, roads, planes, or other distractions, and all the places you can do this are owned by someone / have time limits as public land.

A man can dream.

To me most important thing by far seems to be dealing with CO2 emissions, both those being emitted, and those previously emitted which need capturing. I did work indirectly on that in the past, but to earn a living am currently doing something else worthwhile but not as important

Maybe not the most important problem, but I've been thinking about the massive amount of paperwork that everyone is flooded with through life, at least in the US.

A few of my family members have had health issues since birth and the amount of paperwork my family has been constantly filling out for decades is extremely overwhelming. And this is all extra paperwork added to the normal amount coming from work, the bank, college, car insurance, etc. Even simple forms such as renewing your drivers license add up when there are tens or hundreds of other similar forms every year.

One seemingly low hanging fruit is the time waste of copying the same information over and over when filling out these forms. In 2023, you would think that this part would have been solved by now, but I don't know of any tools with this functionality. I wonder if the complexity of PDF files is one reason that no tools currently exist to solve this problem.

This is mostly a rant because I still cannot figure out any good solutions to this, nor am I actively working on it aside from thinking the problems through in my free time. New technology might be able to solve the problem of copying similar info between forms, but I wonder if it can only be solved at the government level. And I have no idea how to go about solving that because its not like all paperwork is bad; I can understand the need for it in most cases. I just feel like the action of filling out forms should not be such a overwhelmingly large stressor in modern life.

I would love to hear other people's opinions on this. I feel like if there could be any solution that allows average people to spend less time filling out and worrying about paperwork would be a massive benefit on our mental health.

social network for dogs

they are man's best friend, therefore anything else should take a back seat

Working on nuclear fusion. Debatable whether that's ultimately the best way to tackle climate change given how well solar is doing these days, but hey...

Biological Machines Genetically created to manufacture chemicals in a compostable way.

essentially, we grow refineries for all manner of chemicals which are extracted much like canola oil or other such industrial by products of farming. except that we would be refining different complex chemicals. Additionally, in the same vein, development of photosynthesis organic batteries which are like plants and which store solar into chemical and then can extract like a battery the electrical power and the plant then breathes and converts the chemicals

I think the most important problem is to move the society towards the next stage in which everyone can pursue whatever they want, be it art, science, technology, etc., and have the total freedom to do so without being burdened with financial or others. All people are inspired, not forced, to pursue whatever topic they are interested in and are given sufficient resources to do so.

So that the human society can move through the Great Filter and become a galactic species eventually.

Finding the theory of everything.

ChatGPT: "The theory of everything (TOE) is a hypothetical single, all-encompassing, coherent theoretical framework of physics that fully explains and links together all physical aspects of the universe. TOE theories aim to provide a single theory that describes the fundamental physical interactions and principles of the universe, and to combine the general theories of relativity and quantum mechanics into one unified theory. It is also sometimes referred to as the "ultimate theory of the universe." While many theoretical physicists believe that a TOE is possible, it is currently not known whether such a theory exists or if it can be discovered."

Democratizing resilience and catastrophe bonds.

The benefit:

Incentivizing good behavior in municipalities and corporations while disrupting the insurance market.

Why I didnt do it:

Met with a number of big wigs in the market and realized I didnt have the energy at this point in my career to raise money to build a two headed market.

The nature of Consciousness is the key to solving all other problems, especially social issues like war and poverty. Actually consciousness was properly understood long ago in Vaidik culture as the Absolute. Thus the modern view of consciousness as a phenomenon is a regression, a failure to apprehend its real nature. Consciousness, as the Absolute is the foundation of everything. Absent consciousness there is no experience. When consciousness changes, as in sleep, the world disappears. The world is the phenomenon and consciousness is its cause. We go deep into this understanding on our channel https://YouTube.com/@Gnowly108

imho.

most important problem in the world right now: how to avoid climate-change

and (sadly) nope, i'm not working on it :)

Controversial, but I think the biggest problem is population. Many of our problems wouldn't be an issue if we had fewer people instead of perpetually waiting for the newest tech to save us. No, I'm not working on it.

Disconnect between education and employment.

I have written about it here: https://loan-free-ed.neocities.org

Helping the world to overcome the habits of listening only the music they were programmed to and encouraging creators to make more of their own music on Formaviva.com.

Ah, the Hamming Question[0]. I prefer the original formulation: What are the most important problems in your field, and why aren't you working on them?

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/P5k3PGzebd5yYrYqd/the-hammin...

Not enough street music, the extinction of street music.

Maybe not the world, but the us government contracting process is broken and wastes trillions of dollars. The way it is set up does not favor quality but instead, shoddy work, cost over runs, late deliveries and perpetual renewals. Also the phrase “we have to use this budget or we won’t get it next year”

The most important problem in the world is that our technology has evolved far faster than our irrational primate brains, and we've finally reached a dangerously self-destructive level. Individually and collectively, we lack the ability to use that technology wisely.

I think it's helpful to define the word important because important can mean either most fundamental, or most urgent. The answers as to "what is important" for the two different definitions will almost always give very different, possibly opposing, answers. That being said, it sounds like you're asking each person to define importance for themselves subjectively, and then answer accordingly.

Since I posed the "important" issue, I'll answer both. Though there is a common thread. The common thread is health. Health is a word with a relatively vague definition, but nonetheless a powerful concept. Our society is a complex system and healthy can be a description of individuals, groups, the whole of the population, and the environment. For now let's consider the health of the whole human population. Even if we now have scoped health, it's not hard to see how impossible it would be define it precisely, because as the population and culture evolves, so must our idea of health. If we optimize for only a few metrics (e.g. max profit and minimum death) we hurt the dynamism/holism of the system. There isn't a single set of metrics that actually covers everything and it's dynamism. Despite our difficulty defining it, we know it when we see it, and this brings us to the most fundamental problem in society.

Most fundamental: What is health for society? How do think about and map physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health into comprehensible value systems, and then map those to policies. Instead of relying on static definitions, what are some of the perhaps more dynamic markers of health? How do we incorporate new technologies into our concept of societal health?

Most urgent: What are the areas that are currently causing, or have massive risk of causing, "disease" or suffering in society? Climate change, bio-tech risks, failing food systems, authoritarian drift, education (decreased sense-making capacity and the degradation of the information commons). Those are my big ones, but there are others.

Much of my thinking is influenced by Daniel Schmachtenberger (though no affiliation). If these ideas resonate with you, check him out on the youtubes. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=daniel+schmacht...

Am I working on it: I am studying systems science generally, I work for an educational nonprofit, and I'm experimenting in increasing my own health capacities and doing some teaching and coaching others.

The most important problem in the world are people trying to find the most important problem in the world and solve it instead of focusing on their close community. Start humanforming your neighbourhood before terraforming mars

I don't know about the whole world, but I know the most important 3 problems in the US: the cost of housing is too high, the cost of healthcare is too high, and the cost of education is too high.

I'm not working on any of the above 3 problems, because I have to pay for housing, I have to pay for healthcare, and I have to save for the education for my kids.

>What's the most important problem in the world?

Survival.

>Are you working on it?

Most of the time.

Too bad that takes as much work as it once did to provide remarkable prosperity.

Finding out what the most important problem is is quite important to work on the most important problem. So philosophy of sorts?

Non- energy hungry PoW mining (fuck PoS). Yes, I'm working on it in some free weekends.

Nuclear weapons. No. Not sure how besides expensive digging.

Spending more time with my kids. Working on it.

I don't know what the world's most important problem is and if I did I wouldn't want to solve it, i've got enough of my own problems.

Suicide