
Ask HN: What Are the Big Problems? - dredmorbius
I&#x27;m leaving this open-ended, there&#x27;s no specific criteria for responses.<p>I&#x27;m interested in <i>both</i> your list <i>and</i> the reasons why. Submitting your list <i>before</i> reading other&#x27;s contributions would be preferred.<p>Optionally: who is (or isn&#x27;t) successfully addressing them. Individuals, organizations, companies, governments, other. How and&#x2F;or why not?
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ajdecon
What would be necessary to make living in space a real and sustainable
possibility?

Heck -- what would be necessary to make our current, planet-bound society
sustainable in the long term?

How can we address the massive inequality in the world without massive loss of
life? Counting both the possibility of violent confrontation and the
possibility of millions of lives being cut short or degraded by poverty.

How can the problems of global warming be corrected or at least coped with?
Again -- without massive loss of life in the process.

Is it possible to reliably extend an individual human life beyond the span of
a century or so?

How can we build institutions, or at least ideals, which can effect positive
change over a period of hundreds or thousands of years?

Various groups are working on these problems, including governments,
corporations and NGOs. I don't really think any of them are doing a great job.

~~~
dredmorbius
What are your specific goals, opportunities, or risk mitigations for living in
spacer?

(I'm aware of common, and uncommon, arguments pro and con. I'm asking for
_your_ specific views.)

------
cl42
Here are the ones I'm thinking about quite a bit when I think about the long-
term viability of our species or society-as-we-know-it.

(1) Food security. Not many people talk about the fragile system that supports
our ability to stay nourished. At the same time, "nourishment" is relative --
we're getting fatter, it's unclear whether industrial agriculture is
sustainable, etc.

(2) Social inequality, lack of social mobility, etc. This is something that
will have a major impact on our way of life in the coming decades if it
continues. Look at Europe and the US to see how fragile and unstable our
societies are (and how much worse it's getting).

(3) AI. OK, everyone is talking about it, but I don't worry about it in the
context of AI destroying the world, but rather how problem #2 above and #3
mean fewer jobs, more inequality, etc. At this rate, we will not become a
society where our subservient AI-robot-slaves do our work for us while every
human is enlightened and self-actualized. Instead, automation will drive the
cost of labour down and thus cause more inequality in the decades to come. Of
course people will continue working -- this defines them, and whatever meagre
salary they make is necessary to survive.

(4) Our inability as a species to accept that galactic space exploration will
probably be painful, slow, and require generations of space travlers to
sacrifice their egos and lives to enable their ancestors to arrive at the
destination they set out for. Maybe I'm pessimistic but there won't be "warp
speed" and if that's the case, then space travel and galactic colonization
will require re-defining what it means to be a human race -- it'll be more
akin (and more extreme) to the way colonists visited the Americas -- they gave
up their families, communication with the "Old World", etc. to start a new
life. Now imagine these same colonists would set off but accept that they
would die on the journey, as would their children, and their grandchildren,
and only their grand-children would arrive at the destination to maybe
prosper, or maybe die... We need to accept that this might be what galactic
colonization looks like. I don't think we're ready for this as a
race/species/society.

~~~
tmuir
(4) - The driving force behind space exploration is the idea that Earth will
eventually be made uninhabitable by climate change. However, for any planet or
moon in our solar system to be a viable alternative, we're going to have to
induce "climate change" there as well, but on a far larger scale that what
Earth is experiencing. No other body in our solar system experiences the same
range of surface temperatures as Earth, has breathable air, fertile soil,
fresh water, comparable gravity, a food chain, weather patterns, or countless
other things necessary for large scale sustainable human life.

Doesn't it stand to reason that in the course of developing those
technologies, we'd be able to fix the Earth's comparatively minor problems
long before we could transform a planet or moon. One could even argue that the
advancement required would probably first arrive at asteroid defense, scalable
food solutions and small scale climate control to provide more habitable land
on earth for future population growth.

Perhaps exploring space is an appropriate vehicle to spur those developments,
but it just doesn't seem like a plausible endgoal.

~~~
DyingAdonis
It's the only end goal that supports human life after the death of the earth.

~~~
tmuir
The earth is not likely to die for billions of years. Its ability to sustain
human life on a large scale is certainly at risk. What I'm saying is that the
technological advances required to make even the best candidate planet a
superior alternative to earth, in terms of human habitability, are an enormous
superset of the those required to fix every one of the earths problems that
drove us to consider a replacement planet in the first place.

~~~
cl42
This assumes we won't find a viable alternative. I really like Interstellar
for this reason -- I can see us sending x ships to x planetary systems with
the understanding that all but one of those ships will likely perish for a
greater good.

I think the other reason we want to be on multiple planets is less about
climate change, but cataclysmic shocks (asteroid impact, nuclear war, etc.) --
if we're on multiple planets, we have a greater chance of surviving a
cataclysmic shock to one planet.

Your point on climate change is great, though -- you're right that if we can
terraform Mars or the Moon, we have the technology to fix whatever climate
issues are happening on Earth! Funny that this doesn't come up more.

~~~
tmuir
The chances of finding a preexisting viable alternative actually make the
prospect of developing all that technology seem trivial.

Life has evolved over hundreds of millions of years, influenced by the earths
environment, which itself has been influenced by its size/gravity, proximity
to the sun, axial tilt, air composition, our atmosphere, and countless other
macro scale variables, many of which are random and independent of each other.
Most of these quantities have exceedingly small windows that can support human
life. Furthermore, the particular sequence of these variables changing over
millions of years has shaped evolution.

Think of it like this: there are 68 teams in the NCAA men's basketball
tournament. This makes for 9.2 quintillion possible outcomes. There are
certainly many orders of magnitude more variables that have shaped the
evolution of life on earth. I'm not saying only one of those permutations
results in a planet suitable for humans, just that the sheer scale of how
large of a cosmic accident we are makes me think we'll run out of time before
we ever find another earth suitable for normal human life.

~~~
cl42
Hmm... You're just getting me thinking now: if we get sophisticated enough to
travel hundreds/thousands of light years, etc... Then wouldn't it also stand
to reason that we wouldn't even need to find planets, but rather can build our
own artificial "microplanet"?

Curious what you think.

~~~
tmuir
That's a far more difficult prediction: what technology will be developed in
the next several hundred years. What sticks out as some problems with building
a planet are where do you get all of the material, and how would you manage
its rotational and revolutional speeds as it grew larger? Propelling a space
ship seems fairly simple compared with propelling a planet.

Douglas Adams had some things to say about designing planets.

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fsk
Why was Bernard Madoff able to run his Ponzi scheme for so long?

Why are the "best" leaders people with evil tendencies? Is that a universal
law, or a symptom of a deeper problem?

~~~
dredmorbius
Interesting -- psychology and trust / defection issues are really interesting
areas, ones I didn't think I'd be as concerned with when I started asking
questions but they've rapidly climbed up my own priority scale.

On the Madoff story: I'd also be curious about the question of when it was
that he turned: went from being an honest operator to intentionally running a
scam. I'm assuming that there was a point at which his intentions were good.
One possibility being that he "got stuck" and couldn't find a way out.

~~~
fsk
Initially, Bernard Madoff made money honestly by trading in penny increments
when everyone else was trading 1/8 and 1/16\. When the exchanges decimalized,
he couldn't make money that way anymore, and switched to his Ponzi.

In our society, most of our leaders have the same criminally insane
personality type as Bernard Madoff. From their point of view, he was "one of
us". When some low-ranking SEC investigators got suspicious, Bernard Madoff
was able to use his influence to quash the investigation.

However, most of them don't do something flagrantly illegal like Bernard
Madoff. They can ruin a business while deflecting blame to other people, but
not something flagrantly illegal where they might get caught. They're "too big
to jail".

------
hdra
With more information going around the internet, how to identify hoaxes and
false reporting.

~~~
dredmorbius
I've just discovered there's a book addressing part of that problem:

[http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9780596159795-0](http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9780596159795-0)

Blog: [http://buildingreputation.com/](http://buildingreputation.com/)

Wiki:
[http://buildingreputation.com/doku.php](http://buildingreputation.com/doku.php)

~~~
rndn
Online reputation seems problematic to me, because it can be tricked
relatively easily. In many systems, online reputation tends to be a function
of dedication and time investment rather than ability, and asynchronous
communication, anonymity and technological opacity and valnurability are also
possible hurdles. Perhaps the problem is even AI-complete.

I'm wondering if one could somehow recover reputation from the real world to
online platforms. I think real-world reputation can work extremely well when
things are transparent to many people who can construct a coherent mental
representation of you and can thus approve of your abilities with high
reliability. It creates certain social incentives and pressures which I think
are hard to replicate with the current means online.

~~~
dredmorbius
I absolutely agree that the problem is hard. That's actually part of the point
of the reference. It's not just a set of cookbook recipies for "here's how to
implement a reputation system", but an exploration of goals, challenges, and
other aspects. It includes discussion of multiple issues I've considered on
the topic, including overt vs. implicit actions, goals of the moderation
system, Sturgeon's Law, and more.

That is: the reference is worthwhile for identifying the scope and dimensions
of the problem space, and is a record of and reference for those issues.

Real-world reputation is _also_ a hard problem. The book itself starts with
one of the more significant and widely experienced such reputation systems,
the FICO score. Understand too: transparency isn't something you can just
prescribe by dictate. People and organizations have desires for secrecy,
privacy, and some measure of forgiveness for past actions and behaviors.
Justifiably in some cases, not so much in others.

It's not as if real-world _or_ online reputation systems are simple. They're
not. But they're also not distinct.

------
mrcold
\- Greed

\- Lack of empathy

\- Short-sighted thinking

\- Organized religion

\- War on drugs

\- Lack of quality in education

\- Death and sickness

Or, you know, social apps and internet of things. Whatever floats your boat.

~~~
dredmorbius
Interesting list.

On "lack of quality in education:" do you see that as a new / increasing
problem, or an extant one amplified by growing needs?

What would you consider to be an _increase_ in quality of education?
Achievement? Specific areas of focus? Increased universality / literacy /
"bringing up the floor"?

How about intersections of this with the issue of cognitive development and
theories of distribution of cognitive skills (e.g., Jean Piaget), or of
impacts of early childhood development and environments (nutrition, pollution,
nurturing, exposure and acculturation) to intellectual development?

Are you suggesting that social apps and the Internet of Things are a mis-
placed priority? How or why?

If they are: then why do they seem to be such compelling objectives for
business and technical interests? Are there any benefits resulting regardless?

------
rndn
There was a similar thread on LessWrong a couple of days ago (though not just
on Big Problems but on existential risks):
[http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ma8/roadmap_plan_of_act...](http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ma8/roadmap_plan_of_action_to_prevent_human/)

Are you going to summarize the result of the crowdsourcing somewhere?

~~~
dredmorbius
Expanding my earlier response.

I've got a few goals here, at varying levels of meta.

One is to simply get inputs from people on what their perceptions (and
rationales) for "big problems" are. I'll try to summarize those.

One is to provide a reference check for my own views and models of the space.
I've had a few suggestions which expand, or possibly challenge, the framework
I've been using, though generally modestly.

I'm curious as to the expressed and implied views of what makes for
challenges, and the dynamics driving them. Again, I've been forming my own
framework for this, though I'm trying to leave that out of this process to the
extent I can.

At a meta level, finding the most productive forum(s) in which I can ask
questions and receive responses is another element. Though that itself
suggests another Big Problem: Where can people intelligently discuss Big
Problems....

To be further expanded at the subreddit mentioned previously.

------
phantom_oracle
The other guys have addressed quite a few interesting ones.

I have just 1 then: fresh water

over 8/9 billion creatures do get thirsty, 365 days of the year (can't forget
animals).

I'd like to learn more about how fragile this system is, from unbiased reports
(no climate-change promoters/deniers).

Or as the doomsdayers say, the next WW will be over fresh-water as a resource.

------
Animats
We have so much productive capacity in the developed world that we don't need
that many people to make all the stuff. We have no idea how to build an
economic and social system that deals with this.

------
tolas
“the internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in particular the
permanent extension of life beyond Earth; artificial intelligence; and
reprogramming the human genetic code.” - Elon Musk

~~~
dredmorbius
Are those risks, opportunities, or both?

------
mjklin
Take a look for yourself:

[http://www.uia.be/sites/uia.be/db/db/x.php](http://www.uia.be/sites/uia.be/db/db/x.php)

~~~
dredmorbius
Is there a ranking of these issues?

56,564 entries is a bit over my 7 ±2 short-term memory managemen capacity.

OK, here's a ranking:
[http://www.uia.be/sites/uia.be/db/db/x.php?dbcode=pr&go=t&t=...](http://www.uia.be/sites/uia.be/db/db/x.php?dbcode=pr&go=t&t=mp)

Though "monsters" at #6 suggests at best an idiosyncratic prioritization
basis.

More on the Union of International Organizations, for those curious:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_International_Associat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_International_Associations)

~~~
mjklin
Yes, I think "alien abduction" is also on there somewhere...plus every disease
known to man.

It's more like a brainstorm of all possible problems. You asked!

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DyingAdonis
Is consciousness a real thing or an illusory experience of continuity of self
in what is actually the deterministic mechanizations of brain activity.

------
mari_says
The difficult here is to separate the 'problematic' from the 'symptomatic'.
I'd say inequality is the problem.

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ccarter84
Water footprint of everything is hidden 99% of the time.(like carbon.... But
more pressing for us in Cali ATM)

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brudgers
To get us started, what do you think they are?

~~~
dredmorbius
I've written fairly extensively on that, and the essays aren't hard to find,
but I'd prefer _not_ colouring the discussion myself.

