Potential Life Missions #

Finding a way to use my time and resources to make the world a better place is a goal of mine. Here are some roads I could pursue to do that.

Empowering People #

I currently believe that creative people are the solution to the current problems facing humanity, and all future problems as well. See Utopia for more details. Given this, a high leverage way to make a world a better place is to make it easier for people to do their thing.

Problem Accessibility #

Lots of big problems today are difficult for the average person to just dive into. If we could make it so that the average person could effectively use their spare time to work on these big problems, and built a culture encouraging this, we could unlock a lot of latent creative power.

Ways to do this include:

Advertising Next Steps #

Making more non-fiction content with a “current state of things” or “next steps” section that encourages individuals to experiment with the frontier.

Giving People Time #

Giving people more time/money to dig into problems, e.g. with UBI.

https://justinmares.com/apply-for-an-trajectory-change-grant/ is an idea.

Building a Problem-Accessible Culture #

Building open (free to participate in) communities around societal issues.

Education #

I think that having students in schools spend more time actually trying to tackle real problems, as opposed to working on contrived assignments might help empower more people. IMO school in general is too focused on giving students a strong base of pre-requisite knowledge. Many people (myself included) hold the sentiment that the most important thing they learned in school is “learning how to learn”, since much of the actual content they learned is not directly relevant to the problems they are trying to solve. Despite this, they are still by and large effectively solving those problems that they were not schooled to do. I think this is because people have a strong ability to pick up pre-requisites quickly when it is obvious why they need to know them given the problem at hand.

Therefore, if we made school either much shorter, or gave students real problems to work on in a low-risk environment, this may lead to good outcomes.

Optimism #

I currently believe that optimism encourages action. Therefore, fostering optimism is a good way to empower people to try to solve big problems.

Physical/Mental Health #

Sick people have a reduced capacity to solve problems. Working on eliminating the largest causes of sickness would therefore help empower people.

Aging #

The largest cause of sickness in the world today by far.

Also an extreme humanitarian tragedy that dwarfs all others.

Participating in Biomedical Research #

As someone without formal training in biology or medicine, I’ve found it difficult to find a way to contribute to biomedical research personally. Most jobs are very competitive (or I am not qualified for them), and based on the doomerism on r/biotech it seems like even those who are qualified face a pretty fraught industry. Probably the best way forward here is to go back to school for a PhD.

Reduce Costs of Common Wants/Needs #

People need to earn money to pay for their basic needs as well as things they are drawn to want. If we can make most things much cheaper, then the pressure to earn would be reduced.

Open Sourcing #

Participating in things like sci-hub / piracy or open sourcing useful software is one way to reduce these costs.

How? #

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Backlinks: Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, Optimism, Utopia,