Many of the biggest challenges that we face in society are due to one or both of these types of problems:
(A) Collective Action Problems, where many individuals or groups are currently better off taking action X, even though they’d be better off in the long-term if everyone agreed not to take action X.
Some of the big challenges with Collective Actions Problems are (i) getting people or groups to agree to stop the behavior in the first place, and then (ii) creating a very strong commitment mechanism so that the parties don’t just later defect against the agreement.
(B) Incentive Misalignment Problems, where many individuals or groups are currently better off taking action X, even though such actions harm the rest of society broadly.
The big challenge with an Incentive Misalignment Problem is finding some way to align the incentives of individuals and groups with the incentives of society as a whole.
Unfortunately, we humans seem to be quite bad at solving these kinds of problems on a society-wide scale much of the time (we are better at solving them on smaller scales, such as within companies and within families).
I think that figuring out how to better solve Collective Action Problems and Incentive Misalignment Problems is extremely important for the future of humanity.
Here’s my list of some of the major unsolved problems in the world right now that are of these types:
(A) Collective Action Problems
1. The development of nuclear weapons (e.g., North Korea developed them pretty recently, Iran may still develop them, the U.S. and China may still develop more of them, etc.). We would all be safer if countries could somehow credibly commit to getting rid of their nuclear weapons and never making trying to make them again.
2. Arms race dynamics in the development of advanced A.I. (e.g., where players feel rushed by competition instead of proceeding cautiously and cooperating on the numerous safety challenges).
(B) Incentive Misalignment Problems
3. Publication of risky forms of “gain-of-function” research (where researchers find ways to make viruses more infectious or more deadly to humans) and other forms of bioresearch that might threaten our species.
4. Products being optimized to generate craving, immediate hyper-stimulation, and/or addiction at the expense of long-term consumer benefit (e.g., junk food, some social media, clickbait, some video games, etc.).
5. The creation of animal products involving what seems to be vast amounts of suffering (e.g., keeping an animal in a tiny cage its whole life so that a human can spend 30 mins enjoying eating it).
7. The incentive that many groups and individuals have to spread false, misleading, and/or politically biased information; this bad information sometimes overwhelms the spread of true information on the same topics (leading to bad decisions, misinformed voters, and polarization).
8. Over-focus on the short-term welfare of society at the expense of the long term (including our own lives in 10-20 years’ time and future generations).
(C) Hybrid Collective Action Problems + Incentive Misalignment Problems
9. Running a highly risky environmental experiment with the stupendous quantity of greenhouse gases we dump into our atmosphere. If we could cooperate on taking the most cost-effective actions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we could greatly reduce the risk. But this is not strictly a collective action problem, as there are some companies and people who would be individually better off continuing to pollute tremendous amounts (and the personal benefits to them would likely offset the projected negative impacts of global warming on them).
10. The disturbingly high levels of false results that seem to be present in various branches of science (e.g., ~40% of claims from social science papers in top journals appear not to replicate, and an even higher percentage fail to replicate in preclinical cancer biology). Even those who want to change their practices often find themselves stuck in a system that rewards shoddy practices that produce compelling-seeming results.
This piece was first written on November 16, 2020, and first appeared on this site on May 13, 2022.
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