Andrew's Wiki

Open Problems

5 min read

Open Problems

A combined and evolving list of problems Andrew thinks need solving and ideas worth pursuing. Draws from multiple source notes written at different times — metadata preserved to keep track of when and where each idea originated.

This page is a frontier map. See also Andrew’s Frontier page on Vienna.

From “Problems that need solving” (June 2020, age 22)

These were political and social problems visible in Andrew’s community in Arizona.

Education

  • Teaching agency to students
  • Teaching relevant skills to the knowledge working economy
  • Teaching flexibility and growth to meet the needs of an ever-faster-changing society
  • Solving the incentives problem in education (how do you measure & evaluate the “effectiveness” of education so you can reward it)
  • Better education for poor people
  • Better education for minorities
  • Desegregate schools
  • https://www.econlib.org/no-one-cared-about-my-spreadsheets/

Politics

  • End gerrymandering
  • Implement ranked-choice voting
  • Implement proportional representation for parties in congress
  • Get more economists, scientists, and researchers in office (incentives problem?)
  • Create lobbies for (X,Y,Z)
  • End voter suppression

Class

  • Create direct transfers of wealth from the rich to the poor. This can be in the form of UBI. I will eventually have a wiki post about why, but in short, you need to transfer wealth from rich to poor, because wealth makes it easier to generate wealth, so the net effect of no-transfers is that wealth inequality will only increase. Wealth inequality can collapse nations, and I want our nation to survive, so wise progressive transfers of wealth help to ensure against collapse.
  • Invest strongly in the education of the poor
  • Invest strongly in Christianity.

Mental health

  • fix the meaning crisis
  • fix “people think the world is getting worse” despite ourworldindata showing that nearly every objective measure is getting better (see Cultural Black Holes)

Economics

From “Important ideas + requests for products, research, etc…” (March 2021)

More technical, more ambitious. A mix of energy, biotech, tools for thought, governance, and infrastructure.

Energy

Knowledge infrastructure

  • Build the best encyclopedia/archive of all materials known to man. The perfect material science wiki. (examine.com for material science)
  • Also an encyclopedia for construction. A bunch of common open source blueprints with super detailed instructions and all the building materials you could possibly need to build them.
  • Leverage Orbit and build out some of the earliest most powerful tools for thought: https://docs.withorbit.com/ / https://numinous.productions/ttft/
  • Open source farming and agricultural tools — see https://www.opensourceecology.org/ — especially with Claude, this idea could be replicated and invested in

Environment

Healthcare

  • Fix Healthcare — compare the ACTUAL COST of helping someone (in China, India, Singapore) with the ridiculous cost in the US. Pick the craziest discrepancies and start disrupting underground.
  • FIX THE FDA
  • Cheap plasma dilution clinics (you can buy a plasmapheresis machine for $3000)
  • Better neurofeedback systems to control stress, drop into deep meditation, manage PTSD, depression, etc.

Health tech newsletters Andrew read:

  • Brendan Keeler / Health API Guy
  • Nikhil Krishnan / Out of Pocket
  • Chrissy Farr / Second Opinion
  • Jacob Effron / Vital Signs
  • Libby Watson / Sick Note
  • The Preprint
  • Health Tech Nerds
  • Rock Health

Education (again)

  • Cheap 2-sigma one-on-one tutoring from foreign tutors w/ good English (especially for math and science)

Governance

  • Build new open source documents for the founding of a new decentralized nation. What are the laws of all member nations? How must all sovereigns conduct themselves?
  • DAOs are doing this at a baby level, but come on, where’s the constitution?
  • → build a science fiction novel which takes place in such a world. Meme the decentralized sovereignty into reality!!

Social media

  • Social media that’s actually built for your attention (see Cultural Black Holes, Cultural White Holes)
  • Stop using red, stop optimizing for time on platform, optimize for outcomes of participation
  • Create a network of EFFECTIVE socializing, instead of maximal socializing

Other

  • How to build better & cheaper monuments out of stone
  • Fix prisons
  • Better Scientific Management
  • Grow and sell silphion at commercial scale

Sillier ideas

  • A simple “open source software utility fund” — everybody who uses the internet pays into it, supporting public utilities like Wikipedia (<50/year subscription with partnerships, discounts, opportunities. Eventually just an expected part of being on the internet.
  • An “open source collective” — everyone in the project gets total access to everyone else’s projects, anyone can monetize the application layer on top of the platform layer
  • A fake news squad devoted to very important political change to shift public opinion

Other people’s open problems lists

ML resources (from Richard)

Courses: Fast.ai, NYU deep learning, Spinning up in deep RL, Stanford C241N

Textbooks: Grokking deep learning (Trask), Deep Learning (Goodfellow/Bengio/Courville), Reinforcement learning (Sutton/Barto 2e), Mathematics for ML (Deisenroth/Faisal/Ongg), Notes on contemporary ML for physicists (Kaplan)

Next Steps

  • This needs to be published — it’s incredibly important to share
  • Combine with future open problems notes as they surface (preserve metadata for when/where each idea originated)
  • Cross-reference with Frontiers page and Vienna frontier plate
  • Review which of these problems Andrew is actually working on now vs. which remain open

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