Andrew's Wiki

Problems That Need Solving

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Problems That Need Solving

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

Race

  • Decriminalize all drug possession or usage offenses
  • Exonerate all those convicted of drug possession of usage offenses
  • Give Black Americans the wealth they never got from founding this nation. For each slave or slave’s child allow their most direct descendent to select 40 acres of land. This isn’t an “apology” — it’s a debt being repaid.

Class

  • Create direct transfers of wealth from the rich to the poor. This can be in the form of UBI.
  • Invest strongly in the education of the poor

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

Economics

Andrew wrote this in June 2020 at age 22. Interesting that every problem here is political/social, not technological. Andrew suspects these were the problems he could see creating conflict in his society back in Arizona especially.

This note is likely a trailhead — many other notes in the vault are fundamentally about problems Andrew thinks need solving, and this is just the main list. As more notes get processed, connections to specific problems here will likely emerge.

Also notable: the education section comes first and is the most detailed. By 2026 Andrew would be running Fractal University — so this list turned out to be predictive of where he’d put his energy.

This note has been combined into Open Problems, which merges this list with “Important ideas + requests for products, research, etc…” and will continue to absorb future open problems notes as they surface. The original content above is preserved for provenance.

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