There are some problems whose solutions are complex, multimodal, and difficult to even envision.
There are other problems whose solutions are fairly straightforward to understand – just difficult to implement.
This is a list of ideas of the latter type. Some of these could be successful businesses. Others would almost surely lose money at first, and only manage to reach sustainability in the long term. A few would require perpetual monetary investment.
But I believe every single one of them, if implemented successfully, would singlehandedly improve our society for the better, in a definitive and clear way.
Perhaps I’ll pursue one of these ideas myself. But I lay no claim to them. If any of these ideas spark something for you, go out and help make them happen.
Improved Stock Market
The design of our major stock markets inherently pushes company leaders to make decisions to the detriment of society. This doesn’t require leaders to be evil or inept; simply to believe that their company is net-positive enough to be worth preserving. But this means in the long term, public companies are pushed to just barely be worth preserving, instead of actually creating significant and real value.
The first and most straightforward change I’d implement in a new stock market would be an annual lockup period. That means if you purchase stock, you are committed to holding that stock for at least one year. (You’d also have to ban ‘clever’ derivatives attempting to recreate a more liquid form of the stock.)
The point of a stock market should, in principle, be to value the actual worth of the companies, but right now, trading on the stock market has more to do with social psychology than business fundamentals. This lockup period would significantly dampen the impact of short-term shocks and force investors to stay level-headed – if they buy a “growth” stock and then find that the hype fades away after two months, then they’ll be forced to hold their stock while earlier investors sell off. This forces investors to be much more thoughtful about the long-term impact of any change, and decrease the incentive for companies to make flashy marketing splashes that aren’t backed up by real innovation. This also means companies will be able to weather negative shocks more smoothly – which increases the incentives for companies to be open + honest about mid-sized negative findings or incidents, instead of covering them up desperately to prevent a stock collapse.
I’d make some other changes too, but even this single change would have a big enough impact I’d readily celebrate it.
Philanthropic Coordination
Most people value the idea of giving to charities, but don’t trust most charities to be responsible or effective with their donations. As a result, charitable giving occurs at much lower scale than it should, and relies much more heavily on major institutional players.
This also creates opportunities for charities to conflict with each other and further waste funds. If it costs $1B to end world hunger, but there are ten charities each trying to be the one to do it, and they each raise $150M, then there’s enough money in the ecosystem to end world hunger. But not only will these charities fail to come together to spend this money wisely, they’ll actually spend much of it marketing themselves to try to get more money instead of the other guy, creating a zero-sum game where donations are simply wasted.
The solution to this is for people to actually trust the charities they are giving to. There are three solutions to trust, broadly speaking: (a) trusted central institutions; (b) only paying out after the fact; and (c) social networks.
Building a trusted central institution in this day and age is enormously difficult at best; and paying out after the fact won’t work for most charitable activities. So we’re left with social networks.
Alice doesn’t know who the best education charities are, but she does know that Bob shares her values around education, and Bob is a teacher so probably knows a bit more than her. Bob, in turn, doesn’t have time to research charities in detail, but knows Carol, who is a researcher in education, who both shares Bob’s values and does have the time to do her own research.
So Alice “passes off” her charitable donation (say, $1,000) to Bob’s control. Bob “passes off” his (let’s say $500) and Alice’s donations together to Carol, giving her $1,500 (plus Carol’s own funds.) Carol then allocates all of that money to a single charity which she deems the best match for her values.
This system has a ton of benefits. Firstly, Alice and Bob can always trust new people if their values change or they don’t feel the donations reflect their expectations; but they find it much easier in general to trust that their money is being used well, because they know the people involved. In addition, Carol might end up controlling quite a lot of money, and since she’s only giving that grant to ONE institution, we end up with a system that’s competitive in a different way – many charities simply fail, but those who raise grants raise a LOT of money and actually have the tools to have a real, meaningful impact. (And, of course, if they don’t deliver, then Carol has the incentive and time to dig in and understand if they’re misusing the funds, and can relocate future funds elsewhere.)
News That Matters
Most news isn’t important. How do you actually get the news that matters, without the other stuff?
Step one is to define what “matters”. Generally, something matters to an individual if it changes their expectations of the future. If a piece of news doesn’t change my beliefs or expectations, then I didn’t really learn anything that matters to me, almost by definition.
Prediction markets happen to be a social technology which tracks our collective expectations of the future on various topics. So what if you allowed users to subscribe to prediction markets on topics of interest to them – and then the ONLY news you published was of the format:
Predictions of Outcome A in Market X just rose from 15% to 37%. Here’s some of what happened in the preceding hours and days that likely influenced this change.
This could be a great application for LLMs to summarize other “news” sites for the secondary info; but it first and foremost requires the markets to actually be liquid enough to be reasonably reliable.
