Identifying the right problem to solve is an important part of having an impact, but it’s a hard task. Lists of clearly-described problems offer a starting point for finding the right one. They can also help organisations and individuals coordinate around a set of common priorities, as has happened with the UN Sustainable Development Goals
This is why we’ve been working on what we call problem briefs. These are short documents where we describe a problem, evaluate how important it is, and suggest what a philanthropic funder could do to help solve it. We’d like to develop these into a resource where people can explore problems and see how they could contribute towards solving them. We’ve looked for other organisations doing similar work, and wanted to share what we found:
- The Moonshot Catalog. A project funded by Schmidt Futures in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science that summarises science- and technology-related challenges. One of the moonshots is feeding 2050’s ten billion people.
- The 50 breakthroughs study. The Institute for Transformative Technologies developed a list of 50 scientific and technological advances needed for sustainable global development. These include new methods of improving fertilizers and low-cost off-grid refrigerators for preserving vaccines.
- Open Philanthropy Project cause reports. This foundation uses a systematic process to work out what problems to work on, which involves writing up reports on each of the problem areas they have looked into. They have investigated problems such as geoengineering research and criminal justice reform.
- Milken Institute Center for Strategic Philanthropy Giving Smarter Guides. These guides outline philanthropic opportunities in areas of health such as Alzheimers and colorectal cancer.
- University of Pennsylvania Center for High Impact Philanthropy issue areas. They develop guidance for philanthropists on a variety of issue areas such as disaster relief and strengthening democracy.
- The Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential. This is a list of 56,000 world problems identified from periodicals and the documents of 70,000 non-profit organisations. It is organised into categories and problems are linked to related problems. Examples include economic underdevelopment and environmental degradation.
- Ashes Ashes. A left-wing podcast where each episode explores a global problem. Episodes include one on the ease with which truth is manipulated and the problems with forensic science.
- 80,000 Hours problem profiles. a nonprofit that provides advice for people on using their career to solve global problems. Their problem profiles include improving institutional decision-making and positively shaping the development of artificial intelligence.
Developing these kinds of resources is part of a wider project that many organisations are independently working on: finding, understanding, and prioritising problems to work on. We’d like to see more of a unified field develop around this kind of work. A first step towards this would be for organisations to share their work so others can build on it. For example, we’d encourage foundations to publish their analyses of problems, which they often keep as internal documents.
In the longer run, we like Bret Victor’s vision of tools for problem-finding. When thinking about how an engineer might find climate change problems to work on, he suggests that she needs “a tool that lets her skim across entire fields, browsing problems and discovering where she could be most useful.” This is not just something that engineers need - anyone wanting to have a large positive impact would benefit from a tool like this.
