Steps for Prudent Problem-Solving

Aim

The aim of this brief article is to outline how and why society’s primary processes for solving problems end up creating other (often worse) problems; when using the same types of processes to address new problems recursively, this leads to a world in metacrisis, plagued with intractable problems and catastrophic risks that worsen with each attempt at solving them. This paper also presents a surprisingly simple set of principled steps for how to approach problem-solving in any domain that resolves this trap, and offers a meta-solution adequate to the scope of our global issues.

Context

The Big Picture

We routinely solve problems in ways that cause other, often worse problems.

All of the most serious, threatening, and intractable problems in the world are the result of human activity—human activity that is often related to “successful” attempts to solve other problems. Very few of the significant problems that humanity faces are truly naturally arising problems. Almost all of the major world issues are anthropogenic.

Climate change, rampant species extinction and biodiversity loss, coral die-off, the passing of planetary boundaries, nuclear risk, bioweaponry, misaligned AI, and political radicalization (among many others) are all the unintended outcomes of humans working to solve other problems. These issues could not have been caused by the people and technological capacities of the Bronze Age. Our global catastrophic risk landscape arises from our profound scientific insights, incredible technological innovation, and planetary-scale implementation and coordination. The wicked problems that cause unimaginable suffering and the catastrophic risks that now threaten all life all result from the incredible success—not failure—of our problem-solving methods. Like the successful growth and reproduction of metastasizing cancer cells whose success unintentionally kills their host and thus themselves, humanity will not survive much more success of this type.

We can split the nucleus of an atom, land a rover on Mars, replicate the energies of the Big Bang in the Large Hadron Collider, sequence and engineer the genetic base code of life, and create neural networks with exaflops of computational capacity—but though most claim to want to do so, we can’t solve extreme poverty, the basis of war, child sex trafficking, or the fact that all of our successes necessitate the destruction of the biosphere more and more each day—and with it, our own future. Our brilliance and our stupidity, our capacity and our ineptitude, are together hard to accept. This asymmetry is rooted in the way we solve problems. These processes can be upgraded so that the problems that matter most actually become tractable.

Process Bias

Problem-solving methods today are generally focused on seeking new solutions. In most cases, better long-term outcomes would be achieved by first seeking the upstream causes of the issue and considering how to change its origin. Unfortunately, this is not a common practice. Instead, we tend to turn immediately to new technology and inventions. New discoveries, products, and tools are thought of as progress and typically come with associated rewards. When all the costs and effects are factored, the world is often worse off as a result of applying these “innovative solutions.”

Any given technological innovation is inherently new—and so by its very nature, it is likely to have disruptive effects when introduced to a preexisting system or environment. New technologies will not only interact with intended elements of the world in which they are deployed, nor will they only have intended effects. They create externalities (both physical and psycho-social), new dependencies, new incentives, and new problems to address, even while they are considered a success for the narrowly defined problem they were developed to address. Unintended consequences are one of the most defining characteristics of our world. Not all types of innovation or change are actually real progress.

In modern life, it is easy to forget that not all desires should be fulfilled nor all effort or discomfort removed from our lives. There are strong incentives to seek technological fixes for things that are simply features of reality worth embracing, rather than legitimate problems to solve.

Because something is difficult does not mean it needs changing. Food should not be made to last forever, not every discomfort needs a drug, not all work should be automated, nor every moment filled with market-driven stimuli. Mental and physical effort, emotion, exertion, and challenges are key to becoming who we are—to our health, our growth, and our well-being. Difficulties give rise to strength, and while some difficulties are truly harmful and should be addressed, many should be understood as part of what makes life meaningful. Modern life makes it easy to lose touch with this reality in favor of the conveniences it provides.

Of course, not addressing real and legitimate problems that could be addressed is tantamount to being complicit with harm. When problem-solving is truly warranted, it’s important to have a process for doing so that effectively avoids creating harmful side effects as a result. This paper lays out a basic process for achieving such outcomes.

Relevant Concepts: Rackets and Manufactured Demand

Consider the concept of a protection racket, in which people pay for security services where both the paid guardians and the people issuing threats are part of the same crime syndicate. In this way, the crime syndicate creates the demand and also the supply for the demand they created.

A similar dynamic may be observed in the case of a drug dealer who supplies enough of a hit to create a demand (in the form of an addiction) they alone will be capable of supplying. In reality, this same concept applies to all products designed to be addictive—which applies to varying degrees to most consumer markets—and particularly in the presence of increasingly powerful tools of persuasion (e.g. personal data harvesting for micro-targeted advertising, personalized chatbots, etc). Corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder profits, which requires continual optimization of the lifetime value of a customer; for this purpose, nothing beats addiction.

In the market more generally, the reality of manufactured demand has related characteristics: businesses often use persuasive marketing practices to make people want things they did not previously want or need, generating desire for things that consumers feel they have to have because others do, or because they will lose status or competitive advantage if they don’t—even though these things rarely provide any kind of meaningful improvement to the quality of their lives. Instead, manufactured demand actually generates corporate profits, offers returns to shareholders, and grows GDP—while increasing environmental extraction, pollution, and waste, and increasing rates of addiction, dissatisfaction, greed, and comparative unhappiness in society.

The vulnerabilities in human nature—particularly in a society in which the connection to others and nature from our evolutionary environment is largely eroded—are easily exploited by the asymmetric capabilities of large corporations. It’s easy to sell people addictive hits, distractions, conveniences, status symbols, more options, and more speed—even when few people actually believe there is any real quality-of-life improvement involved. The supply side has a harder time monetizing connection with family, time in nature, time with friends, charitable service work, reflection, deep thinking, or any of the things that constitute a fulfilling or meaningful life—things that, on their death bed, many wish they had committed more time to pursuing.

How many products—Twinkies and Coca-Cola, disposable plastic goods and designer labels, horror movies and sitcoms, TV commercials and financial derivatives—have all contributed to GDP and were counted as progress under the idea of the self-correcting free market, when in fact the world would have been much better off had they never existed?

Solutions as Marketable Products

Similar problems can be found in most domains of human activity. There are perverse incentives to manufacture demand prior to offering the supply as a solution, or to create new problems from scratch, before offering the solution as a marketable product.

Food and Pharmaceuticals

More money goes into pharmaceutical solutions to disease than into promoting approaches to health that would make medicines obsolete. The biggest food companies in the world advertise addictive fast food on all platforms of entertainment, having conducted scientific experiments to optimize addictiveness and target certain demographics with adverts (including young children). One outcome of this process is that obesity is a primary risk factor for disease in the West. The problem of obesity is addressed by pharmaceutical treatment of diabetes, heart disease, blood pressure, and cholesterol—each of which have side effects that cause other new health issues, the solutions to which will also necessitate other drugs—drugs made from synthetic molecules so they can be patented (which is critical to returning investments in the R&D process). None of these synthetic molecules were part of how the body worked when it was healthy, nor part of the evolutionary environment in any way. The systems of both food and medicine are governed by the same regulatory bodies, and corporate leaders from Big Food and Big Pharma regularly take paid or advisory roles within the regulators for the industries in which they are invested. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is a very sophisticated racket, that is only legal because corporate lobbyists write most of the relevant legislation.

Beyond obesity-related illness, it can also be shown that the rapid global rise in autoimmune diseases, cancers, neurodegenerative disorders and plummeting fertility, all correlate closely to the increase in environmental pollution from industrial agriculture and manufacturing. This is because the industrial chemicals at the heart of our systems of food, medicine, construction and more (pesticides, herbicides, plastics, surfactants, phthalates, etc) are either carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, or neurotoxins. And yet the solutions being pursued to all these diseases are more patentable, synthetic, chemical pharmaceuticals.

Civilization Is a Self-Organizing Racket

The same dynamics can be observed within a multi-trillion-dollar for-profit military-industrial complex, whose business leaders also routinely make use of the revolving doors into government positions that regulate the private contracts and influence military decisions. Diplomatic solutions contributing to peace would reduce the demand that the defense contractors are so invested in continuing to supply, demonstrating the incompatibility of peace with one of the largest and most powerful sectors of the global economy.

If we make an earnest attempt to analyze the origins of the problems we are trying to solve, it is hard not to conclude that most of modern civilization is, in fact, a complex, self-organizing racket. How many market or government solutions are responses to other activities of markets and governments? How can we justify the accompanying environmental destruction, or the rising rates of mental, physical, and spiritual illness from anthropogenic causes? When the hoped-for solutions almost always involve a new technology—touted by those with the marketing and lobbying budgets and vested interests to do so—the image of the self-organizing racket at scale is hard not to see.

It would be reasonable to hope that the nonprofit sector would be earnest and free of such vested interests. Yet if an organization is created to address a problem and receives money and influence to do so (including security and status-conferring leadership positions), solving the roots of the problem would obsolete jobs and organizations. Such organizations are incentivized to continue to manage and maintain the problems they were set up to address.

The racket framing explained here aims to show how many problems are the results of previous attempts at problem-solving, and will in turn cause new problems—just as how many solutions are necessitated by previous solutions and will in turn necessitate more—on a curve leading to increasing catastrophe and degradation, rather than authentic global progress.

Purpose

From Vicious to Virtuous Cycle

This guide provides a sequence of steps that can be used to ensure that any attempt at problem-solving is more likely to create deep and lasting success, and less likely to create other new problems as a result. Moreover, the approach to problem-solving outlined here is more likely to generate positive externalities, improving (rather than harming) adjacent domains, and creating positive feedback loops that lead to increased holistic problem-solving capability throughout affected networks.

After reading, these principles and steps will likely seem obvious or common sense, despite not being common practice. The widespread adoption of these common sense principles to problem-solving, across domains, would result in unprecedented positive transformations across all areas of society. The approach outlined below has the potential to create real progress toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), mitigate global catastrophic risks, and advance humanity’s collective intelligence and wisdom. Our aim is an approach to problem-solving that changes the vicious cycle to a virtuous one, where benefits rather than costs are externalized, and each solution creates an authentically healthier world.

Steps for Prudent Problem-Solving

Below is a series of steps (each involving principled and qualitative considerations, rather than automatable and quantifiable processes) that while conceptually quite simple, contains the elements necessary for a generalized problem-solving process that addresses all the issues mentioned above.

Step One

Identify the problem(s) to solve and the needs and values to be served (by a technology, product, service, law, solution). This is the typical initial concept with which any problem-solving process would then engage.

Step Two

Inquire to see if it is truly a problem in the external world that needs to be solved or changed, or simply an aspect of reality to relate to differently. For example:

• Natural food perishes. Is that a problem to solve with synthetic preservatives and artificial foods engineered to resist biological processes? Or would it be better, in a holistic sense, to relate to it as a feature of life that connects us to where our food comes from, gives us an awareness of death and the break-down of all biological things, of the cycle of life and the need to eat food while it’s fresh and close to the living ecosystem? How should we take account of the fact that the perishability of food incentivizes the sharing of surplus, rather than hoarding?
• Our children want our attention. Is that a problem to be solved with TVs, tablets, toys, sweets, or ADHD medication? Or is it what we will most wish we had done more of on our deathbeds, and most regret not making time for?
• Fast food has its own costs. Making food from whole ingredients takes time and does not produce the dopamine rush a doughnut does. Given that faster and more addictive food has demonstrably reduced the quality of life across populations, how should we relate to the harder work of preparing and cooking whole foods?
• The choice to walk or drive. Walking takes effort and is slow compared to driving. How will a life of more walking versus driving affect my health? And is the quality of my experience different in walking versus driving?
• Management of emotional pain. Deep grief arises when a loved one dies. Is that a problem that we want to medicate away? Or is it an experience that is at the heart of the ability to live a good life: a path to becoming more compassionate, to love more deeply, and to live with the awareness of the preciousness and fragility of life?

So many of the features of reality that involve some work or delay or discomfort are mistaken as problems for which a solution is needed, when they are actually essential features of reality without which meaning, fulfillment, and strength all vanish. Many of our solutions are misguided interferences to a meaningful human life.

Before solving a problem, make sure it’s actually a problem. If the problem is actually psychological (how you are perceiving it and the meaning you are making about it), should the solution also be psychological? Contemplate the world in which you use a tool, product or device, versus the one in which you change your perception or behavior. In which world are you healthier and a more whole person? If we just followed this one step, the vast majority of our consumption and associated waste and pollution would be obsoleted.

Step Three

If there is a legitimate problem to solve in the world, first explore its causes. The first line of solutions should involve removal of the causes where possible, particularly where causes are anthropogenic. Often the solution is less of something already present rather than more of a new thing.

It is often the case that there are many elements that are part of the causal landscape, all of which need to be considered to bring about lasting and healthy change. Upstream from rising cancer rates are increasing amounts of carcinogenic toxins being put into the environment each year. There is not one type of carcinogen, but hundreds of known types, all of which need to be removed from manufacturing and cleaned from the environment to address the cancer epidemic. We are exposed to these carcinogens from plastics and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) found in everything from consumer electronics to automobiles to residential building materials to packaging, which means changes to all those industries must be part of a real solution to rising cancer rates. Cancer also increases with stress, excess sugar consumption, many processed foods, poor sleep, and a number of other anthropogenic causes; and while individuals can address these causes in theory, the real solution to the epidemic requires changes to the food industry, culture, and many areas of society.

Low immunity also plays a role in cancer and is exacerbated by a diet lower in micronutrients, insufficient sun exposure, and damage to the microbiome, including harm from antibiotic overuse. This very partial list is simply intended to illustrate that there are often real, addressable causes of problems that get relatively little problem-solving focus, and to show how absurd it is that the vast majority of solution-seeking is focused on chemicals that were never part of any healthy body. At the same time, we continue to make the underlying causes of cancer worse every year. The societal changes necessary to mitigate the anthropogenic contributors to cancer would also coincidentally reduce the underlying drivers of many other diseases, improving the health of the environment and other species, and increasing happiness and well-being, in addition to other downstream effects such as better parenting and child-raising, lower violence and conflict, fewer addictive tendencies, etc.

There are frameworks that can be useful for identifying all the types of causes or contributing factors. One that has value is PESTLE+: what are all the political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental (plus cultural, psychological, etc) factors influencing this situation?

It is also important to consider where and how the generative dynamics of the metacrisis influence the causal landscape:

• Are any of the causes of this problem externalities from other processes?
• Are the causes a result of vested interests or perverse incentive structures that might resist the necessary changes? Who profits or has power from the existence of this problem that might oppose solutions—particularly solutions that make the basis of the problem obsolete and thus the demand for their supply?
• Where is conflict involved, and what are the sources of schismogenesis¹?
• Are any social traps involved, in which competitive pressures are causing the problem or keeping it from being resolved?
• Are revolving doors, public-private partnerships, lobbying, or any other kind of vested interest influencing the problem or its causes?

While it may be theoretically simple to look procedurally for upstream causes and consider how to address them, it’s obviously both more complex and generally less immediately profitable than simply seeking a technological solution to the issue. But it does solve problems in ways that don’t cause other problems, and actually help to address other problems in the process, generally increasing the integrity of society as a whole. Our standard approaches to problem-solving, however, produce immediate, narrow benefits, while failing to address the causes of the problem and driving externalities that create more problems. The quality of the world formed from each approach is clear.

It is worth noting that while the total set of causes might be large, with further upstream causes also at play, there is often a relatively small subset of the worst offenders that, if resolved, address the majority of the issue. These worst offenders are often a good starting place.

Step Four

If after addressing the identifiable upstream causes, there is still a legitimate problem needing further resolution, investigate the following for insights into authentic, beneficial solutions:

a. Natural Solutions

Look for relevant situations in which the problem being explored does not occur or is naturally solved, to see what prevented the problem from arising, or what responses arose to address it. See if those insights could be applied in a way that reverses or addresses the problem. Examples:

• Homelessness. If wanting to address homelessness in a city, it is a good idea to study cities that are in some ways comparable but have a lower homeless population and try to understand the causal differences. Also, study cities that had a homelessness issue and successfully addressed it. Find out what worked, investigate how well it really worked (and what other things they tried that failed before finding the successful solution), and explore which of those elements might apply in your city. (Obviously this won’t be a simple copy-paste, because there are important contextual differences that have to be factored, but it can offer important insight.)
• Population Health. If you want to improve the health of a particular population, study areas that have the best health and longevity and try to uncover the primary factors. Think through contextually adapted corollaries that could be applied in your population. Also study populations that had similar health issues that have significantly improved them and study what they did to address the problem.
• Policing. If you want to decrease police violence in an area, study the places that have the lowest police violence and what the key factors are that account for that outcome.
• Violence. If you want to decrease population-wide violence, study the most peaceful cultures, the difference in the rates of violence, (realizing that you may have wrongly attributed your experience to human nature as a whole, which such populations may disprove), and what seem to be the factors that account for the difference.
• Genetic Disease. If you want to cure a disease that has a genetic correlation, like BRCA and breast cancer, it is important to realize that the person diagnosed with cancer at 45 had the same genome their whole life without cancer. What was their body doing that allowed them to be healthy with that gene for all those years, that at some point changed? Study healthy states that don’t give rise to that pathogenesis to see how health works and gain insights about how to support it. Also, study people who have the BRCA gene and never get cancer, as well as the people who don’t have the gene and get it anyway. The gene may be a part of a complex causal landscape that in some cases leads to cancer, but it is not the fundamental cause for the cancer. In avoiding reductionism, deeper insight into both the dynamics of health (that does not include cancer) and a more complete understanding of complex pathogenesis can inform insights for preventing and curing cancers.
• Mental Illness. For insights into mental illness, seek out cultures (particularly those most different from Western culture, including indigenous cultures) in which that type of issue does not occur, comparing and contrasting the differences in the causal landscapes between them.

b. Repurposed Solutions

After seeking evolutionary or natural solutions, the next step, if needed, is to explore repurposing existing technologies for which the interaction dynamics and safety profiles are already well-known. Examples:

• Repurposed Pharmaceuticals. The ReDO (Repurposing Drugs in Oncology) Project, which researches repurposing pharmaceutical drugs that are known from their other applications to have some evidence of reversing cancers—positive unintended consequences—to be used as new, effective, low-toxicity cancer treatments. Unlike a new drug that would require safety studies first (and which would then still have no evidence regarding long-term safety), drugs that have been in use for a long time have well-known interaction and side-effect profiles, which makes them inherently safer. Since these older drugs have generally seen their patent expire, anyone can make and sell them cheaply, and so there is not much money to be made and no economic incentive to conduct the further efficacy research. A similar project could be undertaken for the repurposing of existing medicines for all disease types.
• Modifying Existing Technologies. Many military leaders have made arguments for how much more affordably effective military equipment could be made via essential modifications on existing technologies, rather than the huge expense associated with the “next gen” tech. Next gen versions of pre-existing products often underperform relative to the early contractual promises, which are typically the best deal for the commercial contractor. Contractors are incentivized to propose new features (manufacturing the demand), and commonly maintain economic relationships with the government making the budget decision, (with tax money they didn’t generate, for wars in which they won’t fight).

Step Five

Only if a legitimate problem remains and no viable solution has been found after all of the steps above, next explore what the invention of a new technology to address it might involve.

Factor what was learned from the previous steps about the upstream causes, where there is immunity to this particular problem and what that comes from, and the possible solutions and technologies that could be repurposed, to see what design insights arise from those inquiries.

While pursuing effectiveness for the defined goal, it is also critical to consider what unintended consequences could come from its application at scale, across all relevant domains.

Quick Reference List for Prudent Problem-Solving Steps

Step One: Identify the problem(s) to solve and the needs and values to be served (by a technology, product, service, law, solution).

Step Two: Inquire to see if it is truly a problem in the external world that needs to be solved or changed, or simply an aspect of reality to relate to differently.

Step Three: If there is a legitimate problem to solve in the world, first explore its causes. The first line of solutions should involve removal of the causes where possible, particularly where causes are anthropogenic. Often the solution is less of something already present rather than more of a new thing.

Step Four: If after addressing the identifiable upstream causes, there is still a legitimate problem needing further resolution, investigate the following for insights into authentic, beneficial solutions:

• a. Natural Solutions. Look for relevant situations in which the problem being explored does not occur or is naturally solved, to see what prevented the problem from arising, or what responses arose to address it. See if those insights could be applied in a way that reverses or addresses the problem.
• b. Repurposed Solutions. After seeking evolutionary or natural solutions, the next step, if needed, is to explore repurposing existing technologies for which the interaction dynamics and safety profiles are already well-known.

Step Five: Only if a legitimate problem remains and no viable solution has been found after all of the steps above, next explore what the invention of a new technology to address it might involve.