What is the problem?

Do you consider the extent of human underachievement compared to what is theoretically possible? There are massive global problems and many of them get little focus. It is perplexing that one that gathers great attention may not even exist as anthropogenic global warming is not proven and the evidence is mounting that a cooling pattern may have set in triggered by the solar cycle.

It’s hard to visualize what could be achieved with better alignment and cooperation. The swelling wealth of the few continues to provide clear evidence that the many are being exploited and this needs to stop. Everyone that enjoys living has a common problem as this will be a fairly transitory state unless more focus is applied to extending lifespans. It seems that dying of Covid-19 is a major global issue that justifies all sorts of questionable rules and regulations while other causes of death are acceptable and efforts to change this remain rather limited.

A strange perception permeates among some people that they are winning and the distribution of wealth is highly unequal. So by this measure, there are a few clear winners while the vast majority are losers. However, the winners are playing last century’s game and they have successfully demotivated and pissed off the majority with a toxic mix of entitlement and condescension. This is a huge hindrance to progress on this century’s agenda of fixing poverty, disease, and curing aging.

The rules are set by the global elite, but they can only do this with the consent of the majority. The majority needs to move the consensus along and redefine winning as living for a thousand years. A leading bio-gerontologist has suggested that the first person to live to a thousand years has already been born. Yet even comments like this generate limited traction and focus.

There is a fear and reluctance to move forward based on a strange perception that the planet is approaching capacity and so death is necessary. We expect that with improved behavior the capacity of this planet is much closer to eighty billion people than 8 billion — reaching that capacity will just require a few changes and problem solving which will naturally accelerate if poverty is banished.

This planet is seriously underachieving on numerous criteria. Some specific measures where performance would be considered poor to abysmal would be:

1 % of people not getting their needs met

2 % of people not receiving basic healthcare

3 Accidental death rate

4 Level of violent crime

5 Rate of depletion of non-renewable resources

6 %age of people over-consuming

7 Number of refugees

The problem may lie in one or more of the following areas:

1 Irrationality

2 Relativity

3 Hierarchy & motivations of leaders and their followers

4 Market Failure

5 Lack of vision and inspiration

6 Inability to organize optimally at global, local, and all levels in between

7 The general acceptance of poor standards of behavior

8 Apathy

9 Poor and selfish decision-making

10 Communication problems

Irrationality

Human beings, in general, are innately irrational and while this has been documented it is still not widely accepted. Problems not accepted are not readily dealt with. Careful analysis rather than instinctive judgment has been identified as one technique to reduce irrational decisions. A significant proportion of people on the planet still have faith and indeed the vast majority of your political leaders claim to be religious. We find this somewhat surprising. While we can rationalize that some of them are just doing this to appear more acceptable and help with election bids there do appear to be some that are genuinely deluded enough to think that their actions are likely to be judged favorably and provide them with a hero’s reception in the afterlife.

We have reviewed the actions and achievements of the typical political leader and many of the recent ones appear to have started foreign wars, authorized murders, increased the numbers of people living in poverty, and protected the wealthy from inevitable losses that arise at the end of a borrowing binge. These actions are completely at odds with religious teachings.

Many leaders have also promised many things they are incapable of delivering without over-spending and out-competing other leaders. Economists stay employed by telling their employers what they want to hear and so short-term Keynesian deficit spending has become a near-permanent distortion. The laws of mathematics will bring this to an end at some point in the not too distant future.

In practice, your politicians don’t have as much power as they claim to have. Arguably most people who want to be in power are also unsuitable to be leaders — hence the need to alter the approach rather than continue to manage them like diapers. It is a major problem that there are so many people pretending to be in charge of running your world but in reality, there is nobody in charge and this is a highly inefficient arrangement.

You have this dysfunctional partnership between politics and economics that massively underachieves for most people. We would propose some new ideas for both legs of the partnership.

A great deal of economics is based on the premise of rational economic maximizing man. This made some sense at the time of Adam Smith and probably continued to have a degree of relevance throughout the last millennium. Arguably however it has now morphed into an oxymoron. Given the advances you are making in medical science and the further potential for progress, it seems to us that anybody who sets out to die wealthy lacks ambition.

As for politics — technology can now allow civilization to mature. You may still look for politicians to campaign, entertain and promote solutions to the issues of the day but you should no longer depend on them for decision making. This is beneficial as they have frequently proved to be an expensive, unreliable, and disappointing solution to problems.

Relativity

By relativity, we are not revisiting Einstein’s theory but rather the problem that humans have with continually comparing themselves to everyone else. This is a serious issue as a great deal of comparing is going on and doing better than others appears to be a real objective and source of limited happiness for a few and great misery for many. Social networking has arguably exacerbated this flaw.

Indeed, we suspect that too many would be happy living in a shit shower for 23 hours a day provided they knew others that were there for the full 24 hours. If you were also a stakeholder, perhaps with a financial or managerial interest in the showering enterprise, then you would be even happier and focus on maintaining the status quo as progress might diminish your influence and income. The “I’m alright Jack” mentality is understandable as nobody has any chance of fixing the world alone and therefore it is individually reasonable to try and get the best out of it that you can. Collectively it is a disaster.

Hierarchy

The establishment of a hierarchy within human endeavors is a problem. Your typical working arrangements de-motivate the majority for most of the time. Consequently, many people are not engaged in their working activities. The few that are leading and focussed are typically either operating in capitalist ventures or carrying out fairly short-term focussed Government activities.

Socialism and capitalism have been tried and while neither of these systems has been implemented in any sort of pure form without considerable ‘cronyism’ both systems have significant challenges. The way forward definitely requires improved linking of performance and benefits for all individuals with agreed performance standards being established for different tasks.

Market Failure

Neither hierarchy nor irrationality appears sufficient to explain the lack of focus. Perhaps it is a case of market failure for long-term and uncertain projects that is the problem. Controlling, managing, and ideally stopping the aging process for all will be a very difficult task and it will probably take a while to complete. However, a great deal of change and progress can happen in 50 years. If you had asked people in 1919 if they thought man would travel to the moon 50 years later there would have been few that expected this to happen. As we have also highlighted the global population is much greater now so the potential talent pool to work on projects has never been greater.

Currently, a great deal of this talent appears to be focussed on really rather stupid financial games in which it will probably never be entirely clear whether the cleverest or the luckiest record the financial gains. The failure rate of human life has always been 100% and it seems reasonable to think that the more effort is focussed on reducing this rate the quicker it will start to fall.

There is currently no obvious way to make an investment in gerontology research and have an expectation that you will get the return on investment you want. People are so financially focused we end up with significant levels of unemployment combined with serious problems with healthcare and aging that are not being addressed. So there is a problem here that your present markets and organizations are not capable of dealing with.

Lack of Vision and inspiration

The current generation of political leaders is unlikely to have the satisfaction of delivering massive life extension — however, it will be a much more useful achievement than getting a few men to step on the moon. The majority of these in power presumably believe that it’s not achievable within their lifetime and are therefore not interested in dedicating resources to it. This seems illogical. There are so many surprising things that waste significant resources on this planet and yet there is no focussed initiative to solve what appears to be the biggest human problem of all. The efficient division of labor is massively constrained by taxation and we need an entirely different approach to conserve scarce resources and maximize benefits from sharing skills, knowledge, and things.

In general, the survival instinct of individuals seems to be strong and we think this will triumph over any philosophical objections that people living longer will require fewer people to be born in the future. Having a large productive population will allow a lot more time to focus on solving more problems and that, in turn, will allow the comfortable carrying capacity of the planet to grow rapidly.

Inability to organize

Humanity is severely challenged to organize effectively on a large scale. This seems largely because you lack efficient and effective methods of group decision-making. You appear to have two principal means of group decision-making at present. These are:

1 Meetings

2 Elections/Surveys

While small group meetings can be quite productive meetings have a serious limit to scalability. Beyond around twenty people their effectiveness rapidly diminishes. So as a means of achieving global consensus meetings are severely challenged.

For large-scale consultations, your planet has generally resorted to elections and referendum and these are frequently held out as triumphs of human achievement. I do appreciate that universal suffrage was a right not easily attained and is still not available in many parts of your world. The fact remains that democracy is a fairly terrible means of making decisions. Some of the main flaws of democracy are:

1) It is very expensive to conduct a vote and so is used infrequently. While technology could be used to overcome this, consulting everybody or nobody would remain inefficient.

2) It takes no cognizance of individuals differing levels of knowledge and interest.

3) It tends to require large amounts of funding to get elected. This is typically achieved by making promises to backers which determine policy once elected.

These methods of group decision-making simply cannot support an aligned global effort to implement a strategy to improve the world. As Einstein noted:

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

The general acceptance of poor standards of behavior

There is little discussion on whether or not present standards of behavior are acceptable. It seems questionable if the planet will ever achieve its potential while wealth is so concentrated and with some people having wealth in the billions while others are dying of starvation. Some sort of dialogue on the acceptability of this behavior could be called for and a plan put in place to address the imbalances. Discussions along the line of “Your yacht may be too large Mr. Bezos” are simply not taking place.

Apathy

The attitude that you have captured in the saying “I’m alright Jack” may also be part of the problem. Many of you presently are all right at any point in time. You must realize this is a temporary state of affairs and with the current level of healthcare, none of you will be alright for terribly long. Given your current knowledge and methods, it is exceedingly unlikely that anyone will live for more than 120 years and you will certainly be affected to at least some extent by the debilitating effects of aging during the second half of any life that approaches this length. So, apathy and selfishness need to be addressed. With co-operation and effort, many of you alive today could get to live for thousands of years. Surely that is a prize worth striving for, particularly when you consider the amount of progress and development that is likely in the future.

Poor and selfish decisions

There are lots of bad and selfish decisions being made and this hinders planning for the medium and long term. You need to figure out ways to curb human nature that tends to look to continually acquire personal wealth. The US healthcare system is an astonishing example of the agency problem and truly predatory pricing where the patient is the victim of institutionalized fraud. However, with global warming, the exploitation is more nuanced and it is more akin to a religion seeking a conveniently controlling dogma than an attempt to gouge money. Nonetheless, the diversion of resources for a cause without a case is massive and must stop. There are many environmental challenges to be addressed urgently and the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is not high on the list, yet, it has hijacked so many agendas recently.

Communication Problems

There are major issues with human communication that need to be faced. So many times people mask and hide their true feelings and find themselves unable to express their true feelings and opinions for various reasons. Political correctness, anti-isms, and promotion of fake news for dubious ends have contorted communication into all sorts of strange places in recent years. Being woke may be a start in terms of raising awareness of some of the issues but it needs to move to a coherent and actionable strategy to achieve any meaningful change. There are also long-established challenges with communication with many topics that are important being taboo and even simple fact gathering in some areas is fraught with difficulties.

Conclusion

The problem seems to be tied up in all of the above areas. However, the inability to align countries, organizations, and wealth to work towards common goals appears the key problem.

People are not open about stating that death is a problem. The time before people are born generally causes them very little distress and doubtless, the time after death is equally so with the pain of loss remaining with the living. So possibly the problem is exaggerated by focussing at the individual level as death doesn’t prevent humanity from moving forward. However, humanity is just a large collection of individuals and it remains the largest common problem we have. If you enjoy living then should we not be doing more to work together to fulfill the goal of living longer as soon as possible?

When the highway robber of the past pointed his gun at the traveler in the night with the question — “Your money or your life?” it seems the normal response was to hand over the money. However, when it comes to the slow decay that the aging process causes then it seems humanity prefers money to life. This is quite puzzling.

A more organized approach to decisions is required to allow a new strategy to form with more structured and participative online decision-making tools and fewer politicians driving their backers’ agendas.