I’d be interested to know: what is missing from my new list of causes of bad things and potential types of solutions? Thanks to those of you who commented on my prior version!

Causes of bad things in the world:

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1) EXTERNAL CAUSES

1i) Nature or evolution (e.g., malaria, cancer) -> Potential solutions: technological development, such as medical cures

1ii) Bad luck (e.g., landslides, earthquakes, droughts) -> charity, government programs providing social safety nets

1iii) Scarcity (e.g., insufficient food or water in an area) -> migration away from high scarcity areas, technological development to increase food production

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2) FAILINGS OF HUMAN NATURE

2i) Highly selfish actions by non-evil people (e.g., some of the crimes that are committed, some of the manipulation that occurs) -> cultural norms discouraging selfishness, cultural norms to punish those taking highly selfish actions

2ii) Harmful actions taken in highly emotional, confused, or desperate mental states (e.g., crimes of passion, harmful, desperate reactions out of fear, harm caused during extreme mental illness) -> widely available and effective mental health treatment, widespread education/training related to mental health and emotional regulation

2iii) Well-intentioned ideologues who are convinced that their simple but wrong model of the world is the absolute truth (e.g., some of the genocides and wars, many harmful yet well-intentioned policies) -> rationality education/training, a robust culture of respectful disagreement and debate

2iv) Cognitive biases leading to actions with severe negative consequences (e.g., greatly misjudging whether a project will bring enough benefit to be worth the cost, excessive fear towards or devaluing of ‘othered’ outsiders leading to mistreatment or harm to outsiders, lack of preparation for likely occurrences that are not salient) -> rationality education/training, careful design of systems to counteract biases, strong moral norms of respect towards all, moral circle expansion

2v) Retaliation or revenge (e.g., cycles of retribution) -> a culture of forgiveness, effective dispute resolution methods and institutions, reliable enforcement of laws

2vi) Evil people acting alone (e.g., serial murder, child abuse) -> effective police forces, high crime clearance rates, enforcement of laws, scientific investigation into the root causes of evil

2vii) Evil people who rally supporters (e.g., some genocides and wars, some extractive government policies) -> strong norms around truth telling and social punishment for lying, a robust culture of respectful disagreement and debate, a culture of empathy toward and acceptance of those who are different than you, a well-educated and informed citizenry, scientific investigation into the root causes of evil, a strong constitution, a strong independent judiciary, strong norms around maintaining freedom and independence of thought

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3) CHALLENGES OF COORDINATION AND INFORMATION

3i) Negative-sum competition (e.g., fighting over food when there isn’t enough to go around) -> technological innovation to increase abundance, thoroughly enforced laws forbidding negative-sum behaviors

3ii) Unintended side effects of actions that are not innately unethical (e.g., addiction caused by the invention of social media, new promising-seeming medical treatments that turn out to have horrendous side effects) -> a robust and low-transaction cost systems for those who were harmed to be compensated by those who caused the harm, hard to undermine enforced regulation requiring organizations to ameliorate harms once they have been identified

3iii) Collective action problems and negative externalities caused by individually reasonable behavior (e.g., pollution, climate change, overuse of resources) -> methods for assigning prices to negative externalities so that someone bears the cost, regulation to limit negative externalities

3iv) Prisoner’s dilemmas and difficulties of pre-commitment and coordination (e.g., arms races, such as with nuclear weapons) -> technology to facilitate coordination and simultaneous action, public projects by governments and private donors

What other broad causes of bad things or potential types of solutions am I missing?

This piece was first written on November 2, 2025, and first appeared on my website on November 17, 2025.

It seems easy to underestimate the extent to which one “cognitive load” might sap your capacity for others. This underestimation could be having detrimental effects you aren’t aware of.

For instance, if you are trying to have a deep and important conversation in a noisy and distracting environment, it may seem that it’s merely hard to hear. But, it’s possible that the effort you expend trying to understand the other person’s words causes fewer cognitive resources to be available for actually processing the conversation.

There’s a wide variety of loads that can drain on your cognition in this manner. Basically, ambient things your brain either attempts to process, adjust for, or draw your conscious attention to.

This suggests the idea of trying to make the information as easy to cognitively process as possible when you’re trying to think deeply or do difficult work.

For example, when:

• reading a challenging article, make the font size on your computer bigger and increase the screen brightness so that your brain has to expend less effort visually processing the sentences

• doing work that requires intense focus, use earplugs or put on headphones with gentle white noise or music without lyrics (ideally music that you are very familiar with) so that your brain isn’t trying to make sense of all the natural sounds around you. This neat site let’s you create your own customized white noise, exactly to your tastes: http://bit.ly/2nQIZuN

• you are trying to get difficult work done on your computer, move all the clutter from your desk (or, at least, out of your line of sight) and make the computer window fullscreen

• you’re about to have an important meeting but you are hungry or thirsty, quickly eat or drink something so that your physical needs won’t be subtly drawing your attention throughout

• there is something blinking that you can see out of the corner of your eye from your desk, go put some dark tape over it

• you need to get something done, but you feel anxious and are having a lot of worried thoughts pop up, take 5 minutes to do deep breathing or meditation or whatever else works to quickly calm you down so that your brain doesn’t expend so many resources on the things that are worrying you

• other people you know who are walking by are drawing your attention during a conversation, rotate yourself relative to your speaking partner so that you can’t see the other people moving around the room