A Brief History of Problems and How We Solve Them.
There must have been a problem that the Big Bang solved. As far as I am concerned it all began with a problem solved, and one day, at least for humans, it will all end with a problem that nothing can solve. Our job as a civilization is to be ahead of that moment.
This is also true for individuals. Kevin for instance, must have had a problem he couldn’t solve. He jumped off the terrace of a four story building in the corner of Halsey St and Irving ave. in Brooklyn some time ago. That day, I saw across the street a young woman standing in tears while the paramedics and cops were doing their job, and as I watched the whole scene, I wondered what kind of unsolvable problem he must have had. I learned later that the woman was his daughter, which made it all more intriguing to me.
What is at the root of all human problems? What do they share in common? What do solutions have in common? And how are our problems different today than they were a hundred years ago, or a hundred thousand? What does that say about the future? And is it possible that an advanced society is subject to experience many more problems than it is built for? Are we built to experience infinite problems as we seem to be heading towards?
The answer to the last question is one of the main reasons why every problem is connected to our mental health. And in today’s mediatic world, the exposure of our minds and attention to problems beyond our immediate reality, is yet another layer compounding over time that we were not necessarily built for.
In the context of this essay a problem is any unsolved “puzzle” that involves human beings and produces net negative consequences unless it gets solved. Not performing at work gets you fired, taking one too many doses of your favorite drug turns you into a drug addict, not managing well your money will make you go broke and one too many cars in the city will make an almost irreversible damage to the quality of the air you breathe. Now add to the list, the War at the other side of the world, grabbing your attention from the distance, even for a few minutes. You can have a meta puzzle of puzzles. Some people get them all at once.
Stress caused by problems affects our brain’s performance at different levels. Robert Sapolsky, a professor of neurology and biological sciences at Stanford University, has written extensively on that subject and it is fascinating. Although there is a good kind of stress (a Netflix thriller, or the playoffs of your favorite sport), when stress is chronic and provoked by other things, and when we find ourselves helpless, things like anxiety and depression also appear (from mild to suicidal) and that seems to be one of the most common causes of our mental and physical health deterioration.
322 million people report depression around the world each year, and in The United States, it is one of the top leading causes of death. Bio-chemical and hereditary issues aside, it is safe to say that there is a real and direct relationship between all problems and mental health.
A few concepts will help illustrate how this relationship works, but the most important one to understand is the compounding effect. Insignificant problems can compound for individuals and for societies, leading to significantly bigger consequences, both psychological and physical. In other words, a problem we must solve is the compounding of problems, specially for those in less favorable positions in society.
Thinking that we can make all problems disappear is an irrational wish, but we can look at trends and patterns of how most of them come and go and do something about it. By principle, while the creation of problems requires almost no effort at all, the creation of solutions requires all sorts of human activity, like acquiring knowledge, doing analysis, creating theories, practicing cooperation and most importantly, taking action, and taking action faster than the emergence of the next problem, which we all know is coming as soon as we think we solved any other problem.
From all these things, cooperation and speed are by and large applicable to solve any problem in any society. So how do societies and individuals become better at solving problems more cooperatively, faster, and cheaper? Why would that be important? How do we optimize technology for problem solving? What if solutions have also a compounding effect? These are questions I will also try to find possible answers to.
The Nature of All Problems
All living organisms are naturally in a constant problem-solving mode. If they solve the problem at hand (adaptation problems such as a change of weather or a change in their food supply), they survive and reproduce, if not, they perish along with their genetic information.
Humans have a unique and significantly different relationship with problems: we create them out of thin air. Philosopher Karl Popper placed problems in its own category of reality, a part of what he called “world three”, or that which is created by the human mind. They have fascinated philosophers, artists and scientists alike because they take part in all areas of our lives and perhaps also because of that abstract quality only humans can play with. Like in mathematics, cosmology, and frankly, in certain kinds of jelaousy.
The visionary architect Buckminster Fuller once said that “solving problems was all humans were here to do”. We suffer and obsess with them, and at the same time we all earn our living only as long as they exist. Whether turning flour into bread that can be sold, increasing our productivity for a pay raise, or inventing products and services to transform society, it’s all about problem solving in one way or another.
With all that, It seems that problems are part of nature and that the more attention we give to them, justified or not, consciously or not, the more real they become in the human mind. And that if many of them are a matter of perspective and knowledge, theoretically, we can solve them all.
But how about small problems that affect individuals? I’m talking about the problems we choose to solve and that constitute the fabric of our economies. Is it possible that now and then we solve the wrong problems? If so, why? One reason is that our society’s incentive to solve problems is not just that the future can be better in a hundred years, but that certain “solutions” can produce incredible economic gain today, and in ever shorter periods of time, for very few individuals. This heuristic to decide what gets financed and built limits our opportunity for long term progress as a collective.
In deciding which problems to solve, our better angels still act like the child who is given the option to eat one marshmallow now, or wait 15 minutes and eat two, and then gobbles up as soon as he or she is left alone, 45 seconds in. (see the Stanford Marshmellow Experiment). Russell Ackoff, an organizational theorist form the University of Pennsylvania, had a somewhat humorous but yet fundamental observation, which is that “we’ve become really good at doing right the wrong things, which is really unfortunate, because the righter we do the wrong things, the wronger we become”.
Whether for lack of the right incentives, or for playing the instant gratification game, we can see the danger of not focusing on the right problems to solve, and instead use our creative energy to create and scale solutions to problems we don’t have (like, being more entertained, or developing virtual reality). Precisely these kind of products hinder our capacity to think, beware of our society’s challenges, understand problems, and create impact driven solutions.
And while we entertain entire generations of people, for others, real problems compound. Knowledge problems, financial problems, health problems, and so on. In other words: our brains’ main diet for the last one hundred years, has been run by short sighted economic incentives. And for the last one hundred years, we’ve been distracted like never before in human history.
One Hundred Years Distracted
In 1920, the world’s first commercial radio station KDKA, began broadcasting in Pittsburg. Since that day, it has become normal to have our minds constantly pulled into realities other than our own, with infinite stories and games that capture our limited attention.
The last twenty years have served as a period of market saturation, and all forms of media have converged into a kind of super-attention-capturing machine. Within this complex of social-tech-games, some positives include ubiquitous access to information, interconnectedness, almost infinite and democratic paths to artistic expression, and even “video games” that can positively stimulate our brains. The negative side goes back to the quality of the incentives, the unintended consequences, and the asymmetry between the efforts to entertain vs. the efforts to solve actual individual human problems. The net results of this tendency to build attention dependent products, precisely because it deals with the human mind, are at least worth discussing as a matter of public mental health, and perhaps as a matter of survival. The documentary produced by Tristan Harris and others, The Social Dilemma, discusses this and other related issues, however one sided, it’s worth watching.
Is there an alternative to the way we are using human attention? If so, what is it? How could we shift some of those innovations in a different direction? Do we have a choice?
From this perspective, the control of human attention is perhaps the most important problem we face as a society. In times when we are made aware not just of our problems, but of every problem that everybody has, everywhere, our vulnerability is amplified, and for some people one more small problem, real or not, can be the final straw. When Kevin jumped off from a four-story tall terrace and became another one of the 800,000 cases of suicide per year, I wondered if perhaps just one too many things came his way, just enough to jump from that terrace at age 61, and leave his daughter behind. We will never know the answer.
Since humans are not in total control of their behavior or chemistry, manipulating human attention is a very dangerous game to play without understanding its implications. Just like what we pay attention to is at the core of what it means to be a healthy individual, how we direct our collective attention in the future will be at the core of being a healthy society. What we pay most attention to is a good dilemma to think about.
Mental Health is Human Health. Solving TACT+E
TACT stands for Time, Attention, Connection and Technology. +E for economics. That’s the ultimate puzzle we are here to solve.
The use of time comes down to speed. Speed is perhaps the most important quality of the products and services we create. The faster brains are more powerful, and so are the fastest products and services. Preventing and solving problems faster will always be a necessity.
The attention problem is not new, and I would say we’ve been dealing with it since the beginning of our existence. In modern times, the expression “the attention economy” already began to appear back in the 70’s. But apparently (no pun intended), we did not pay enough attention to it and now it has compounded with other challenges.
Social problems such as poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, homelessness, disease, violence, loneliness, racism, and unequal access to opportunity, are just some of such challenges that can compound over an individual’s life at a faster pace than the accumulation of definite systemic solutions, which is why our individual agency and responsibility is so important, and the faster the better.
In time, this difference in pace could decide whether humans colonize the solar system or go extinct. Finding ways to compound positive actions that help individuals solve problems faster, is just as important as implementing systemic policies by governments, which have proven to be mostly slow, incompetent and blind about their social responsibility. Politicians should live 100 years in the future and act accordingly, but what we see is a 4 year short term focus to win the next election and perhaps most of us are all trapped in that cycle.
The next piece of the puzzle is the healing power of human connection, a subject we keep learning from. As early as 2019, current Surgeon General of the United States, Vivek Murthy, published a book entirely dedicated to the subject, to show how human connection was at the core of human health, mental and physical. It begs the question, what does “a connected world” really looks like? What’s the goal? What will be the role of AI in the future? And so on.
With today’s technology we have the opportunity to fundamentally change how we cooperate individually and collectively. We can optimize our social networks to leverage our time, our attention and connection capacity in service of problem solving and knowledge distribution. Something like division of labor 3.0.
We can submit our attention to technology, or submit technology to our needs. Perhaps a change of philosophy on how we go about solving problems, and about our notion of good economics and incentives, can prevent and reduce problems in size, number, and rate of growth. Perhaps the challenge is to draw a path towards that change, and the first step is understanding once and for all the relationships between our small problems and our big problems, our technologies and our needs, and understanding why mental health is nothing short of the health of our entire society.
The Micro Levers
Fortunately, “what stands in the way, becomes the way” as put by Marcus Aurelius two thousand years ago. Technology comes with as much potential as it comes with challenges.
Connectivity and speed completely changed the way things are. From having to travel for days or even weeks to find any piece of written information (if you were literate to begin with), we moved to live in a world of ubiquitous information, saving time in almost all human activity.
The amount of information that we now carry in our pockets is not the problem. It’s the quality of information and our relationship to it, as individuals and as a group. If we can see ourselves as independent micro-levers in the economy, not only able to sell and share expertise based on a school degree or job title, but also the insights from life experience itself, we could take our division of labor to a whole new level, never seen before. Optimizing the distribution of quality knowledge and insight, as much as we optimize the distribution of goods, could be a key for incremental and accelerated collective progress over time. I’ve called this a theory of Intellectual Altruism.
Intellectual Altruism
I like to think that I.A (intellectual altruism) is a complement to A.I (artificial intelligence) and that a healthy future requires both to be taken seriously.
Apart from regulatory challenges (worth noting, also created by human minds), to make the most out of micro-cooperation is not wishful thinking. Examples are already in effect around the world, creating positive ripple effects in entire communities and their economies.
Nobel Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus turned micro-financing into wealth and will take millions of people out of poverty (mostly by empowering individual women around the world, including The United States). Him and his team challenged the idea that people are the ones who need to go to banks with financial problems (status quo), and instead created a micro-financing model in which the bank goes to the people who have problems to begin with (new paradigm). These micro loans compound to large scale impact.
In similar ways online platforms help entrepreneurs crowdfund and crowdsource products, services, art projects, and a whole variety of initiatives in ways no individual or group of investors could ever dream taking credit for. This has come with the decentralization of everything, and it’s just the beginning of a new way of understanding the human economy.
And the question is, what else can we accelerate through “micro-actions”? What other problems could we go to, as opposed to wait for them to come to us for help? I believe Mental Health, in the holistic sense, is a strong candidate, because it touches everything essential to navigate the world. By identifying our common points of pain, and organizing those who help us solve them, (counselors, coaches, attorneys, health or finance experts, etc.) and by organizing our non-academic insights as well, we can leverage the power of micro contributions. Turning intellectual altruism into a new social habit will not only accelerate problem solving, it will prevent bigger problems in the future, even those of global concern like the destruction of our natural ecosystems.
The Future of Problem Solving
Philosophy, not profits, will drive the businesses of the future. It will drive their economic models and capital allocation. How and why they do the things they do, will be how the public will measure their contributions to society.
The past decades of social media development may have prepared us for this very moment; the moment we decide that we will use technology and connectivity in smarter ways. The moment to obsess with “product human fit”, instead of “product market fit”. After all, what good is there in being omnipresent Gods, if we are not being omnipresent problems solvers?
Cooperation and reciprocity works because the game of life is infinite. As infinite as knowledge itself. An economy fueled by intellectual altruism will also increase our capacity for critical and independent thinking, something we so desperately need in our wanna-be democracies today.
Even the smallest contribution adds purpose to life (a return on investment not to be undervalued), and it is in our self-interest as a collective that others do better in today’s world. Trait as it may sound, knowing that we are in this together, was perhaps the biggest lesson from 2020 and the global pandemic.
With the advent of A.I and all its hype, this human to human, one by one approach may sound like an anachronism, but there are things about us that can not be replicated, nor should we want them to be just yet. Real human conversations are how we better connect with others and ourselves. It’s how we better teach, learn, create, heal, mate, and grow. The future of problem solving is nothing but radical human cooperation assisted by technology.
In the futuristic masterpiece by Ernest Cline and Directed by Steven Spielberg, Ready Player One, the main character competes to win the ultimate social game for fame and wealth. It’s a motor vehicle race with obstacles and monsters of all kinds, so no one ever gets to the end of it. But one day the hero decides to compete going backwards instead of forward like everyone else. Behind him, there is a wall, and when he does go backwards, faithfully and following his instinct, the wall breaks open, and it leads him to the finish line through a secret road. He wins literally running in the opposite direction of what it seems to be the rule, against the herd. Then he shares his discovery with his friends and gets them to win as well.
Maybe we need to pull back for a moment. Race back to simplicity. Back to the old truths and principles that every religion, ancient philosophies and many of our modern heroes have tried to communicate. From Mandela to Gandhi to JFK, to Bob Marley, to even Einstein, or anyone society looks up to and quotes, the underlying message is always the same: that our best bet is to practice more compassion, understanding, and mutual care. The difference with their time and ours, is that now we actually have the tools to turn those ideals into products. Technology marks the end of dogmatic views of the world, and soon the end of extreme political ideologies, and perhaps even the end of politicians as we know them. We can live in a World where technology serves as a catalyst for different perspectives to coexist.
Warren Buffett, one of the most famous (if not the greatest) investor alive, proposes an even more fascinating mental excercise. Imagine, that before you are born, you get to play God for a moment, and you get to design and build the world you’ll be born into. The trick, you don’t know your gender, race, physical condition, socio-economic situation, religion or country of birth. What would this world be like? What kind of society would you build? The answer is, you would need to make sure that in this world anyone would have an opportunity to live a decent and happy fullfilling life, no matter who you are, where you are born or what genes you carry.
The Ultimate Economic Superpower
In the wealthiest society humanity has ever seen, we still have 800,000 people committing suicide, 20 times that number who attempt suicide, and 322 million reports of depression. Every single year. It’s not to say we are doing bad, is that we can do better.
I don’t know why Kevin took his life and I never met him, but I’m pretty sure not every suicide is absolutely necessary, nor every case of depression or every human struggle. The right person, with the right insight changes the game. Maybe that was all Kevin needed. Maybe we need more active strangers and less passive hundreds of friends.
The Dalai Lama says, “every time you make a decision, ask yourself who is benefiting from it? If it’s only you, you are being a fraction of what you can be.”
I’m a filmmaker and an architect. I think in layers and perspectives. Why I write about things I don’t know anything about, is precisely why write about them. Depression, was always to me the same as “very sad”, but when I tasted it myself, it became a sort of mysterious phenomenon I wanted to understand, and it took me down a fascinating rabbit hole, and I am turning the insights I gather into design ideas.
I’m still trying to understand where problems come from, or how depression works, but my insight is that accelerating problem solving through ubiquitous tools might help some people avoid unnecessary pain, and on the contributing end, it might bring meaning to almost anyone willing to help. We know helping feels good (particularly when it’s easy, effective and effortless).
Accelerating problem solving might be possible to achieve with a philosophy of intellectual altruism and technology. And it could also be one powerful way to equalize opportunity, and create a better learning society. To get there we will need to make a lot of experiments in different domains, and that’s why this experiment called Kuiktok exists. Just an experiment.
Connect and let me know what you think: @ifernandocastro on twitter.
Acknowledgements:
This short essay could be just as long talking about great things happening around the world. And about people who are at the front of the fight against all social problems, inspiring others to do the same by action, instead of just writing articles on it. From breakthrough tech companies like Neuralink, to community leaders to private investors and corporations, people from all walks of life have come together to fight different causes. Like The Wikimedia Foundation, Acumen, The Gates Foundation. The 80,000 hours initiative, The Innocence Project, The Jed Foundation, Virgin Unite, the talented (RIP) Leila Janah’s Samasource, Principles, The Grameen Bank and The Yunus Center, and The ChanZuckerberg Initiative, are just a handful from many leaders and organizations I came across in the last few months and who are committed to solving problems all around the globe.
Suggested reading: (a couple of books if you are interested in topics and ideas I only scratched the surface of).
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Adam Smith, 1759
- Essay on Compensation. RW Emerson, 1841
- A Theory of Human Motivation, A.H. Maslow, 1943
- The Study of Man. Michael Polanyi, 1958
- The Art of Problem Solving. Russell Ackoff, 1978
- Finite and Infinite Games. James P. Carse, 1986
- How Are We To Live? Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest. Peter Singer, 1993
- In Search of A Better World. Lectures and Essays. Karl Popper, 1994
- The Origins of Virtue. Human instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation. Matt Ridley, 1996
- Inventing Human Rights, A History. Lynn Hunt, 2008
- Thinking in Systems. Donella H. Meadows, 2009
- Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, 2011
- The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsche 2011
- A World of Three Zeros. Muhammad Yunus, 2017
- Blueprint. The evolutionary origins of a good society. Nicholas Christakis, 2019
- Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. Vivek H Murthy M.D. 2020
