The Hamming Question
What are the most important problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on them? *
In 1968, Stewart Brand opened the Whole Earth Catalog with a warning:
“We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”
Brand recognized that humanity had acquired planetary-scale leverage. We could no longer rely on nature to absorb our mistakes or balance the scales; we were at the controls. He was right about our power, and we must get good at wielding it. But a dangerous asymmetry has emerged: we are becoming gods externally, while remaining fragile, irrational humans internally.
We can split atoms, redirect rivers, edit genomes, and alter the climate. Yet, the minds directing this power remain vulnerable to distraction, manipulation, fear, and status competition. We have exponentially increased our capability to change the world, but we have failed to develop a commensurate capacity to steer—to foresee consequences, coordinate responses, and correct our errors at scale.
Asking for a single solution to these cascading failures is like asking what single species makes up a forest. We are dealing with an ecology of constraints—ranging from physical material and infrastructure to institutional rules, goals, and human judgment. A starving child needs physical food, not a better attitude;1 physical production alone does not guarantee delivery, as institutional rules dictate access.2 A communication network can distribute truth or noise; a weapon does not decide when restraint is justified. External capability and internal capacity are coupled; we must become gods internally by systematically upgrading our ability to see clearly, govern our impulses, and coordinate our actions.
The Architecture of Human Capacity
Humans are not fixed inputs in a mechanical system. We are shaped by the world we are shaping. Because human behavior is driven by an ecology of intersecting forces, there is no single master lever to pull. This interlocking web of systemic failures is often called the metacrisis, and as Daniel Schmachtenberger suggests, treating an ecology of problems requires an ecology of solutions.3
Consider how these layers couple across scales:
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The Biochemical Baseline: Cognition and judgment have physical prerequisites. Attention and effort are finite resources; when biological health fails, it drains the capacity required to make complex decisions at scale. The United States now spends approximately 18% of its GDP on healthcare and employs nearly 12% of the workforce just to manage illness.4 When a society’s biology struggles, its steering capacity plummets.
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The Physical Environment: Our physical environment directly alters cognitive potential. Exposure to air pollution (PM2.5) penetrates the brain, linking to reduced attention, “brain fog,” and long-term structural damage.5 When we alter the environment, we directly impair the physical brains of the people who will run the next iteration of society.
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Cultural Software: We externalize cognition through tools. Writing expands memory; mathematical notation makes complex operations routine. Checklists, doctrines, and languages act as cultural software. Yet, as Samo Burja notes, these explicit tools rely entirely on intellectual dark matter—the tacit, unwritten knowledge required to actually run institutions and execute complex tasks.6
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Institutional Selection: Institutions define roles, assign authority, and set incentives. They select which behaviors succeed. If an arrangement rewards extraction or manipulation, the people using those strategies gain influence. As Scott Alexander terms it, this is Moloch—a system where participants are forced to optimize for destructive behaviors to remain viable.7 The institution facing the next generation is partly an output of the previous one. We build the environment, and the environment builds us.
The Threat of Leverage and Bad Boundaries
As our external leverage grows, the cost of an internal human failure skyrockets.
In the United States, a single President can authorize a nuclear strike. That decision rests atop a towering stack of dependencies: sensors, doctrine, communication, and human psychology during extreme uncertainty.8 We no longer have the margin of error to wait for human wisdom to naturally catch up to technological leverage.
Furthermore, systems often fail because we draw the wrong boundaries around them. A corporation can dump costs into a river; a cartel can solve a coordination problem perfectly among its members while imposing massive costs on the rest of the market. As Vitalik Buterin has noted, more coordination is not inherently good—it depends on the checks and balances in place. To fix a system, you must track the costs and consequences to their true end point.9
Tracing the Causal Path
You cannot fix a complex system by staring at the whole and despairing. You have to trace a specific, actionable causal path. Moving from observation to intervention requires mapping out a few critical coordinates:
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The Desired Outcome: What exactly must change? (e.g., A resilient coral reef)
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The Binding Constraint: What condition currently limits the outcome, and through what mechanism? (e.g., Untreated sewage discharge reducing the reef’s resilience)
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The Leverage Point: Where can an intervention actually alter the system’s behavior? (e.g., The local water treatment plant)
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The Actuator: Who or what has the power to pull that lever? (e.g., The utility regulator)
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The Blocker: What prevents them from acting? (e.g., Missing capital, lack of authority, or bad data)
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The Action: What specific force will remove the block? (e.g., Enforcing existing environmental laws)
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The Observed Result: Did the outcome change as the causal explanation predicted? (e.g., Reducing sewage measurably improved reef health)
An intervention only happens when you find the exact force needed to remove the blocker, unfreezing the actuator to pull the lever and clear the constraint.
How I Am Working On It
My work has traditionally focused on the front end of this sequence: building instruments for seeing. At CivLab, I built the first complete data model of San Francisco’s government. With Tweetscope, I turned fragmented social feeds into structured, labeled maps.
But a map is entirely useless unless it enters a decision made by someone with the authority and means to act. The largest gap in my work—and in the broader effort to solve complex problems—is continuity.
My goal is to become the “eye” for the storms that will reshape these landscapes. The eye finds the operative constraint, follows it across scales, and identifies exactly where force is needed. Moving forward, I am stepping out of the role of asynchronous spectator. I am committing to the life of a dangerous professional: learning one important system deeply enough to work directly with its practitioners. My mandate is narrow and specific: take one important outcome, trace the causal path to the blocked actuator, contribute the missing piece to unblock them, and let the real-world result prove whether the model was right or wrong.
If all I produce is a better catalogue of the world’s problems, I have failed.
Footnotes
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UNICEF, “Progress in reducing child deaths slows as 4.9 million children under five die in 2024”. ↩
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Food and Agriculture Organization, An Introduction to the Basic Concepts of Food Security. ↩
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Daniel Schmachtenberger, “A Synthesis: Why Humanity Won’t Survive Unless We Change”. ↩
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Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, “NHE Fact Sheet”; Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Industry and Occupational Employment Projections Overview and Highlights, 2023–33”. ↩
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World Health Organization, Air Pollution and Child Health: Prescribing Clean Air; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, “Office Air Quality May Affect Employees’ Cognition, Productivity”. ↩
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Samo Burja, “Intellectual Dark Matter”. ↩
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Scott Alexander, “Meditations on Moloch”. ↩
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Congressional Research Service, “Authority to Launch Nuclear Forces” and “Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications”. ↩
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Vitalik Buterin, “Coordination, Good and Bad”. ↩