IMO the #1 biggest most important problem is the design of institutions. Specifically we need to design institutions that can accept higher information through

IMO the #1 biggest most important problem is the design of institutions. Specifically we need to design institutions that can accept higher information throughput from their members. This applies to corporations, governments, academia, etc. When I say information throughput, I mean, accept information from its members and change its own behavior in accordance. Our current institutions were designed when people had to travel days to go contribute to law writing etc. That's no longer the case. The amount of information going to and from our institutions is much larger, but the institutions themselves have not scaled. Institutional processes can be very similar if not equivalent to software. And there are a lot of preventable problems just from scaling. For instance look at our red/blue culture wars and how obviously it corresponds to population density... maybe we need to have variation in policy based on population density. Instead whoever is in power pushes their policies on everyone. When a republican is in, the cities suffer, when a democrat is in, the countryside suffers. We also have corporations making decisions that would not be made if the shareholders and employees were given all the information and polled for the best decision. We have policies that are made "for the greater good" that don't compensate those who lose out. This makes them unpopular. Any policy that is against fossil fuels should also focus on providing compensation to the millions of people who depend on it for their livelihood. We have insane amounts of waste in the government and 20% of people think their jobs that they're forced to work are meaningless. The fact that there are some readily identifiable, strong patterns for some of them indicates that there could be a relatively straightforward cause. IMO these problems aren't impossible to solve. They just need a systematic approach. They need to be studied in academia like we study physics. Imagine if we spent the amount of money we do on particle accelerators to instead create a few dozen "test cities" where people can move there and experiment with different economic and social systems. Until then, though there's still a whole lot of theoretical work that can be done understanding how information flows through an institution and ultimately affects and constrains its behavior