Mental health treatment to prevent anthropogenic catastrophic/existential risks
Biorisk and Recovery from Catastrophe
Issues of mental health can be very harmful to the well-being of the self and others. The degree to which this harm can occur can, when combined with technology, even result in catastrophic/existential risks. (The Russian invasion of Ukraine, the cause of which may be the mental state of Putin, can plausibly lead to nuclear war. Another example is engineered pandemics.) Given the disproportionately anthropogenic skew of catastrophic/existential risks, research/funding/advocacy for mental health treatment (general or targeted) may help prevent such risks.
Facilitate U.S. voters’ relocation to swing states
Values and Reflective Processes
A key difficulty of implementing alternative voting systems which can more effectively aggregate voters’ preferences/information (and of implementing beneficial policies or constitutional amendments in general) is political gridlock. The political party that stands to lose power if a voting-system reform passes will vigorously attempt to obstruct it. The resolution of political gridlock could not only enable large-scale policy solutions to previously intractable societal problems, but also help implement (via policies or constitutional amendments) alternative voting systems which can bring about a lasting reduction in future political gridlock.
One way to reduce political gridlock is to help likely U.S. voters to move to swing states. (This is related to my ongoing research collaboration with Feng Fu.) Some tentative ideas include creating a website to inform people where they could move to make their vote more meaningful, applying social-norm theory to facilitate large-scale relocation to swing states, and contemplating various policies (e.g., to reduce housing costs, facilitate remote work, and provide relocation incentives) that may help reduce people’s empirically high aversion to moving in general.