Welcome! I’m glad you’re here.
This slideshow is an quick introduction to what’s going on here at Less Bad, take a look at this explanation, or just read on below.
AI is Helping Less Bad
With all the trouble of the past few years, the good stuff that happens every day, the thousands of people around the globe that are contributing to our shared prosperity, can be difficult to see.
These are scary times, and for many of us it seems like the world is falling apart. There is a distinct possibility that the entire planet is going to descend to another Dark Age.
But there is also the possibility that we can turn the ship around. That we can make decisions, course correct, get past the pettiness and shortsightedness of the past few decades, and usher in a better phase of human history.
Less Bad is an attempt to answer the question, “If we were to make things better, how would we do it?”
How can we improve on so many of these pressing issues we are facing.
This site is about bringing in the good news that we can easily miss all around us.
As a website, LessBad.org is organized around four “building blocks.” Just about all posts are broken down into these four parts of the problem-solving framework I’m working off:
- Goals – The big, difficult over-arching goals it would be great to reach.
- Strategies – More specific, individual projects to that can help reach those goals.
- Problems – In short, things we don’t like about the US and the world right now.
- Causes – The incentives, rules, norms etc. that result in the problem. By understanding the causes we can better develop strategies to improve.
Additionally, the different “issues” fall into at least one, often more, categories:
- The Environment – The Earth and nature, climate change and all that.
- The Government – Both the institutions that create and enforce the laws that govern our lives, but probably more importantly how those laws are created, where our “leaders” come from, and the causes for its infernal malfunctioning.
- Business / The Private Sector – Corporate America, Banks / the Stock Market / Wall Street, small businesses, tech, etc. The Private Sector has a huge influence on society and I hold the position that leveraging business is the only way we’re going to get out of this mess.
- Society – Basically anything that doesn’t neatly fall into one of the above three.
Less Bad is an attempt at a framework, a way to organize and catalog the most powerful ways we can make progress toward a better, Less Bad world.
It’s about our shared ideals, supporting the common good, and ways of making progress toward our common goals.
Ways to make things Less Bad.
Just a humble attempt to see how we can be better.
How we can work toward a better world.
You’re a good person, right?
There’s a good chance you’re a good person.
And so are most of the people you know.
I want this site to be a source of hope that we are moving toward a better society. Modern life can make believing that all but impossible, but I firmly believe that in many areas we are coming along.
But it’s not fast enough, and there are some powerful forces acting against the common good.
I want to bring together good news, highlight helpful and decent organizations that are actively working their asses off (in what can easily seem like a hopeless situation) to make the future better.
To help us make things Less Bad.
Eventually, I envision an open Wikipedia-like site where thousands of people get together to discuss, brainstorm and collaborate on common goals and strategies for progress. A place where we work together to identify the biggest sources of pain in everyday life and come up with strategies to make them better – Less Bad.
Right now I’m just a blogger with limited bandwidth, but I hope to write several posts a week and over time have a good collection so that when the time is right a larger community can create a blueprint for saving the world.
I understand this project is pretty naive, and I can promise you I’m extremely overwhelmed about it.
But as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t have a choice. I have a vision that things can be better and I feel I wouldn’t be holding up my responsibility if I didn’t at least try. I might end up in the poor house, but the alternative seems worse.
I hope you’ll stick around for the ride.
If you are still interested, you can browse the site in terms of posts that relate to society as a whole, the business and corporate world, the government and the environment.
Each of those categories is then comprised of goals, strategies, problems and causes. Of course there is some overall. Most things don’t fall into neat little boxes.
There are also some elements exploring systems and how they are at play.
All of these pages pull in the constituent parts automatically based on the tags – provided I tagged them correctly!
It’s like a three-dimensional Russian doll situation.
Anyway, it’s still early days but I’m planning on working dedicating a lot of time to this in the next few weeks and months.
I hope you’ll get involved!
Please sign up for the newsletter, and/or share on social media and follow me on there.
And if you’re feeling extra generous or inspired, consider donating. Right now I’m doing all this solo but it would be great to be able to get some writing, design, programing or marketing help!