Imagine a 10 million people attempting to solve a single problem. Or a 100 million. Or half a billion people! The one that pops into my mind is climate change. Imagine if we had millions of different experiments going on in parallel and millions of people tinkering on stuff to fix the world.

1. Don't forget that there are other people out there! It's possible for a problem to be important, for many people to be working on it, but for your honest assessment to be "I'd just get in the way, because I have neither the talent nor drive to effectively contribute to solving the problem." That's fine - go work on problems that you can contribute to, and through the wonders of our market economy, you end up making life easier for the people who are working on the problem. There's a strong argument for thinking in relative terms when deciding what problems to work on, i.e. "What can I most contribute that other people can't?" rather than simply "What can I most contribute?" or "What most needs doing?"

2. Young people - particularly young people who are really good at rational & logical thought - tend to underweight their emotions when deciding what to work with. You're going to be stuck with them throughout all of the actual work, so it's very difficult to be effective at problem solving when you don't actually enjoy the problem solving.

3. Many really big problems got that way because they're effectively unsolvable. When I was a teenager, the biggest problem facing earth was arguably climate change, which is arguably still the biggest problem. In the 15 years between my HS graduation and the Paris Accords, we made negative progress toward solving this, and then a year after the Paris Accords we reversed all the progress we'd made. Now, the best science available shows that it's effectively too late, we're screwed, and we should focus on harm-mitigation. Everybody knew it was a problem in the 1990s and even the 1980s, but fixing the problem required cooperation from powerful entities that had every interest in not fixing the problem, and that sort of cooperation is basically impossible to achieve. While big ideas like this sound great and get people fired up, you usually accomplish more by working on small problems with no opposition and then putting yourself in a position where you can solve the big problem without the consent of all the people who caused it in the first place.

4. Realistically, small problems are much easier to solve than big problems, and solving a bunch of small problems (like, say, "How can Uber or similar competitor reduce vehicle miles traveled by 5%/quarter?") is often the key to solving big problems (like, say, "How do we eliminate carbon emissions?") You often don't know what small problems are worth solving until you actually enter a field and look around in detail. So pick an interesting field and get started - you can always start over if it turns out that the most interesting problems are boring, but you'll never know in the first place if you don't pick.

As an individual I try to learn and improve minimizing my negative impact and working towards a sustainable business. But that is so small and insignificant in comparison to solving problems like these.

Maybe we have to think very long term and improve the effectiveness and reach of education. Maybe the hope is that future generations are smarter and more empathetic than us.

The world has gotten worse many times before. We need to be able to find ways to cope with and mitigate that rather than just hoping that things will work out and that we can keep on having more, more, more, more and more without ever making sacrifices.

Preventing further catastrophe can sometimes do a lot more to make the world better than making the next big shiny thing would. Ambition doesn't put bread on the table in and of itself.

The constant drumbeat of 'we should all panic now' is not really helping anyone and seems to be mere attention seeking.

I'm with you - the catch is, how do you know what are the actual important problems, except by how people allocate money?

We could each list a thousand problems that ought to be solved, but we can only work on one thing at a time. Thus we use a scarce resource (money) to communicate our actual priorities.

But, unfortunately, present-day people don't want to do that. They want instant gratification. The feeling that they are doing something to address the problem, even if it makes no sense in the long term. And the politicians keep sell them that feeling at a cost of such fiascos.

(Obviously it's also great if a person can donate to charity or something of that nature. But obsessively following world events will make you miserable and solve nothing.)

Keep doing those things. Even if you aren't singlehandedly solving the crisis, you are at least setting an example for others to follow, which is what matters. When people see others caring, they begin to question their own level of caring. If everyone wrote off small changes as "What's the point?", then that attitude feeds into the habits of others too.

> but I'm interested in slightly longer term projects (say the next 10 years).

I don't have a perfect answer for you, however, incorporating this into a career or public works effort would be something. R&D and implementation is still worth something. Even if it's not crazy lucrative or game-changing immediately, proper change takes time and has to be started somewhere. Think of all the R&D efforts from the past that contributed to massive changes in the present. Someone had to think, work, and tinker on projects to come up with adaptable outcomes. The work of one still has the potential to impact many.

> It seems like we're on track for a huge crisis, but as group we're slow to react.

My theory is that we are essentially up against a "nonphysical" entity (it's silly but South Park captured this with the use of 'ManBearPig'), so people don't treat it the same as an "us vs. them" dilemma. It's really an "us vs. us". It's hard to react to something that's not right in front of our faces. There's always the ability to count on tomorrow until the day arrives that there won't be any more tomorrows to count on. At which point, people usually look around for solutions. There's a group that will outwards and a group that will look inwards. There's an endless amount of excuses and distractions to fall back to, but at the end of the day doing something is better than doing nothing.

Personally, I only have 3 weekday-hours outside of work/sleep/cooking, plus weekends. Half is spent socializing or relaxing, the other half I channel environmental concerns into volunteering in science activism (education, campaigning, networking, and donating to PACs).

Outside of climate and science, I don't really follow other news above local politics. My reps are aligned with me on Trump. China/Hong Kong, same, plus I already boycott Chinese goods. Staying current on all is depressing... but individually acting on one thing is meaningful and motivating.

Highly intelligent people are most productive when they are tackling problems they enjoy. You cannot just order them around and tell them to go tackle climate change or whatever.

As long as they enjoy tackling crypto shaped problems, they will keep jumping in until enough crypto shaped problems are solved that only really frustrating ones are left.

If you want to change how things work, you have to change the environment for problem solving. Make it more or less enjoyable.