The coverage audit
Is this actuallya comprehensive index?
The 11 problems on this index were hand-seeded across a build session — not discovered. A curated list reflects the curator's blind spots. So instead of trusting that, we cross-checked the list against three taxonomies that were each built, independently, to be exhaustive over a domain — and counted what falls outside all three.
Summed across the three taxonomies below. Partial matches and deliberate exclusions are not counted as covered — see each list for the full breakdown.
UN Sustainable Development Goals
source →17 goals, negotiated by all UN member states in 2015 as an exhaustive frame for human development. Goal 17 (Partnerships) is a meta-goal about implementation, not a problem area, so it is excluded from scoring.
4 covered · 3 partial · 9 gap · 16 scored
Direct match. — extreme-poverty
Malnutrition and food insecurity are not on the index at all.
Covers pandemics, three infectious diseases, and aging. Does not cover the top-DALY causes — see the GBD taxonomy below. — infectious-disease, biosecurity, longevity
Direct match. — pedagogy
Not on the index.
Not on the index. Waterborne disease kills more children under 5 than malaria.
Direct match. — energy-abundance
Not on the index as its own problem.
Housing covers physical infrastructure; scientific productivity covers innovation capacity. Broader industrial infrastructure is not covered. — housing-construction, scientific-productivity
Not on the index as a distinct problem from poverty.
Housing overlaps but urban systems broadly (transit, air quality) are not covered. — housing-construction
Not on the index.
Direct match. — climate-change
Ocean health / fisheries collapse is not on the index.
Biodiversity loss is not on the index.
War, conflict, and governance quality are not on the index.
Meta-goal about implementation mechanics, not a problem area — excluded from scoring.
80,000 Hours problem profiles
source →The longtermist/EA cause-prioritization canon — skewed hard toward existential and catastrophic risk, which is a deliberate and different bias from the SDGs or GBD. Only the profiles with a clear, non-speculative match to "a problem a company could attack" are scored; frontier/philosophical profiles (moral status of digital minds, whole brain emulation, s-risks) are listed as excluded rather than padded into gaps.
2 covered · 2 partial · 8 gap · 12 scored
Direct match. — biosecurity
Direct match. — climate-change
Same partial coverage as the SDG health goal. — infectious-disease, longevity, biosecurity
Deliberately excluded this session by explicit editorial decision — not an oversight. Flagged here for the record, not as a recommendation to re-add.
Not on the index.
Not on the index.
Not on the index.
Animal welfare is arguably out of scope for a "humanity" index — flagged, not necessarily a recommendation.
Same scope question as factory farming.
Not on the index — distinct from loneliness, which frames the social dimension, not clinical illness.
Not on the index.
Adjacent but not a direct match. — scientific-productivity
Speculative/frontier — not scored as a gap.
Speculative/frontier — not scored as a gap.
Speculative/frontier — not scored as a gap.
Speculative/frontier — not scored as a gap.
Speculative/frontier — not scored as a gap.
Governance-risk profile, overlaps extreme power concentration — not double-counted.
Governance-risk profile, overlaps extreme power concentration — not double-counted.
Speculative/frontier — not scored as a gap.
Global Burden of Disease, top causes
source →Epidemiology ranked by DALYs (disability-adjusted life years) — the antidote to picking health causes by which ones get news coverage. This is the most damning cross-check: it is ranked by actual harm, and the index barely touches it.
0 covered · 2 partial · 7 gap · 9 scored
Hypertension now covers the largest modifiable cardiovascular risk and its delivery gap; lipids, acute cardiac care, congenital disease, and other cardiovascular causes remain unmodeled. — hypertension
The second-largest cause of death worldwide. Zero presence on the index.
Not on the index.
Depression, anxiety, and addiction are a top-5 DALY cause on their own — distinct from loneliness on the index, which frames the social dimension only.
Infectious-disease on the index names malaria, TB, and HIV specifically — pneumonia, the single largest infectious killer of children, is not named. — infectious-disease
Not on the index — overlaps the clean-water SDG gap above.
Not on the index.
Not on the index — low-mortality but the single largest cause of years lived with disability globally.
Not on the index.
What's actually missing
Nine candidates, ranked by how many lists agree.
Hand-curated from the gap rows above. A cause flagged by only one taxonomy might be that taxonomy's own bias; a cause flagged by two or three independent lists is a stronger claim that the index is actually missing something.
Hypertension control now covers the largest modifiable risk factor, but the index still lacks a complete cardiovascular model spanning lipids, smoking, acute care, and structural disease.
Second-largest cause of death worldwide. Zero presence.
A top-5 global DALY cause and independently named by 80,000 Hours as neglected — flagged by both an outcomes-ranked list and a cause-prioritization canon.
Named directly by the SDGs; the resulting diarrheal disease burden is named directly by GBD. Two independent lists, same gap.
Distinct from extreme-poverty’s income framing — hunger is a nutritional-outcome problem with its own solution space (fortification, supply chains, agricultural yield).
Named by the health SDG and a distinct top-level GBD cause cluster.
Named by the SDGs (peace, justice, institutions) and by 80,000 Hours (great power conflict, extreme power concentration) — the least tractable-looking gap, but the most repeatedly flagged.
Named directly by the SDGs; not represented on the index in any form.
Named by 80,000 Hours as a top-tier problem. Explicitly and deliberately removed from this index by editorial decision this session — listed here for the record, not as a recommendation.
Why this isn't the whole answer
This is a snapshot, not a live check. The taxonomies here are hand-fetched and hand-mapped, same as the 11 problems themselves. It answers "what are we obviously missing", not "are we complete" — no finite set of taxonomies proves completeness, it only lowers the chance of an obvious blind spot.
There is a live path to closing this. The Exa Agent problem-sourcing pipeline already exists in code — it does open-ended web research and returns structured candidates to a review queue at /admin/candidates. It is currently in stub mode because it needs a database connection that has not been wired up yet. Once it is, discovery stops depending on this page being re-run by hand.
Three lists, three biases. The SDGs skew toward negotiated political consensus, 80,000 Hours skews toward existential and catastrophic risk, and GBD skews toward measurable mortality and disability. None of them alone would be a fair comprehensiveness check — together they cover most of the space any one of them would miss.
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