The manifesto
Every problem is a door.Open one.
optimism.fun is a map of what is worth doing with a human life: humanity’s hardest problems, ranked by how many they hurt and how badly, with the people, capital, and companies already storming each one. This is the thinking behind it.
Problems are soluble.
David Deutsch put it plainly: every problem that is not forbidden by the laws of physics is solvable, given the right knowledge. Suffering is not the natural order, it is an unsolved problem. That single idea, taken seriously, changes what a life is for.
Progress is a choice, not a guarantee.
Extreme poverty has more than halved since 1990. Child mortality is down sixty percent. None of that was inevitable. It happened because specific people decided specific problems were worth solving, and then solved them. The receipts are real, and the work is unfinished.
Technology and capitalism are the engines.
Technology is how knowledge becomes a solution. Markets are how a solution finds everyone who needs it, and how the people who build it can keep building. This is techno-optimism with a ledger: not faith that things will work out, but the practice of making them work out, and pricing it honestly.
Rank the work honestly.
Not every problem is equal. Importance is roughly how many people are affected times how badly, and whether there is a real market that can pay for a fair solution. Urgency is whether it is getting better or worse. We rank with sourced numbers and visible confidence, and every ranking is a conjecture open to refutation.
Coordinate like one tribe.
Humanity already has everything it needs to solve its hardest problems: talent, capital, attention, time, expertise. What it lacks is legibility. Founders cannot see which problem to pick. Investors cannot see the whole field. This site is the coordination layer: a map that routes the right people and the right money to the right problems.
Build the next million builders.
The goal is not one more index to read. It is to help a million people find a problem worth their life and go solve it. If you are looking for what to do with the rest of yours, this is an invitation.
All problems are explainable.All solutions are creatable.
David Deutsch, via Karl Popper, operationalized with data.
Three ways in
If you build
Find your problem →
Browse 12 ranked problems and the concrete companies someone should build for each.
If you fund
See the field →
The capital already deployed against each problem, and the gaps where it is not. Find the underfunded quests.
If you are deciding
Read the requests →
Humanity’s requests for startups: concrete, buildable, held to the Choose Good Quests test.
Weekly whitepaper drop
One problem.One whitepaper. Every week.
Each week we ship a deep-dive whitepaper on a top-ranked humanity-scale problem — built in the spirit of Musk’s Hyperloop Alpha and the transformer paper. Problem + market size + before/after vision + a proposed solution + the investors who would back it. Humanity’s Requests for Startups, sourced and sorted quantitatively. No spam. No marketing.
by subscribing you agree to receive low-volume updates from optimism.fun. unsubscribe with one click, any time.
the three routings
1 · weekly whitepaper
one humanity-scale problem per week, deep-dived to whitepaper depth. ships every monday.
2 · founder → problem match
if you’re building, we’ll route you toward the problem and capital stack you fit.
3 · allocator → deal flow
if you’re deploying capital, curated quest-mapped deal flow in the domains you care about.