A crowd-sourced record of the problems humanity faces, organised so that a person deciding where to put their money, their vote or their career can compare them honestly.
The priority weighting
A priority score is a judgement, and a site that publishes one has stopped being purely a reference. That is true, and it is the reason for every rule here: the judgement is made visible, sourced and adjustable rather than avoided. A reference work that refuses to say anything about relative scale is not neutral either. It has moved the judgement onto a reader with less information.
| Component | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| burden | 0.2 | life-years lost per year |
| reach | 0.2 | people affected |
| trend | 0.2 | getting better or worse, per decade |
| neglect | 0.2 | effort already going in, relative to scale |
| tractability | 0.2 | whether more effort would help |
This weighting is provisional. It is equal across five components, which is a placeholder rather than a claim. The rule that is already settled is that whatever it becomes, it is published here and a reader can change it.
Why "unscored" is everywhere
A problem is scored only when all five components have a citable figure and none is contested. Anything else is unscored, and unscored is never treated as zero.
Treating a missing figure as zero would rank the least-documented problems as the least important, which inverts the truth: they are the ones nobody has measured yet. So an unscored problem says what it is missing, and finding that figure is the most useful thing a contributor can do here.
How this site is built
Every page you can read is a file on disk, rendered when something changed and served directly by the web server. Nothing you read runs application code, which is why it is fast.
Underneath, the only source of truth is an append-only log of events. Every table and every page is a projection of that log and can be thrown away and rebuilt from it. Corrections are new events, never edits, so the record of what this site said and when survives the correction.