Uniting behind goals

While goals and ideas deserve more attention than projects or brands, in absence of a way to refer to and identify with goals and ideas, people tend to unite under brands, projects and companies, not goals, and humanity does not seem to have a systematic way to define and unite behind goals.

Goals, unlike brands, require a few sentences to explain, and are harder to remember than brands. Most people know "Google", but don't know "make the world's information universally accessible and useful", most people know "SpaceX", but don't know "make life multi-planetary", etc.

The absence of a means to easily refer to and unite behind goals makes competition unavoidable, because for important goals, multiple initiatives and groups are created, but only a few survive the competition. Some might think that this is good, and that's how market optimizes the world. However, competing companies tend not to share their competitive advantages in advance, which is not necessarily the best way to preserve diversity. It's a killing process. Such process has already killed a great number of organizations and life forms, which some would think are not worth of existence.

When a significantly more efficient mutating replicator is created by an evolutionary process, it tends to take over the competitors, driving them to extinction.

(Chris Adami, in Avida grid -- artificial life "petri dish". Click to play at the 472nd second.)

An evolutionary process sometimes creates new replicators, taking over the world. However, this doesn't have to be the case. In fact, evolutionary process can be efficient when a communication is good. For example, the kind of optimization problems that communicating neural cells do would likely require a multi-generational deaths for a genetic algorithm to achieve.

So it seems that if we would make it easier for people to unite behind goals, it is a hope that we could enable ourselves to find optima by thinking systematically together in the level of goals and ideas, without subjecting individuals and groups to the unnecessary competition, which in fact, currently poses a risk to global security, as the first company that creates a super-intelligence may be the last.

The ideas of how to help people unite behind goals and ideas (as opposed to projects, brands, companies) are very welcome.

Note: criticism regarding the fitness of this goal (solving this problem) as part of humanity's objective function, as well as pointing out inaccuracies in its formulation are very welcome.