Research history

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A **symptom** is a problem as it shows up in someone’s life: hunger tonight, an untreated fever, a flooded home. A **source** is something upstream that keeps producing problems, often many at once.

## Why the distinction matters

Symptoms are urgent, visible and real, and helping with them is good. Some needs recur because the conditions producing them persist. A food bank feeds people tonight, and tomorrow there is a line again. Charitology asks every gift where it acts on the chain from symptom to source, and asks the system as a whole whether its mix is right. That is the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/).

## The six sources

Humanity’s Checklist argues that the world’s problems grow from a few shared sources inside humanity’s collective life:

- **Story**: the story we tell ourselves about what is possible
- **Coordination**: whether the people who could solve a problem together ever meet
- **Vision**: whether we can picture the future we want to build
- **Attention**: what our feeds and media reward
- **Status**: what a culture admires
- **Gatekeepers**: who gets to build and be seen

Fixing a source, the checklist argues, stops it feeding the problems below it and starts it feeding the cure. Charitology adopts these six as the top of its [depth scale](/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/) and treats the claim that fixing them would help everything downstream as a hypothesis to test.

## Between symptom and source

Most work sits in between. Charitology’s depth scale has five levels: relief, repair, prevention, structure and source. Bed nets are prevention: they stop malaria for the people who sleep under them. A ban on lead paint is structure: it changes the rules that produced the harm. The scale describes where the work acts. It does not say which level is better. A healthy system funds all five on purpose.

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    "body": "\nA **symptom** is a problem as it shows up in someone’s life: hunger tonight, an untreated fever, a flooded home. A **source** is something upstream that keeps producing problems, often many at once.\n\n## Why the distinction matters\n\nSymptoms are urgent, visible and real, and helping with them is good. Some needs recur because the conditions producing them persist. A food bank feeds people tonight, and tomorrow there is a line again. Charitology asks every gift where it acts on the chain from symptom to source, and asks the system as a whole whether its mix is right. That is the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/).\n\n## The six sources\n\nHumanity’s Checklist argues that the world’s problems grow from a few shared sources inside humanity’s collective life:\n\n- **Story**: the story we tell ourselves about what is possible\n- **Coordination**: whether the people who could solve a problem together ever meet\n- **Vision**: whether we can picture the future we want to build\n- **Attention**: what our feeds and media reward\n- **Status**: what a culture admires\n- **Gatekeepers**: who gets to build and be seen\n\nFixing a source, the checklist argues, stops it feeding the problems below it and starts it feeding the cure. Charitology adopts these six as the top of its [depth scale](/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/) and treats the claim that fixing them would help everything downstream as a hypothesis to test.\n\n## Between symptom and source\n\nMost work sits in between. Charitology’s depth scale has five levels: relief, repair, prevention, structure and source. Bed nets are prevention: they stop malaria for the people who sleep under them. A ban on lead paint is structure: it changes the rules that produced the harm. The scale describes where the work acts. It does not say which level is better. A healthy system funds all five on purpose.\n",
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          "publisher": "Humanity’s Checklist",
          "title": "Humanity’s Checklist: six things to fix so we can fix everything else",
          "url": "https://humanityschecklist.org/",
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