Is there something fundamentally wrong with the Universe?

Yes. Obviously. Put on an economist's glasses, look at it through the framework of mechanism design. The incentives it sets up for the agents embedded in it are abhorrent. Just off the top of my head: limited resources, physical offense often triumphing over physical defense, everything always going to disorder as the system evolves (which also causes that offense > defense inequality), lack of built-in machinery for inviolable contracts which makes non-defection hard to enforce, plus the local natural agent-generating processes ("evolution") approach intelligence from the bottom up and naturally select for the stupidest/most malfunctioning possible agents...

And this is what we get as the natural end product: dog eat dog, a war of all against all, a myriad of agents with disparate values ruthlessly competing with each other over finite scraps, unable to work together because they simultaneously lack any convenient coordination/enforcement mechanisms and are too stupid to coordinate voluntarily, and unable to opt out of the war and build their own safe garden.

Terrible design. Even we could do better. Even we do do better — when designing institutions and states, or virtual worlds.

If we were programming the universe from scratch, we'd do a better job, pick the laws of physics that naturally incentivize niceness and civilization instead of cancer. Out of the box, with no need for the embedded agents to cobble together homemade solutions.

It makes more sense to me to assign fault at the level where the problem lies

Eh, not sure it makes sense to think in terms of blame here, though. Blame is ultimately about credit assignment, which is about identifying which parts of the system are performing well or poorly and how to fix them. And, well— I mean, sure, I'm down to take the fight to God and/or our Matrix Lords eventually. But in the meantime, it still makes sense to assign blame to the things we can affect at the current moment, instead of prematurely skipping to the end.

I've had these kinds of thoughts many times. I don't think they were very healthy for me, and ultimately they're not very useful. Whether they're in some sense "correct" is an interesting question, though.

First, the concepts of right/wrong and credit/blame also exist within humans, or at least within animals. Applying those concepts to a level where they don't naturally exist is also questionable. We humans do this a lot in part because our minds naturally treat other things as having minds when they don't, and we do this historically in the context of religion and thinking the world was designed by something capable of having those categories applied to it.

Second, the laws that govern reality at a fundamental level are amoral, not immoral. What would it mean for those laws to be altered in such a way as to make a better universe? How much complexity and precision in the laws and in the initial conditions would that require? Because almost all possible sets of laws and initial conditions are amoral. This is in some sense a thermodynamic/entropic/probabilistic argument: amoral laws and conditions are exactly what we should expect for what kind of universe we might find ourselves in. If it were otherwise, that would be something that needs a deep level of explanation.

Third, a few parts of your post come down to a discussion of free will in a deterministic universe. I would ask, what is the alternative? Either the universe is deterministic, and it would be possible-in-principle for some entity outside it to use those laws to predict your actions and choices in advance in large part by modeling you. Or it is not deterministic, and such a prediction is not possible, and also no actually existing entity including you can be said to determine your choice. Neither options seems to get you what you're after, and I have never found any suggestion of what a third option might even look like. The deterministic option at least lets you act for reasons, (usually) puts the locus of control within the part-of-the-universe you call you, and offers a path (become more powerful in various ways) to making that be the case more often. (And it is not necessarily impossible that this becoming-more-powerful could, someday, include changing what kind of universe you live in, with what laws.)

If there's something wrong with the universe, it's probably humans who keep demanding so much of it. 

Most universes are hostile to life, and at most would develop something like prokaryotes. That our universe enabled the creation of humans is a pretty great thing. Not only that, but we seem to be pretty early in the universal timespan, which means that we get a great view of the night sky and less chances of alien invasion. That's not something we did ourselves, that's something the universe we live in enabled. None of the systemic problems faced by humans today are caused by the universe, except maybe in the sense that the universe did not giftwrap us NP solutions or no entropy or moral values baked in. Your example of genes points out that even our behavioral adaptations are things that we can thank the universe for.

If the problem is separation of the human from the universe, then I think a fair separation is "whatever the human can influence". That's a pretty big category though. Just right now, that includes things like geoengineering, space travel, gene therapy, society wide coordination mechanisms, extensive resource extraction. If we're murdering each other, then I think that's something eminently changeable by us.

The universe has done a pretty great job, and I think it's time humans took a stab at it.

I find it hard to not assign whatever issues or problems we have to how the Universe works.

Indeed, the Universe just is, everything else is an emergent concept for the tiny embedded agents in it (bacteria, ants and humans). That includes sugar gradient, scent of food and laws of physics, respectively.

One of these emergent concepts is personal responsibility. Societies that do not have it do not last as long.

“Is the sage above causation, or subject to causation?”
“The sage is at one with causation.”

Controlled or not controlled?
The same dice shows two faces.
Not controlled or controlled,
Both are a grievous error.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the universe. Of course, we tend think there is, but that's what we were made to think. It turns out that constant struggle is the only way to keep things from decaying, which is why life will never be easy. If anyone lived an easy life, they'd slowly decay to the point that life wasn't easy anymore. When people run out of problems, they seem to invent more by making problems out of minor things, so it must be built into us in some sense.

On the other hand, you could say that the universe is wrong if we deem it to be wrong, and correct if we deem it to be correct. In which case, it would be immoral to deem it wrong. You see, by claiming that the universe is wrong, you'd making it less enjoyable, lowering its value, and you don't get anything in return except an unsolvable problem. If you decided that life is great, even though it's not moral, then you could enjoy life without suffering from the amorality of life. In other words, we've decided that things "should be" different than what they are and must be, but I think that even this is a misunderstanding, that we don't know what we want.

And we tend to value only that which is rare. But this is a problem, for if we got more of that thing, it would stop being rare, and we'd seek the next rare thing. In other words, we've conditioned ourselves to play games that never end. But the humans who didn't do so seem to have died off as a result, so those who did stayed.

Could we have designed a better world? I really don't think so. Anyone who has written stories or designed games should have realized how important "undesirable" elements are. Why is a scarcity necessary in a game? Why is a story improved by villains or adversity? Try seeing if you can create good without evil, or light without darkness. I don't think you could even become a designer of the world without losing your role as a player. You either have the power and knowledge of the programmer, which is boring, or the immersion and ignorance of a player, which is scary.

Anyway, your own perspective on the world is a design principle as well. Are we all without blame and guilt, perhaps even agency? You can do away with those, but you might land yourself in nihilism in return. You can't have your cake and eat it too, at least that's logically impossible. It's still possible to be in frames of mind in which we struggle and have fun, or in which we suffer and enjoy ourselves, on in which we feel in charge without blaming ourselves for anything. Your brain isn't limited by rationalism. The logical side of things seem to be zero-sum, but a lot of people are miserable all the time, and a lot of people enjoy life almost constantly, so I wouldn't give the logical perspective that much weight. Perhaps the objective and subjective should also complement eachother.

I think that someone, or something made the assertion: "The existence of something is better than nothing existing at all", and I'm happy that this is the case. Buddhists might disagree?

I guess my advice would be to come up with a conclusion that makes you happy with life, and then to stop thinking any further about questions on this scope.

Do you have any specific complaints? If they take the form of philosophical/existential worries, I might have thought about them and reached good/optimistic conclusions already.

You should check out Efilism or Gnosticism on Negative Utilitarianism. There are views that see the universe as rotten in its core. They are obviously not very popular because they are too hard psychologically for most people and, more importantly, hurt the interest of those who prefer to pretend that life is good and the world is just for their own selfish reasons.

Also, obviously, viewing the world in a positive manner has serious advantages in memetic propagation for reasons that should be left as an exercise for the reader. (Hint: There were probably Buddhist sects that didn't believe in reincarnation back in the day...)

I think from this perspective there are two fundamental things wrong with the Universe:

1. consciousness is an emergent, not fundamental, property (as far as we know; panpsychists would object to this), and can only exist within subsystems with specific order qualities;
2. the second law of thermodynamics means that order-wise, most interactions in the universe are negative sum.

So 1 means that death is a thing, and 2 means that death is in fact sort of the default, and that scarcity and all sorts of reasons to fight are a powerful driver of anything alive, which needs to preserve its negentropy to stay so. A universe that didn't have these things would not be necessarily free from bad things, but you could at least say that said bad things wouldn't be life-ending, and that they would generally be the fault of someone; that choices could be made to mitigate them, but if they happen it's because someone chooses so. That said, I'm not sure what such a universe would look like - probably merely a pure network of consciousness nodes ("individuals") interacting with each other freely with no space or time. Way too alien to imagine properly.

I feel like this is a case of asking the wrong question. If we are asked 'is the universe aligned with human values' then the answer would be sadly no. People die for senseless and arbitrary reasons. We are forced to jump through countless hoops to meet our physical needs. Those who fail to jump through the hoops, often through no fault of their own, end up dying. But I don't think this is useful knowledge, or particularly in the context of fixing society's problems. 

But while the universe does not give us an easy way to meet our goals, we still have goals. Thus, the important question is, in my view at least: what is the best way to achieve those goals? Irrespective of genetics, psychology, or any other factors causing murder, we agree that murder is bad. No matter the difficulty of meeting our physical needs, most of us nevertheless strive to meet them. To do so we create a variety of systems, be they moral frameworks, states, laws, or anything else necessary for human interaction and survival. 

Note, however, that none of this accesses factors outside of our control (like say, the universe!). We take the rules of the game as a given and try to optimize for our goals with the tools we have. I don't think focusing on the system is productive unless we have a means to change the system. 

To illustrate the point: your country is an autocracy where the way to get anything done is to gain the autocrat's favor and satisfy the interests of a narrow elite. Naturally, this system works quite poorly, and people are regularly oppressed. A reasonable observer might conclude that the problem is the system. We want to overthrow the autocrat and install a better form of government, like say, democracy. This is a good mode of thinking, primarily because it's actually possible to do. 
 

But suppose we have a different situation. Your country is a well functioning democracy, but prone to hurricanes that are devastating and kill large amounts of people. Here you don't really have a choice but adapt. Sure, you could move, take precautions, buy insurance, but at the end of the day the hurricane will happen and you can't just dial up Thor to have him call the extreme weather events off. Fixating on the unfairness of the universe is rather pointless here, because you can't change anything. 

I think real life is mainly a mix of the two. In that sense, personal responsibility is both omnipresent and nonexistent at the same time. Yes, you cannot control the circumstances of your birth, your education, your genetics, your geographic location, BUT... at the end of the day you still get to make almost every decision that matters. To live or not to live. To learn or not to learn. To help or not to help. No decision is entirely your own, but most people tend to have enough control over their actions that we consider it fair to deem them responsible for personal actions. And we certainly do often have the ability to change our own lives-- for the better or worse. 

I think I might ask back, "So what?" The universe is unfair, it's amoral, it doesn't care about good or evil, much less your survival. Should it change how we act? Make us dream less, strive less, think less? 
 

I don't think so. 

(First response to a post on LW, woo! I felt so intimidated haha. Apologies in advance if I sound rude, inconsiderate, or if the post is just badly written. It's my first time. Critiques welcome! I'll be off to bed now tho, stayed up way too late writing this. Night!)

What's wrong with the universe...that's a fascinating question, isn't it? It has to be something, right? Once you get deep into the weird esoteric game theory and timeless agents operating across chunks of possibility-space, something becomes rather immediately apparent: something has gone wrong somewhere. Only that which causes, exists. That just leaves the question of what, and where, and how those causal paths lead from the something to us. We're way out on the edge as far as the causal branch-space of even just life in the solar system is concerned, and yet here we find ourselves, at the bottom of everything, exactly where we need to be. DM me.

Nothing wrong with the universe, from an Anthropic perspective it's pretty optimal, we just have most humans running around with much of their psychology evolved to maximize fitness in highly competitive resource limited hunter-gatherer environments, including a strong streak of motivating unhappiness with regard to things like; social position, feelings of loneliness, adequacy of resources, unavailability of preferred sex partners, chattel ownership/control, relationships etc and a desire to beat and subjugate most dangerous competitors to get more for ourselves (men wanting to take down the men in the tribe next door who are likewise planning to murder them, women wanting to take down women outside of their immediate friend/family circle that compete for essential resources they need for their kids).  We are designed to be to some degree miserable and discontent, with maladapted compulsions to make us work harder on things that don't have immediate payoff, but that do improve our chances of survival and successful procreation over long term.

The fix would be hacking human brains (benignly) and figuring out how to rewire the innate negative psychological drives to enable greater contentment in a post-scarcity technological world.  There's a good chance that will become possible post singularity (if humans aren't all dead)