Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

IMO this will exist in 10-15 years:

- a wireless charging infrastructure

- an indoor localization infrastructure

- a global wallet infrastructure

Not enough people think about the lack of infrastructure nowadays. The internet is not the end.

- Having had a number of friends doing research in the field of anthropology, I recently got to think it represents a bag of knowledge we could leverage on to answer very important questions, for example, "what is really the role of religion in our societies?". Governments are spending huge amount of money to defend from/attack terrorists that let themselves explode in name of a religion, but no money is spent to understand deeply how this is possible, and whether it is really what is the real role of religion in that.

- "Nutritionism", or whatever other word you like to mean "how what we eat impacts our well-being". We need to eat, but information on how we should do it to be healthier seems very contradictory.

The argument of open borders as "the best way to reduce global inequality" is pure myth. How do you explain all the poor black people in Chicago or all the poor Mexicans in Los Angeles. These are people whose families have been living in America for generations yet are still poor. How about the fact that upper-class Indians are the ones who get work or student visas but the lower caste Indians don't have the equal opportunity.

I would ask people to address the inequalities in their home countries first before blaming other countries. I think the answer is to first address the reasons why 2nd or 3rd world countries remain as they are, preventing the citizens of that country (and the country in general) to become more prosperous. There are so many countries that are blessed with so much natural resources and human talent yet remain 2nd or 3rd world.

I think the reason for this are: corruption, graft, cronyism, elitism, colonialism, etc. Fix this so people don't have to migrate/flee to the few first world countries - which is not sustainable.

Let's suppose you open-sourced education, so rather than it being controlled by an elite and passed down to the masses in varying degrees depending on how much money the recipient has, it's controlled by everyone. People can design their own courses in the same way you make a Linux distro or other open source project. Courses could be stored somewhere like Github and downloaded, forked and merged like we currently do with software. Suppose people taking those courses could contact the developers or their helpers if they don't understand something, or just want to discuss it -- email, Skype, Slack, etc. So many people want to learn, and so many others (like me :) would be happy to help them if there were the right structures and support systems to make it possible.

All these things could come together to become something far more than just "online courses", just as open source software is so much more than software you don't have to pay for. Imagine we're at the Apple II stage of online education, but the iPad version (30 years down the road) will be unimaginably cool and powerful. Let's just imagine a world where you expect people to be educated to a decent level, just as we increasingly expect a base level of computer literacy. You're right that the infrastructure is not there at the moment, but let's not get hung up on that -- it will spread and increase, so what good things do we want to follow it?

If online education stays where it is, you're right -- it's not good enough. But, respectfully, I hope you're wrong, and we're seeing the start of something extraordinary, the next phase in the democratisation and distribution of knowledge. I hope universities start to look more and more like museums, and education becomes a lifelong endeavour for everyone: learners, teachers, and all points in between.

Personally I think this would be a tremendous thing for PG&Co to research. Hopefully, we're just getting started :)