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Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

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Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#311

Post by anigbrowl »

nyargh wrote: post #109
tacostakohashi wrote: post #12

Work as a programmer for whoever will pay you the most. Invest, and donate money to causes you care about.

People are going to shit on the parent comment - but honestly, anyone with more than a few years of experience in a tight tech job market is going to easily be in the top decile of earners. The highly-committed individuals that do the brutally hard work on the ground for non-profits or NGOs make a pittance in comparison. Committing a quarter of your salary would pay the entirety of theirs. Consider that for a moment.

That's great but you have to consider the social cost of the day job, which the parent comment assumes to be neutral even though in practice this may not be the case. I think the OP's real question is how to pick ethically efficient employment, not how to make money in order to be more charitable.

Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#312

Post by TeMPOraL »

justforFranz wrote: post #294
peacetreefrog wrote: post #188

Just read all the top line comments here. Interesting that no one had mentioned the one thing that has probably done the most to "better our chances as species" in the last few hundred years, and has helped hundreds of millions in India and China get out of backbreaking poverty and accumulate some wealth. And that is... Work hard, accumulate skills, and become better at your normal job. Even if you're not writing ope…

"that's how most of the world's wealth is created" Most of that wealth simply goes to the top 1% and stays stuck there.

Be that as it may, enough of the wealth remains with the 99% to make parent's point valid (with caveats applied).

Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#314

Post by TeMPOraL »

Mz wrote: post #308
TeMPOraL wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean to put things in your mouth. I read your comment as complaining about an extreme anti-capitalism position; I wanted only to complement that with an example of extreme pro-capitalism position that I also frequently notice here. You're 100% right about the hierarchy of needs (and about my baseline need satisfaction too; I can bitch about the state of the world exactly because I have somewhat stable income…

Rebutting the idea that capitalism is pure evil has nothing at all to do with suggesting that people should not be seeking to make the world a better place. So, perhaps we should just let this be as we seem to be talking at cross purposes.

Fair enough.

Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#315

Post by TeMPOraL »

Mz wrote: post #285
nyargh wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear about your experience, but you make a very salient point and I also agree that you made an enlightened (if hard earned) decision regarding the best thing you could do for your children. In my experience there are thousands of people doing the hard work day in and day out, quietly holding the line. It's a constant effort and constant tension, but for those who won't settle for anything less than revoluti…

I try to assume they just don't see it because it is hard to see. I also have a serious medical condition and have gotten off all drugs. I am routinely told I am crazy, making that up, it is a tall tale, my success is because my condition is mild, it is wild coincidence...etc etc...and I cannot possibly actually know anything useful. People who don't think I am straight up crazy and have acted on my suggestions have…

> It takes real and significant effort to try to quantify in a meaningful way that "We prevented X amount of catastrophe with our work." It is much easier to see lives saved by an ambulance than lives saved by the local gym or the local organic grocer.

Maybe something could be done to help / teach people to better quantify it (caveats about Goodhart's law notwithstanding)?

Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#316

Post by Mz »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #315
Mz wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try to assume they just don't see it because it is hard to see. I also have a serious medical condition and have gotten off all drugs. I am routinely told I am crazy, making that up, it is a tall tale, my success is because my condition is mild, it is wild coincidence...etc etc...and I cannot possibly actually know anything useful. People who don't think I am straight up crazy and have acted on my suggestions have…

> It takes real and significant effort to try to quantify in a meaningful way that "We prevented X amount of catastrophe with our work." It is much easier to see lives saved by an ambulance than lives saved by the local gym or the local organic grocer. Maybe something could be done to help / teach people to better quantify it (caveats about Goodhart's law notwithstanding)?

I have a zillion little blogs about various things that interest me (but, wait, there's more! I also leave comments like the ones above in various online forums!). Maybe over the course of the next 30 years, my writing shall become popular and this issue will substantially change.

:-)

Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#317

Post by Mz »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #300
Mz wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because long experience tells me that it is inherently hard to see and measure the disasters you prevented. This makes it incredibly hard to feel like you are accomplishing anything and harder still to convince other people you are actually adding value. Y2K was supposed to be a global meltdown. There were people who prepped for that like a coming apocalypse. It was prevented and many people remember it as "Ha! Can y…

I'm very sorry about your experiences, and at the same time thank you for sharing them. Here and elsewhere in the thread you make really good points about prevention and about non-obvious benefits of mundane things. That said, within the context of the topic, I can read your remarks in two ways: 1/ Helping society is much less obvious than it looks at first, so just drop the whole techie do-gooder savior attitude and…

Or, 3, it can be read to mean exactly what I said in my first remark:

I think the best social good comes from fostering a more civilized environment.

There are myriad ways to foster a more civilized environment. Pick whichever one fascinates you and go with that. Some people find snails endlessly fascinating. Others find computer security endlessly fascinating. Both interests have potential to be used to further the greater good.

Just because it is boring to you or me doesn't mean it will bore everyone. Sometimes it helps to have a larger perspective, like the story about the two brick layers. When asked what they are doing, one says "Building a wall." and the other says "Building a cathedral!" Both answers are equally valid, but I bet the second guy is a lot more jazzed to go to work in the morning.

Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#318

Post by TeMPOraL »

Mz wrote: post #316
TeMPOraL wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It takes real and significant effort to try to quantify in a meaningful way that "We prevented X amount of catastrophe with our work." It is much easier to see lives saved by an ambulance than lives saved by the local gym or the local organic grocer. Maybe something could be done to help / teach people to better quantify it (caveats about Goodhart's law notwithstanding)?

I have a zillion little blogs about various things that interest me (but, wait, there's more! I also leave comments like the ones above in various online forums!). Maybe over the course of the next 30 years, my writing shall become popular and this issue will substantially change. :-)

Well, maybe you could aggregate some of those comments like 'edw519 did :). His "best of"[0] is actually a pretty solid reading about programming and entrepreneurship.

[0] - https://v25media.s3.amazonaws.com/edw519_mod.html

Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#319

Post by andkon »

Honestly, most of the skills I've learned in building products for people can be used to make tech that has a social purpose. First, you find a problem. Then you find people who can honestly tell you if your solution will actually work. Then, you do the hard work of building what you're gonna build, and seeing if it can fit at the locus of how things are actually done.

That sounds vague, so an example might be nice. I travelled to Oaxaca recently and toured around a bunch of palenques (mezcal distilleries) to see how folks did their work. It sounded like there's an enormous problem with overcultivation of maguey — a plant that needs 30-some years to mature in some cases. I thought maybe an app that could identify + track maguey would help. I talked about it with folks, and realized that the problem isn't that they don't know where the plants are, or that they don't know how long they should grow for. It's that there's too much demand for what the ecology can bear, and a lot of it gets carted off to Jalisco to fill tequila bottles before it's mature.

In that light, an app for identifying + tracking maguey isn't really gonna help. But now I have the contacts, they know I want to help, and we can keep talking about what they're working on. Maybe it'll line up. But it's uncertain. And frankly, that's how this stuff works — whether you're building something in the hopes of getting into YC, or building something to help out humankind. Just because you can earn a paycheque writing code doesn't mean you can identify and fill a new need with that same skillset.

Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#320

Post by Frondo »

If you want to do social good on your own, pick a cause you can get excited about and look for meetings in your town around that cause. Go to those meetings for six months and get to know people. Talk to them and find out what problems they're facing, and brainstorm with them ways tech can solve those problems. Find the most curmudgeonly people in that community and work with them until you've won them over. Now you have an idea! Make it, refine it, and when you launch, your local community around that cause will be able to promote it to like-minded folks elsewhere.

Simple, but takes a lot of time, patience, listening, and humility. You can't go in thinking you have the answers, it's got to be a collaborative process.

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