Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 460 posts

Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?

#61

Post by Iv »

Energy and AI are totally needed.

AI can fuel research in every domain, including healthcare.

Energy is becoming the dominant cost of more and more things. And the transition out of oil is, IMO, the most likely to be a civilization-ending event if we don't do it correctly.

If you love on of these subjects, dive in. Let other well intentioned people go into the other fields, we are many!

And to answer your question, when I was 14-15 yo I stumbled upon the notion of post-scarcity and on the question and AI and what I did not know at the time was called the technological singularity.

I think the creation of human-level AIs will be the most significant invention since the invention of fire or agriculture so this has absorbed most of my thoughts and focus in the last 20 years.

Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?

#62

Post by RHSeeger »

nsomaru wrote: post #20

The focus should not be on "what," but on "why." I just got this advice the other day and it's liberated my thinking. I was (am) stuck in a rut believing that if I just find something I am passionate about it would alleviate the sense of purposelessness that pervades. Not so. Some people can work just for material benefit to themselves and their families. However, eventually that juice runs out because money is just…

> Some people can work just for material benefit to themselves and their families. However, eventually that juice runs out because money is just not useful beyond a point.

Admittedly, material benefit to myself and my family isn't the only reason I work. However, the argument that "money is just not useful beyond a point" isn't a strong one in my mind. I'm in my late forties right now and make a reasonable sum of money. I doubt I will ever get to the point where making more money won't get me more of what I want. Right now, I need to weight priorities when it comes to spending money (generator for my house vs something else). Getting to the point where I don't need to do that (for important things) would be my "more money isn't useful" point. I doubt I will ever get there.

Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?

#63

Post by hkmurakami »

We work on the things that are at the intersection of what we want to work on, what we are capable of working on (contributing to), and what the world (customers) want to have us work on.

It's the same thing with charitable giving. Give to the cause that will sustain your passion and connection to the cause. Disease in third world countries may reduce the most suffering in the world, but helping others in your own first world community is a "good" that should not be discounted.

Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?

#64

Post by estsauver »

Hey, I struggled with this question too. It can hang up a lot of very smart people in a challenging way.

A few thoughts:

- Sector of business and the problems you want to solve can end up being kind of orthogonal. I knew I wanted to have a big impact on some of the world's poorest people. I ended up working in agtech which at first had no impact on the world's poorest folks, it just made a few people very rich actually. I broke off and started a startup in the space 3 years ago that's now using agtech to help the world's smallest farmers radically improve their incomes. It takes time, but I wouldn't get too hung up on the sector to work in, I'd focus on what's driving you. If you want to work in healthcare to help people in your community, remember that helping people in your community is the goal and healthcare is just one possible medium.

- I really like Peter Thiel's classnotes from the startup class he taught at Stanford. They really changed my world view on what a successful company/life would be for me. I know he's become somewhat of a pariah in the tech community for his Trump support, but this work is pretty apolitical and really excellent.

Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?

#65

Post by RHSeeger »

The important thing for me is to work on small problems that flex my abilities. Solving global problems isn't something that I strive towards. Figuring out a good way to speed up information retrieval in the context of my work (internal cache vs external cache vs denormalized tables, etc) is something that makes me happy. I'm happy doing whatever work lets me work on those small, difficult problems.

Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?

#68

Post by davedx »

I decided in my mid-30's I wanted to work on energy, so after some career manoeuvring I found a job working in the IT dept of a renewable energy company. I was there two years, and would have stayed longer, but the salary wasn't that competitive and with my large family I ended up returning to contract work. (Towards the end pretty much all of my salary was going to our monthly costs, I had nothing left).

I don't regret doing this at all. I feel like I contributed (not for as long as I'd have liked to), and I learned tons of stuff working there.

I think AI is also pretty interesting as something that "should be worked on", and the pay is possibly also better than it is in the energy sector.

Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?

#69

Post by JofArnold »

For day to day I solved this by working for BigHealth. Their mission to get the world back to good mental health perfectly aligns with what I feel to be one of the most important issues facing humanity. From that perspective I’m sorted. But I’m also currently spending a lot of time thinking about 20-30 years into the future. I don’t have any answers but I’m reading various sources of ideas from sci fi to Marx to economics to philosophy to psychology. I’m hoping to get insights about fundamental long term human behaviour by looking at history and science. Good luck to you :)
Post reply on HN