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Solving All the Wrong Problems

nytimes.com

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Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems

#41

Post by mzw_mzw »

sosborn wrote: post #30
sachel1sta wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Responding to the point you're trying to make: How big of a problem are police killings--really? We all understand the act of (unjustified) police killings is a bad one, but how much of a _problem_ is it? Look at the evidence. Then look at all of the other problems that we all face, not just in the states, but worldwide. I can name a great problem that almost all of us should be focusing on: global warming. Why don't…

> Why don't we spend our energy on a significant and catastrophic problem? It's possible to do this without ignoring other issues.

Not according to this article, apparently.

Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems

#42

Post by pron »

saturdaysaint wrote: post #33

She's free to get away with a smear like this because it's impossible to quantify or predict the amazing things that can arise from instant access to information or from every human saving hundreds of hours a year and getting better products and services shopping online. Even when things inarguably improve - like when society suddenly decides to embrace and defend the rights of new categories of minorities - it's imp…

What does this have to do with the article? Her criticism is very specific and is about something very recent.

Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems

#43

Post by ot »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #5

> "As one colleague in tech explained it to me recently, for most people working on such projects, the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do." Ha! I've used the exact same characterization. Anyway, this seems entirely predictable given a couple different considerations. 1) People are most apt to effectively solve problems for which they have some context. 2) People who…

It's a common sentiment: https://www.herecomestheairplane.co/

Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems

#44

Post by calbear81 »

aetherson wrote: post #12

It's pretty un-self-aware for someone to simultaneously bitch that: 1. Some populations are underserved because they aren't sexy and high profile and interesting. 2. Some apps are solving small problems instead of tackling global warming. The truth is that many (perhaps all) of those apps will fail, and if any succeed, most of the successes will be kind of marginal successes that don't upend the world. So what? That'…

It's okay that the marginal successes don't upend the world, the writer simply is asking if those of us in the valley are "disrupting" the right problems for the right populations. A marginal amount of time-savings for a high-income earner in having their car parking woes solved might be economically more viable than working on a problem that is less sexy but potentially has significantly less impact on actual improvement to people's lives.

Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems

#45

Post by sachel1sta »

ixtli wrote: post #13

I believe the salient point that "the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do" is a direct effect of lack of diversity in our field. Homogenous, largely white, largely male, largely safe people are not going to detect the problems the author appears to be implying are going untreated.

Rather than just "believing," can you please provide evidence that "white, male and safe" people do not detect and put their energy into treating the kinds of problems you're alluding to? (In fact I must have missed the specific untreated problems that you and the author mention).

I fail to see how skin color, gender and "safeness," whatever the hell that is, implies someone has a "reduced" ability to detect and solve important problems. If you actually look for it, you will find many examples of people with the superficial characteristics you describe, and find that not only are they an extremely "diverse" group of people -- in the characteristics that truly matter -- but that they are doing precisely the kind of work that I think you speak of.

Why stop at people in "our field"? What about all of the people who possess the superficial characteristics you mention, but who also share an extraordinary amount of "diversity" and have had extraordinary success in treating important problems -- outside of "our field"? Doctors, scientists, engineers ... all over the world ... truly seek to make the world a better place.

Frankly I'm sick of the notion that "white, male and safe" implies a lack of diversity and a lack of ability or desire to detect ... whatever problems you have.

Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems

#46

Post by Swizec »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #37
Swizec wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a problem or a good thing? Washing machines, kitchen appliances and similar technological advances, freed up our at home time so much that we can put a whole nother 50% of the population through college. A whole 50% of the population that can get jobs, have careers, and do cool shit, who was stuck wiping men's proverbial bottoms until the 1950's. Making free time free is a good thing. There's no telling what…

The calculus of the opportunity cost presented here isn't the tiny incremental improvement attached to my already amply comfortable lifestyle, but rather the aggregate full-time loss of many dozens or hundreds of engineers, data scientists, and investment $$$ diverted to trivial pursuits. Or put more simply. The lost problem-solving potential for 8-10 hours a day of a single PhD in Applied Mathematics massively dwarf…

But what about the time cost/opportunity of a single full-time phd versus 10 minutes a day for the 253 million cars on US roads today? Globally?

Assuming parking only once a week for each vehicle, that's over 60,000 hours of saved time per day. That engineer's time investment is virtually free in comparison.

Of course these savings will only materialize after parking technology becomes commoditized. Commoditization is part of tech progress.

Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems

#47

Post by microcolonel »

I don't see what's wrong with building businesses which serve niche desires. Does she not understand that surely there's somebody somewhere who desperately needs their car parked, that without the internet people already had beer delivered to their door?

She just seems to have such a curmudgeonly attitude, where all people must be working to solve her favourite enormous issues and never to slightly enhance the lives of some customers.

Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems

#48

Post by gk1 »

jdoliner wrote: post #40

I find articles like this pretty frustrating. There's tons of companies in Silicon Valley that are trying to do audacious things that people's mothers never did for them. They don't get much press coverage and that's fine, media outlets are businesses too so they need to write about companies that their readership wants to read about. But the fact that they then turn around and complain about the fact that all the co…

I fail to see a single original thought in this article. This same article could have been written 10, 20, 100 years ago, about the stupid ideas from those times. There is no shortage of stupid ideas and there never has been. (If you think those periods didn't have as many stupid ideas, it's only because of survivor bias.)

Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems

#49

Post by inputcoffee »

jaredsohn wrote: post #28
wolfgke wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most important thing in the world is love. If you hint at dating startups, here two texts why this is difficult: > http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html > http://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/

FWIW, based on the following sentences it doesn't look like the GP is hinting at that.

I was basically joking.

The joke is (I hate explaining these): the most overdone app, exemplifying the NYtimes article, that I can think of is a photosharing app.

And then I worked back into how a photosharing app is what the article is encouraging us to create.

Although a dating app joke would have worked just as well, and I suspect wolfgke was implying that.

Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems

#50

Post by dasil003 »

None of this is going to change unless capital miraculously grows a conscience. As an entrepreneur seeking funding you can't afford to solve problems for the poor because there's no way to raise money for that, and there's certainly not a lot of disposable income available to bootstrap from.

The problem with this type of article is that it conflates all the struggling little startups with the unicorns who are actually making a lot of money. These big companies probably should grow a conscience, but it's not really in their DNA, because if they had been socially conscious from the beginning they never would have succeeded. Meanwhile, all these little companies are in a life or death struggle on a daily basis, so they have to do the thing which gives them a chance to survive til tomorrow. Don't get me wrong, I recognize the privilege of people who get to join a high-risk startup, but just because they are individually privileged with that freedom does not mean that they have the power to actually push our culture to a more socialist mentality. I don't use the word "socialist" as an epithet here BTW, despite American political dog whistles, I think the growing income gap is evidence that we have a real lack of social conscience throughout society.

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