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…
I think Bill Gates is an interesting data point here. For a lot of his life he was reviled by many, and yet in the past 15 years he has used his wealth to do great good.
My opinion: take whatever idea you have for a great company, but make it a non-profit. Other than maybe e-mail, wikipedia is the best thing to come out of the internet. And its creator may not be a billionaire oligarch, but he has a GREAT life. If you can set aside a need to be filthy, needlessly, pointlessly rich, then maybe turn your next idea for a social network or a communication platform or whatever into a non-…
This is the dream. OpenStreetMap is another great example of such an idea. To take it a step further, I'd encourage setting the non-profit up as a worker's cooperative. Just imagine all of the big companies out there organized as open-source, co-operative non-profits. We could kill a lot of redundant work, retain people's privacy, and really empower the employees of these companies to ensure the company works on things they believe in.
Looks like a lot of the top-voted suggestions are only applicable to a single country. If your suggestion has a major restriction like that, then would you please declare it upfront?
I think the most basic and overlooked thing is food. Eating well, reducing waste, and sustainable production are areas with huge opportunities. Energy and food are fundamental for improving quality of life; and they're also the human activities with the largest negative externalities to nature.
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…
I think Bill Gates is an interesting data point here. For a lot of his life he was reviled by many, and yet in the past 15 years he has used his wealth to do great good.
Agree that he's done a ton of good with his charitable giving, but point is that he bettered humanity (probably even more than his charity) even before that with Windows (giving the masses an easier way to interact with computers, allowing individuals and companies to create other valuable things in turn), the whole software not hardware paradigm (led to rapid development in terms of the type of programs and functionality people had access to), and Microsoft Office (Excel and Word == a ton of social value). Obviously he wasn't personally responsible for all that, and also became a multi billionaire in the process (and is giving most of it away, kudos) but even if he kept it all, that's all benefiting humanity and creating social good.
My opinion: take whatever idea you have for a great company, but make it a non-profit. Other than maybe e-mail, wikipedia is the best thing to come out of the internet. And its creator may not be a billionaire oligarch, but he has a GREAT life. If you can set aside a need to be filthy, needlessly, pointlessly rich, then maybe turn your next idea for a social network or a communication platform or whatever into a non-…
This is the dream. OpenStreetMap is another great example of such an idea. To take it a step further, I'd encourage setting the non-profit up as a worker's cooperative. Just imagine all of the big companies out there organized as open-source, co-operative non-profits. We could kill a lot of redundant work, retain people's privacy, and really empower the employees of these companies to ensure the company works on thin…
Tools for automating the mundane tasks of running a co-op, sounds like a great idea for a project. Something along the lines of the GNU tool suite.
How does one build and maintain a co-op? Could anyone recommend a book on the subject, that covers a variety of nations or regions?
This is exactly the advice a sociology professor in college gave to the sociology majors.
A sociology professor advised sociology majors to work as programmers? That's much better advice than I'd expect from a sociology professor, if I'm to be honest.
Yes. Any high paid job actually. Point being don't do this solely because you "want to make a difference".... making a lot of money at a different job and giving to causes you care about is a legitimate way to make a difference.
The medical world has a lot of uses for software and machine learning.
Sure, but would be cool to know where to find some particular areas or projects to help.
This is the core problem here: I could personally name a ton of industries and endeavors that could use software to be better - but finding a particular need and someone willing to work with you on fulfilling that need? That feels incredibly hard.
Do you get any push back on this from the state/gov? Cynically; I can see this process being intentionally obscure and difficult to dissuade people from applying and receiving aid.
Great question! Overall I'd say our gov't partners are incredibly supportive. A lot of why these processes are hard are not by intentional design, but rather by _unintentional, non-design_. What do I mean? It's that these systems evolve over time, via massive waterfall IT procurement processes, and you often have someone (say, one county, or one unit) who proposes to add one more question because it makes it better f…
Actually, to follow up -- you mention simplifying the process to be easier on the user. Are myriad of questions one must laboriously answer to enroll in EBT programs a matter of... legislation? taxes? I would imagine that the questions have to do with honing in on a complex placement within the law which determines benefit levels. How do you go about simplifying a process which requires a large number of distinct data points by law or by census design?