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

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

#421

Post by hotdogs »

dstick wrote: post #257
quanticle wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason energy and AI are more attractive than healthcare has little to do with "identity", "culture" or "positionality". It has much more to do with the fact that the field is chock full of incidental complexity that makes doing any kind of good work an extremely unrewarding slog. Look at the 834 EDI format [1], for example. Does anyone want to work with a file format as nasty as this? Does anyone want to work in…

Wait a second... what’s stopping you from changing —this— situation then? Solve the data format problem. Make it easier for everyone to exchange data in meaningful, efficient ways. Sounds like a terrible pain that you understand well enough to be able to solve. When you have, it might remove a major bottleneck and open the floodgates for more smart people to join, ultimately benefitting healthcare in a massive way. M…

> Solve the data format problem. Make it easier for everyone to exchange data in meaningful, efficient ways.

https://xkcd.com/927/

The whole field feels like such a mess to deal with what basically boils down to text/numerical data. You could probably spend the rest of your life just writing parsers to consolidate different data formats. I truly don't believe healthcare will be solved by technology until there is a single ubiquitous format. It's really a problem of policy, and I won't purport to know the answer or who should be solving the issue, but I don't think it's ever going to be solved by one person at a keyboard.

There are standards such as HL7/FHIR, but in my experience, most companies incorrectly or partially implement the spec, and then it might as well be something else.

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

#422

Post by quanticle »

wolco wrote: post #330
quanticle wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short answer: hospitals, insurance companies, governments Long answer: It's not like people don't understand that the current situation is suboptimal. It's that any kind of change implemented unilaterally will leave you unable to communicate with your counterparties. The severe consequences of this (not getting paid, being out of compliance with HIPAA) means that any kind of change to health-care IT at a system-wide…

The more interconnected the greater the energy required to change from the groundup but trivial to change at the top (submit in this format or no payment)

Except that health care has no "top". If an insurance company tried to unilaterally impose a new standard, they'd quickly lose support among hospitals, and then they'd lose their subscribers shortly thereafter.

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

#424

Post by diminoten »

dogcomplex wrote: post #366
diminoten wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

28 words written, with the expectation of many many orders of magnitude more in response. This is a social zip bomb, and it's not very nice. Don't spend other people's time like this, do some research yourself if this genuinely interests you.

We got you covered. Or rather - other media has you covered. Just gotta link requests like these to some book/series/etc they might (but probably won't) read/watch ;)

Yeah, and thanks, but it's sometimes hard to see comments like, "Hey cool, could you just give me a brief 10k word essay on what you're talking about?" and not get a little frustrated.

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

#425

Post by loco5niner »

throwaway713 wrote: post #336
yesenadam wrote: post #285

I want to be careful with this decision, to avoid any future regrets Don't forget to consider that you may regret whatever you do - by human nature, the grass is proverbially always greener on the other side. People who have kids may wish they hadn't, but if they hadn't, they may have regretted that - in both cases thinking they'd made the wrong choice. Socrates and Kierkegaard, among others, discussed this as a basi…

> Hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way How does one regret hanging himself?

Same way you wake up dead.

Seriously though, one of the consistent things said by people who attempted to commit suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate bridge but survived were (paraphrasing) "At that moment, I realized that of all the problems in my life, this(jumping) was the only one I couldn't fix".

At that point, when it was too late, they regretted it.

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

#426

Post by selestify »

diminoten wrote: post #424
dogcomplex wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We got you covered. Or rather - other media has you covered. Just gotta link requests like these to some book/series/etc they might (but probably won't) read/watch ;)

Yeah, and thanks, but it's sometimes hard to see comments like, "Hey cool, could you just give me a brief 10k word essay on what you're talking about?" and not get a little frustrated.

Well it's not a thing with a particularly obvious term to search for -- "small thing worked on over long periods that brings great change" doesn't really provide good results on Google despite it being a rather specific idea. So I'm grateful for any pointers to resources I can look into further for this kind of thing. The other person's reply with an explicit book name doesn't seem to have taken up all that many words, and presumably they know what they're talking about and them dropping a book name like that would save me a lot of time compared to me searching around the internet based on a very vague phrase.

Now granted, my Google-fu could stand to be a lot better.

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

#427

Post by news_hacker »

loco5niner wrote: post #319
yesenadam wrote: post #285

I want to be careful with this decision, to avoid any future regrets Don't forget to consider that you may regret whatever you do - by human nature, the grass is proverbially always greener on the other side. People who have kids may wish they hadn't, but if they hadn't, they may have regretted that - in both cases thinking they'd made the wrong choice. Socrates and Kierkegaard, among others, discussed this as a basi…

This is also (arguably) the point of "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken

Some clarifying info on how the poem is the most misread & misunderstood poem in America, for those interested (it's actually an ironic poem about self-deception to avoid regret rather then a "triumphant self-assertion"):

> Frost’s poem turns this expectation on its head. Most readers consider “The Road Not Taken” to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion (“I took the one less traveled by”), but the literal meaning of the poem’s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem’s speaker tells us he “shall be telling,” at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths “equally lay / In leaves” and “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.

> According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ages and ages hence” that his decision made “all the difference” only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. “The Road Not Taken” may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Source: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misr...

edit: whoops, someone beat me to it and already posted the link

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

#428

Post by solveit »

kiliantics wrote: post #412
solveit wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grassroots activism is great, but I think it's pretty clear that a single person at an elite think tank is more impactful than a single grassroot. Now, if you think you can pull a Nelson Mandela, go for the activist approach, but most people can't, and 80,000 hours is in the business of giving advice to maximize expected utility.

The problem is that the single person's hands are tied because of their position. You can't influence the government from a think tank if you're suggesting prison abolition, banning cars from Manhattan, or even just massive social housing projects. Those think tanks would never get funded or get the time of day in government. Some things really need people power from below.

I think we're both completely correct. Some things need power from below, but those things are almost never the most efficient things to be working on precisely because they're so outside the political mainstream.

This is also the reason EA gets a lot of hate from various quarters. They take picking your battles to an extreme, and essentially come right out and say that many worthy causes are not the right ones to be fighting for.

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

#429

Post by insited »

yesenadam wrote: post #285

I want to be careful with this decision, to avoid any future regrets Don't forget to consider that you may regret whatever you do - by human nature, the grass is proverbially always greener on the other side. People who have kids may wish they hadn't, but if they hadn't, they may have regretted that - in both cases thinking they'd made the wrong choice. Socrates and Kierkegaard, among others, discussed this as a basi…

Amazing

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

#430

Post by AnimalMuppet »

I don't think the question, as stated, is useful. Any problem big enough to be worth dedicating your life to solving is not likely to be solved by one person. Even if it is, you are unlikely to be the one to do so.

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't work on such problems. But the question seems like it's saying "I need to fix one of these in order to not waste my life", which seems line an unhealthy way of trying to find one's identity.

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