Do All Problems Have Technical Fixes?

To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: "No."

Sometimes what is needed is not to solve or explain, but to acknowledge a problem. To name it. And to have the restraint and patience and trust that its understanding, alone, will take care of most of it.

I feel like the framing in the article is wrong. Tech startups are desperately searching for solutions that will generate value.

When a "new hammer" is developed or discovered (lets say, radiation) there's a natural inflection point. People will try marketing radioactive medicines, radioactive soft drinks, radioactive toys, radioactive jewelry.... etc etc. Everything will be thrown at the wall to see what sticks. There's no broader intellectual movement in play.

This process is more like "product darwinism" than technological determinism.

I suspect there's a correlation between how likely someone is to answer "yes" and how recently they entered the software engineering workforce. At any rate, it's definitely changed for me since starting out.

If nothing else, getting people to accept a technical fix is a social problem.

On the other hand, yes, some social problems have had technical solutions. Remember when “You just can’t get good help these days!” was a truism? It isn’t said as much anymore because the underlying problem was obviated: Time was, middle-class households were becoming unmanageable due to young women no longer wanting to be servants, such as maids; not even the Great Depression could shift the problem. Ultimately, the whole thing was rendered obsolete by the rise of home conveniences such as dishwashers and vacuum cleaners, allowing middle-class women to do their own housework.

Those technical solutions still required a social shift away from expecting maids to be part of any well-run middle-class household, but the technical and the social went hand-in-hand.

https://daily.jstor.org/how-america-tried-and-failed-to-solv...

Side note:

> the Naturalisitic Fallacy that “ought” can be derived from “is.”

What's the name for the fallacy that “is” can be derived from “ought”?