But of course, all anyone here is going to do is talk about it, before resuming work on useless "innovation" X
Solving All the Wrong Problems
31–40 of 118 posts
Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems
#32"We are still looking at the computer as if it were a means of doing what we were already doing."
-Marshall McLuhan
Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems
#33She'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 impossible to establish a definitive cause.
I'm sure some variant of this story could have been written at any time during the rise of global capitalism, yet the world has, by just about any measure, become a radically better place during just about any 25 year time frime. Show me a chart on https://ourworldindata.org/ where anything has gotten worse - from America to places once considered irredeemably "third world", just about anything we can measure is improving. We don't need concern trolls on high horses to make the world a better place.
Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems
#34I fail to see how "And a new proposal to create an app designed to stop police killings." fits on the list of problems that don't need to be solved. Am I missing something?
I think it's meant to highlight the absurdity of believing that police killings can be fixed by an app.
Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems
#35It's true that there are large underserved populations of lower economic status. But this isn't because they are "uninteresting" in my view; helping single mothers is much more interesting than coming up with a CRM for all but the most heartless. The rub in my view is people without means don't have the means to fund your startup over food and shelter, and those two segments have some pretty fierce competition. Perha…
To add to your point, some projects are simply not going to be profitable, but will certainly have a benefit to society nonetheless. A lot of civic tech projects help increase awareness to certain issues or aim to empower disenfranchised groups, but don't have have a profitable revenue model.
I'm lucky enough to be well-off in many regards that I can freely spend 20-30 hours a week to design/code projects that will hopefully have a meaningful impact to people in my city, specifically increasing awareness of mental health and injustice towards people of color. But I'm not being paid for it, nor is anyone here capable of giving me a salary/donation that comes even close to what I'd earn at a tech startup. The government is also pretty limited to how much they'd provide as a grant.
I'm reminded of an organization here that created a platform to enable non-profits find and manage volunteers, which has clear efficiency benefits for organizations since the process can be very messy. But because organizations can't really pay them that much, they are limited as to how quickly they can expand the team and add new features. Given the limits of their market, no 'investor' is going to invest in them in the hopes of expecting a meaningful financial return.
I'm not sure where I'm going with my train of thought. Maybe something like it'd be nice if there were a non-VC model that enabled groups to work on projects that had no clear profit model? I know the U.S. has organizations that give grants to transformative projects, like the Sunlight and Knight Foundation. Sadly, not every country is lucky enough to have something like that.
Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems
#36> "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…
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Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems
#37> "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…
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 dwarfs the 10 minutes that person saved having their car parked for them.
Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems
#38"A service that sends someone to fill your car with gas."
Yes please. So I can have more time to solve bigger, and more challenging problems...
I don't understand how we can even tackle these harder problems if we're spending so much time on mundane chores.. it all adds up.
Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems
#39I 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.
Please don't use racist language on HN.
Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems
#40I 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 companies on their radar are the same is outrageous. They're all the same because there's this huge selection bias applied by the fact that they only cover companies they think their average reader can understand. Which isn't a very wide variety.