To Make the World Better, Think Small | Hacker News Reader

To Make the World Better, Think Small

nytimes.com

81 pointsdnetesn28 comments

I agree with the headline, even if the content of the op-ed is kind of a mess. Reminds me of Etsy's Code as Craft Speaker Series. My favorite talks by far were the ones that focused on pretty minute issues, such as how to do A/B testing at scale, or how to manage multiple CDNs. Not because those are issues I've ever had to deal with professionally, but because how the details are dealt with are not only interesting from a technical standpoint, but they provide concrete info about a company's values and expectations. In the talk about multiple CDNs, for example, I found it interesting that Etsy had built a substantial amount of infrastructure to auto-detect the failure of a CDN, but it was always up to the engineer on-duty to wake up and push the button to switch CDNs.

In contrast, sometimes the Etsy talks would have grander topics, such as how to be a better entrepreneur, which were often filled with platitudes that offered no real insight or actionable advice.

As a teacher, I tell students that the best way to make an impact is to focus on the details. Because if you even know the details of an important problem like world hunger or injustice, it at least means you've done some research. More importantly, students need to realize that if something is indeed a big, "important" problem, it means that many, many people have been working on it. If these problems could be solved simply by people thinking, "I want to end world hunger!", then they wouldn't be big, complex problems.

> I tell students that the best way to make an impact is to focus on the details

Thank you for the insight in your last paragraph. Do you have references that will help me explore this even more?

I'm sure there are essays and writeups about this that I don't have off the top of my head. I do have a lot of examples.

In journalism, this insight becomes quite obvious after you've been on a beat for a few years and see how things really work, that is, how things are mostly mundane, and corruption or injustice isn't obvious because if they were, they would've been snuffed out (or obfuscated). So the devil is always in the details.

One of my favorite Pulitzer-winning stories is an investigation from the Sun-Sentinel (Florida) newspaper that majorly busted cops for speeding. Ostensibly, the big picture idea here is "who polices the police?"...but that by definition is an incredibly tricky thing to identify. After all, it's the police who create and record the data related to law breaking. So how did the Sun-Sentinel do it?

It started off with this widely-shared viral video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk44_bIhmGY

But the Sun-Sentinel reporters weren't content with the status quo -- i.e. shrugging and thinking oh everyone knows that cops speed all the time. They wanted to prove it. And their method was quite ingenious and so mathematically airtight that cops were being disciplined even before the story came out: http://www.ire.org/blog/ire-news/2013/04/15/how-sun-sentinel...

Here's the entry in the Pulitzer Awards for 2013: http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/sun-sentinel

If you go through the Pulitzer winning entries, many of them include the cover letters for the award submission. Those letters will often describe how a small detail or curiosity grew into a big investigation.

The tech scene is full of examples. Is there a single successful unicorn that, whatever their lofty motto is today, didn't start with fulfilling a very basic need? Facebook's mission today is to connect the world, but its early prototype was a faster way to lookup co-eds. Likewise, Google's mission to organize the world's information began with the implementation of the almost too-obvious (but genius) PageRank/Backrub algorithm.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090126204112/http://ilpubs.sta...

And of course, there's always Dr. Feynman's recounting of how he came up with the idea that would eventually lead to his Nobel Prize: https://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html

Thank you!

It is a little sad that Brooks calls W.C. Fields a misanthrope because of his comment. He was clearly making a joke. . . which he was known to do because he was one of the most famous comedians of all time. His schtick was acting like a misanthrope to ultimately make a sympathetic point.

And he even used his dying breaths to make a joke about the obvious injustice of the world and the callousness that allows it to persist. . . talk about timing. . .

The AEI certainly doesn't "Think Small".

"From 1990 to 2014, AEI received more than $111 million in disclosed contributions"

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Enterprise_Ins...

The board of directors of the Donors Trust "the dark money ATM of the right" is comprised of the president of the AEI, and the AEI is one of the largest recipients of money from the Donors Trust.

http://www.businessinsider.com/donors-trust-capital-fund-con...

I basically agree with the author, to a certain degree. Only looking at local problems reminds me very much of Biedermeier, when people grew so frustrated with things happening in the wider world that they retreated into their comfy personal world: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biedermeier

Just saw https://www.amazon.in/p2p

Once again, NYT shoving morality down my throat.

They violently forced you to click on the link in HN and violated your individual rights?

Not at all.

Still, it seems that every single op-ed in the Times has to do with why X liberal opinion is moral and, if you think otherwise, then you are either stupid or immoral. I have yet to see a single NYT opinion article that isn't formatted in such a way.

That description really doesn't apply to this article at all. I'm not sure how "working on a small, local level is probably more effective for individuals" is a liberal opinion, and any judgments on _you_ from the author would seem to just be your own projections, as there's nothing like that in here.

I agree. If anything, the idea tends to be a conservative one, given that conservatives tend to avoid problem solving of any kind at the federal (i.e., large scale) level. Conservatives fight against solving almost everything at national level, want problem solving to be smaller, more local. This tends to be an issue for progressives because rich localities have fewer problems (but many resources to solve them) and poor localities tend to have more problems (but fewer resources to solve them).

And, then, when they have power at the state level, they invariably do shit like this:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

Forcing their will and the will of their lobbyists on those below them. Conservatives' professed interest in smaller more, individualized and localized solutions is a shell game.

>I'm not sure how "working on a small, local level is probably more effective for individuals" is a liberal opinion

Sure, the overall message may not be liberal. But there are numerous liberal ideologies that the author subtly sticks in to his article as if they are untenably true. E.g., liberal views about

- Syrian refugees

- The European migrant crisis

- Globalism

- Pope Francis

He even uses these views to say "hey, you should care about these things and take my side if you want 2017 to be better than 2016".

Perhaps I should've pointed these things out in my original comment, since these subtleties might not be very obvious when reading them, if you are a liberal yourself.

The author of the piece is the president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

I'm not sure why you would find his views particularly liberal.

The writer is a prominent (free-market) conservative.

As a liberal, I much prefer that we live in a world where my political opponents are also trying to make the world a better place rather than being mustache-twirling Hollywood villains. So please don't assume that 'giving a shit' is a liberal characteristic: it's (indirectly) slightly flattering but profoundly unhelpful for actually getting things done.

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