Ask HN: Are we wasting our problem solving capabilities? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are we wasting our problem solving capabilities?

5 pointsblunte3 comments

HN is visited by many people who live to solve challenging problems.

Are we collectively navel-gazing? If we were coordinated, could we not solve some major problems in the world instead?

I first had this thought years ago when I would drive past fields of young and adult sports teams practicing and competing. I pondered what they could do if they offered one day a month, with guidance, to improve their town. There are some organizations such as Habitat for Humanity and many others who do this, but it is still much smaller scale than the number of available people who already give their time to team efforts.

We here are largely underutilized, creating our own challenges to solve (outside of the workplace). What if we could identify a few major challenges which would serve humanity while also giving us something interesting to tackle?

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Open source projects are kinda like that. Besides, many people look for something "not-serioues" when choosing after-work hobbies. Collaborating in a challenging group problem takes away some of that brain power (and juice) that you need the next morning at work.

I do agree that it's not efficient, but unfortunately it's how things work. I, too, used to get sad about sub-optimalities of the world when I was a kid. Nowadays, I'm used to life as is, and have found that "change" is costly.

There are some well-thought out lists:

https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/

https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs

However, something about them doesn't click. I don't think most of these are inspiring. It's best to solve problems that you personally face.

A lot of people run the calculations, and think that the most impactful thing they could do is help out some poor country. But they usually don't understand the root cause of those countries being poor. So they throw money at wells and education, when the real problem might be crime rate and gangs/corruption.

It's probably best to solve problems locally. Even if you're in the richest country in the world, there's probably a "backyard" that needs your help. I know people from small American states who would be grateful to not grow up as truck drivers or forced to work below minimum wage on a farm.

There's plenty of us who are in developing countries who understand the challenges of a developing country better too. Much of the problems in Malaysia/Malaya for the last 50 or 600 years has been a shortage of tech. The region has always been rich. Tech led to colonial conquest and later on, income disparity as the rich used technology to buy better mining/agriculture equipment and muscle the poor out. There's still a robber baron culture here. Discrimination is rampant - it's normal to get rejected for race, looks, or gender (especially if you're pregnant). It doesn't matter how much money you put into educating young women if nobody wants to hire women with degrees. And since people tend to copy "more successful companies", this culture is permeated.

It's funny to read HN and see comments who say unicorns won't improve the economy. Just the fantasy of having unicorns has improved tech and culture a lot. The power structure has shifted away from employers. Employers are giving much better terms, especially to disadvantaged people. So people are now able to live better lives, and it frees a lot of intelligent people who would otherwise be forced to work two jobs to survive.

The flaw I see in one day a month is rotating between people for problem solving. If you have 30 people work on progressing the same project, it adds a tremendous amount of overhead, and make it difficult to determine who should guide them or how they should be guided. It is very likely there will be disagreement each step of the way. Maintaining a momentum and direction would also be difficult. It would be much more effective to have 1 person working on the same problem for 30 days. Over years, the knowledge accumulated by one individual about the problem solved has a multiplying effect over knowledge distributed by 30 people, each having worked 12 days on a problem.

Once a challenging problem is solved, and tasks can be assigned to implement the solution, with each task being clear and well-defined, that's when you can start assigning them effectively. When the solution is of value and convenient to implement, that is when people can come together and coordinate to serve a purpose that can benefit humanity as a whole.

As a society, we would benefit by identifying solutions of value, and implementing them, and I think we have and will continue to get better at that, as demonstrated by increasingly unique financing models like venture capitalism, kickstarter, DAOs, better tools for collaboration, better ways of bringing people together over larger geographies to work together on the same problem and more.

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