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Comment by fvdessen | Hacker News Reader

I think western designs work actually very well in developing countries, such as south america and south east asia. Where they fail is in non-developing countries such as central africa, where the problems of war, crime, drugs, and corruption run so deep that technology is unable to solve any problem, just as giving a washing machine to a crack addict is not going to help him stay clean.

A good example is digging a well in the village to get water. But why isn't there a well in the first place ? Because in most of the case they're getting their water via water trucks from a corrupt government agency who's quite interested in making sure no well ever works for long, and the locals don't have access to the financial, technological and judiciary infrastructure to make long term investments and commitments worthwile. In other words the problem of the village is not the lack of the 'well technology' in the skill tree.

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I read an article a while back about the success of handing out “iron fish” to people in villages. It’s literally a little fish-shaped hunk of iron that people keep in their cooking kettle that slowly leeches iron in their food and helps with lots of anemias. A key observation was that it was basically useless for anything else. It’s not valuable. It’s a small hunk of cutely shaped iron. Recipients largely used it as intended because there wasn’t anything else to do with it, really.

Contrast with another agency that passed out mosquito nets to hang over beds. Turns out they made good fishing seine, so most people either took their net to the nearest river to fish with it or sold it to someone else who wanted to.

I’m sure the people who got mosquito nets would’ve loved sleeping without being bit by mosquitos. A stable food supply was their more pressing issue though.[0] The humble iron fish addressed its problem by being good for one thing only.

[0] Seine fishing quickly devastated the local fish stocks. “Oops, sorry our gift is now causing you to starve.” A critical lesson here: ask the recipients of such a “gift” whether they actually want it and what they’ll use it for. They’re not you. Don’t assume they’ll use it the same way you do.

The mosquito-nets-as-fishing-nets story is covered in the video.

Ah, nice. (You can tell I didn’t watch it.)

Maslow's hierarchy, though a flawed model, does offer some predictive power on the rational reasoning people turn mosquito nets into fishing nets.

You need food...basically now....a few times a day.

Mosquitos are a maybe once a day thing, and the diseases they might cause come with irregular frequency. If you can sleep with them biting you, you've satisfied the priority of Maslow for attending to Physiological needs before Safety.

I would bet that if the same villagers had access to an unlimited supply of these nets, once they had used them for every single conceivable method to feed themselves including agricultural uses, they'd inevitably end up covering beds at night.

Selling the wells solarpump cause the woman who carry it un from the river got uppity.

Imagine an NGO with infinite cash started handing out free rooftop solar installations to anyone that wanted it in the US. The oil companies would lose their collective minds over the sudden drop in profits. You would instantly see legislative backlash to put a stop to it. Those in power spend a lot of time and energy making the status quo what it is and they don't like when it's threatened.

>Those in power spend a lot of time and energy making the status quo what it is and they don't like when it's threatened.

Kinda like how the sugar and fast food industry don't like that people are now indulging in Ozempic, or other weight loss drugs since they just decrease your appetite making people eat less.

I don't see a point in imagining an impossible hypothetical. If we imagine a world with infinite resources a lot of problems as we know it would go away. It is precisely because we live in a complicated and imperfect world that we have problems, and we must solve those problems within that reality. Competing priorities between different parties (e.g., "oil companies") cannot be simply ignored if you want to actually discuss anything meaningful and not merely wishful/imaginary.

Interesting method of thinking. I call most countries in Africa developing countries, but some of them aren't developing at all but instead are regressing and are in a worse state than before.

Boils down to the sometimes brutal fact that social problems can't be solved with technological solutions.

Our technophilia often blinds of from this, even in the US. Techno-optimism is basically a cult that says all our woes can be solved with engineering rather than social effort. Climate change, wealth inequality, etc will not be solved with technology. They will be solved with sweat effort and social change. To believe anything else is delusional.

Yes. “I have a startup that’ll change the world with our SaaS product!” has really rotted peoples brains on this website.

I've beendownvoted into oblivion on this website for arguing with crypto pundits who were preaching here how much Bitcoin will save the poorest countries from poverty.

I never liked the "Change the world" rhetoric. Give me "We think this is an untapped market, with a good chance to make a nice business out of".

I always felt that was more or less a religion sold to engineers in order to get them to work on whatever meaningless tech product du jour was used to extract money from some VC or other. Some would say I'm a miserable cynic though.

> sweat effort and social change

Is that a euphemism for war?

Social change can come from votes or revolutions, but usually the latter.

Sound unpleasant. Let's avoid social change.

Sometimes it comes from tech advances, though, I'm pretty sure.

Can't be sure if that's sarcasm or not.

I can at least sympathize with the notion. Social revolutions and upheavals are always going to be unpleasant regardless of the means and ends and some people are simply content with the way things are.

> Social revolutions and upheavals are always going to be unpleasant

Removing the rot is always going to be painful for some (usually the current ruling and asset owning class). And almost everything rots with time. More food delivery start-ups aren't going to improve that.

Those who believe in technology (usually web stuff) being the miracle salvation are those who have it very good anyway and see no need to change but your poverty stricken people can't eat apps, but they can eat you on your way to work.

That may be true to an extent, but at the same time technology should get a lot of credit for civilization improvements such as near extinction of slavery in the West once machinery became cheaper/more productive than manual labor.

In case of climate change, perhaps technology is not the complete solution. But again money talks, and if technology can result in availability of cheaper and more environmentally friendly inventions, it can help a great deal. Case in point, many new power plants across the world are built using solar/wind presumably because of lower cost, not out of some altruistic concern for the environment.

>but at the same time technology should get a lot of credit for civilization improvements such as near extinction of slavery in the West once machinery became cheaper/more productive than manual labor.

When people on this site talk about "tech", they don't mean something on labor saving machinery for humanity as most of the low hanging fruit there has been picked decades ago, but more on the spectrum of which new VC funded app can make the most lucrative exit, using the $CURRENT_DAY hype like blockchain or AI.

Sure, new and more advanced machinery is coming out, like ASML's stuff, but those ASSML steppers aren't saving people from hard labor, starvation or poverty, like the mining or agricultural machines for a century ago.

To be fair, for climate change a technological solution is probably the more practical one, since people are unlikely to go against their own interests for the greater good. Much easier to have renewable energy and electric cars and geoengineering than to try and encourage/force the entire world to change their lifestyle.

Isn't South America considered "western"?

No it's considered part of the "global south" relative to "the West"

Japan/ROK are also sometimes considered "Western" due to being key components of Washington's force projection

It's usually considered Western-adjacent.

"Western" is somewhat of a biased term to limit nations to an in-group of rich, affluent, mostly culturally eurocentric/euroderived nations. If you don't fit all of the qualifiers, you're not in.

LATAM is missing out on the affluence (and, some would argue, a certain racial component), so they get excluded. Japan, SKorea, etc are also sometimes included or made adjacent for similar reasons.

That's kind of a nonsensical classification but apparently is the one being used. I always thought western meant "in the western hemisphere".

It broadly does. With the asterisk of "rich, culturally European (and probably white)".

New Zealand and Australia are Western countries that aren't anywhere near Europe and North America

No. It means the Western part of the Old World as opposed to the Near East, India, China, etc, plus the parts of the New World setted by that part of the Old World.

South America was settled by the western part of the old world.

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