Do All Problems Have Technical Fixes? | Hacker News Reader

Do All Problems Have Technical Fixes?

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79 pointszdw85 comments

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.

> 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.

Have you read anything from the early 20th century? This is a noticeable theme in e.g. stories set in the mythos of Conan the Barbarian or the Wizard of Oz. "Radium" is treated as essentially a form of magic.

I don't think "read Conan the Barbarian" is the main takeaway of that, though I'm sure "rays" was a trope in fiction.

Quack "radioactive medicines" actually happened to people. Product darwinism and actual customer darwinism.

See, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_quackery

https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/radioa...

https://histmed.collegeofphysicians.org/for-students/radium/

https://www.dannydutch.com/post/the-strange-story-of-eben-by...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/the-lethal-legacy-of-e...

> though I'm sure "rays" was a trope in fiction

No, seriously, "radium".

And before that, it was "magnetism".

And today it's quantum mechanics and/or dark matter.

You mean

Tech startups are desperately searching for buzz words that will generate profit.

Tech startups are desperately searching for buzz words that will generate a VC payday. Actual profit is optional.

Exactly - buzzwords are new opportunities for fundraising first and foremost.

Actual products which provide actual solutions to actual customers.. are for the product market fit phase.

s/profit/increase in valuation/

For most of the startup ecosystem, profits are less a goal than liquidity event. Often that comes in the form of an acqui-hire, monopoly buying out competition, or a technology transfer.

Profits are a distant focus, though remaining ahead of run rate has merits.

this makes sense if tech startups just existed, but they are brought into existence, by people who perhaps think "you know what would be neat, and also make money because people would totally want that, is radioactive soda pop!"

I guess in the end the effect is pretty much indistinguishable.

Yeah and this worked for quite a while as the prior generation was less STEM savvy than the younger generation who grew up on it and as such have had two decades to realize web app startups are just a generational Ponzi scheme that’s not going to literally take them to Mars or do much of anything but hand more of our agency to a bunch of patronizing elders who don’t contribute except in the form of political pageantry.

That sounds like the what I am seeing in the consumer packaged goods industry. In desperation of growth they are throwing everything at the wall.

ex: that 'flamin hot' thing took off and post pandemic they put it in everything including soda and ice cream. Lets not forget every merchandising opportunity under the sun.

There's only so many people who can figure out what will really sell, or be able to really sell it.

And way more people who wish they could do the former, but know in their heart they never will, while having a leg up in the latter, often built from a fortunate upwardly-mobile sales career where their customers never did get their money's worth.

You know the kind I'm talking about.

Which can guide their actions toward a slightly deceptive form of marketing, or things even more unsavory.

OTOH, sometimes quite benign, but also less creative.

And it shows.

Otherwise you wouldn't know the kind I'm talking about :\

A lot of these things that I describe are built on the back of a successful product. 'Flamin hot' was a successful product, every subsequent variation was not original thinking. What steps were taken to get to the original success?

Seems like in the 80s-90s there was an avalanche of unique products, now in this post pandemic decade its just nonstop rehashing of the oldies. Ex. Cinnamon toast crunch vs cinnamon toast crunch hazelnut spread alternative.

Funding, both from governments and investors, also tends to chase after trends, so people's proposals will reflect that.

I wish there was some deeper thought or philosophy behind it, but that clearly isn't always the case.

Reminds of hammer factory: https://factoryfactoryfactory.net/

A lot of problems do. But sometimes the problem is people related. You can work around those problems with technology but you can't fix them.

In terms of real world problems: climate change, food scarcity, poverty, water quality and access, health care, etc. a lot of the solutions are technical. And a lot of those solutions are directly or indirectly about making energy cheaper and cleaner. With cheap clean energy, you can address climate change. You can desalinate water (at scale). If you have clean water, you can address food scarcity (e.g. irrigate desserts). You can also address sanitation. Cheap energy also enables transport, having light in people's home (education). so that addresses poverty. And so on. All that comes from just a handful of technical solutions that make energy cheap and clean. Anyone working on those things is accomplishing more than decades worth of well intentioned but not very effective activism, charity, diplomacy, etc. I'm sure AI has a role to play here as well.

The point is moot anyway. We're not going to turn into Luddites and competition continuously drives us to do better. Which means people keep on figuring out technical solutions to challenges around them. Technology isn't inherently good or evil. But it can be very effective sometimes. And of course there is a lot of not so effective or misguided stuff as well. Part of the journey.

> A lot of problems do. But sometimes the problem is people related. You can work around those problems with technology but you can't fix them.

It depends a lot on what is encompassed in the considered definition of technology. Education and language can certainly be taken as technologies, under certain perspectives at least. And addressing individual behaviors with undesirable social consequences is something that definitely can be solved with appropriate educational "technologies".

In my current perspective, the most weighted factor between a technology and an innate individual trait is how transferable it is.

>We're not going to turn into Luddites and competition continuously drives us to do better.

It all depends on which values we endorse and thus how we deem something "better". On global scale, there was probably never so much passive aggressive competition within humankind (we also never been so numerous to be fair), and its results on global biosphere are to say the least completely disastrous.

>But it can be very effective sometimes.

Sure but working on improving effectiveness means nothing. If we try to enhance efficiency of gaz chambers, we are clearly bringing only more evil to the world. Efficacy is meaningless without a kind and generous purpose.

I could almost say "science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme", but Rabelais actually wasn’t willing to say what it is generally thought it means nowadays. https://theconversation.com/science-sans-conscience-nest-que...

I agree with you.

Before we are so eager to solve the problems, we better pinpoint how the problems were introduced and exacerbated. In the US, there are conflicts between illegal immigration and local communities, or conflicts between BLM and ALM. Especially the latter one, which I as an ordinary non-American cannot understand why ALM was abandoned like SHIT in the end. I do not know that initially aimed to advocate for peace. Quite funny we have to choose sides: IsraeliLivesMatter vs PalestinianLivesMatter or RussianLivesMatter vs UkrainianLivesMatter. In the end, I decided to forget about the controversy. And decide to fight back against those who argue against "all lives matter" just because of a few bad apples. And maybe this is also the reason AllLivesMatterWorld was abandoned like SHIT: just because of a few bad apples, we are abandoning all apples.

I do not want everyone to upload the truth that all lives should matter, but I can make everyone see the truth here: all lives indeed matter whether you argue against it or not.

I hope by advocating kindness first, fairness always, and DUKI in action help dissolving the original sin that we all have, we can solve all the problems that technology and science alone cannot solve. DUKI is not dookie as you think. More on Www.AllLivesMatter.World

The phrase "all lives matter" was introduced specifically to counteract and silence "black lives matter". It does not literally mean that all lives matter - it means that black people need to shut up and take what they're given.

Much like "one people, one nation, one leader" does not advocate for unity but is, in fact, something Adolf Hitler frequently said.

I understand that there were many cases where people said "all lives matter" with the purpose of trying to silence BLM voices, and I judge that as an evil will and condemn it. My point is that at least some people who say "all lives matter" don't have that kind of evil intent. To condemn all uses of "all lives matter" is also an evil here.

Reasoning symbolically, I do not see the conflicts here. All lives can't matter unless Black Lives Matter, can they? But We all should not focus on the symbols only; it's the will behind the symbol that matters most. We all should condemn the evil will behind all these symbols usage, not the original usage of these symbols.

The same applies to the advocacy AllLivesMatterWorld here, calling for peace, advocating kindness first, and fairness always and envisioned DUKI in action to build the world on blockchain, which should be totally decentralized, I only feel goodness and don’t see evil there. Enlighten me if you find there is evil in it.

Believe it or not, actually the AllLivesMatterWorld calling for peace was partly inspired by BLM and trying to join the voices there, and I have a thanks letter for that. But considering that harsh reality, I sincerely hope that we all should feel the will behind the advocacy to make a righteous judgment, not just associate it with some evil usages of symbols and believe we got it right. Because all symbols can be used by evil hidden in it, not just All Lives Matter but also Black Lives Matter.

If one hears another say "Heil Hitler" rarely do they stop to ask whether maybe it was about a different Hitler.

The All Live Matter "movement" is constructed, engineered and financed by big money white supremacy as a mechanism to shut down all discussions other than theirs.

Thank God.I luckily labeled the advocacy using 4 words instead of 3, “AllLivesMatterWorld” advocating for Peace worldwide.

Food scarcity, poverty, clean water, basic health care. These are IMO excellent examples of people problems, not tech problems.

If it were tech problems we wouldn’t be drinking clean water, driving Teslas and eating fancy food now would we? These are more or less solved issues. Now what we have not solved is how to share our toys.

Of course, tech could help to lower barrier(s), making access so cheap even “they” can have it, but the fundamental problem here is: why do “we” have “it” and “they” do not?

These are deeply political problems with exceedingly thin ties to technology. I feel focusing on tech distracts from the true issues which are again political and cultural, related to, say, the economy and its underlying philosophy itself, education, geography, history, etc. I don’t know where exactly tech ends up on this list of major factors, but it’s not on the first few pages.

Interestingly I think it is the diplomacy and activism that enabled the resources to open up and drives activity in tech that then eventually winds up where it needs to.

It’s the trickle down theory all over again. If our toys are /extremely/ nice then surely global poverty will be relieved!?

Well I mean folks in the developing world now have mobile phones which is really changing the way things work. It doesn't immediately install a new government and raise everyone instantly out of poverty but it's likely a big improvement to quality of life.

I'm sure it's not all upside either. But I suspect that this is one case if trickle down actually working.

And eventually the Chinese will sell every person in the third world a dirt cheap electric mini car. Sounds like in some areas the technology solution is changing lives and improving the situation despite poor governance.

Everybody having a car (electric or otherwise) just creates new problems. Can we use technology to get governments to invest in fast and efficient public transportations and divest in car infrastructure? Is there technology that can do that?

This same stupid idea came up at this years Chaos Communication Congress to thunderous applause. Its a very European mentality. The first government that imposes that people take the bus will be the first government that gets voted out in record time. The left wing activists cannot seem to internalize that many people generally like the car and want the freedom of personal transport. These groups are now paying for their disregard as left wing governments are starting to get booted out or are on the verge of getting booted out.

Interesting that you see giving people the choice of efficient public transportation is 'imposing' but building ever bigger freeways and interchanges is somehow not imposing a system on people.

For your info: https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/07-10-2024/traffic-is-made...

Transit sacrifices speed for efficiency--long headways, meandering routes, sometimes cumbersome crowds, nothing for the last mile. To be fast, a system needs to arrive on demand and go point to point, which implies a lot of vehicles that don't need to be huge.

food scarcity could be viewed as a bin packing problem when you consider the amount of food that gets thrown away.

I'm a little stunned that these problems can be framed as technical...

How cheap would energy need to be for those problems to be solved? Can you provide a ballpark dollar figure for how low prices would need to go to solve each of the problems? Or a wild guess?

Also, if energy production is getting cheaper, but energy production is only provided by a few entities (e.g. for reasons like production being capital intensive, strategically relevant, or first movers advantage / natural monopolies) would you believe that energy prices go down to that level if production costs fall low enough?

I am not op, but food is essentially solved, as is most of the other things he listed. Socialist and countries at war aside famines just don’t exist anymore.

This seems wrong on its face?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/namibia-drought-elephants-hipp...

Trickle down doesn’t trickle down enough.

https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america

It all hinges on how far you are wiling to go. If you are OK with being a supervillain, you could use a radiotherapy machine and FMRI to nuke the specific neural paths that are creating your pesky people-related problems.

The patients will object, of course, but that part of their brains can also be nuked.

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

Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again!

This!

Perhaps the title should be "why do tech leaders believe all problems have technical fixes?" To that question, isn't the author analyzing too much into a salesman's pitch? They profit from selling technical solutions, so of course they'll say everyone can use one.

You can deal with those scammers, because in the end they know it's not true.

The real problem are the true believers

Our proclivity to believing that all problems have technical solutions is what has largely lead us into out current cultural cul-de-sac. Namely the idea that AI will somehow "save us". I can't think of anything more patently stupid. As stated here in another comment, technology is neutral, but is also a multiplier of force. Many of our technologies simply multiply the force of the already powerful, against the power of the powerless.

My gripe with titles like this is that problems as a class are much bigger than technical problems.

For example:

Many people on HN seems to have dating problems. Whenever an article on dating is in the front page, I see those issues in the comments. In most cases, that class of problem requires people to work on themselves. Online dating for sure as hell isn’t solving it.

Some of my comments outlined how to solve dating problems for cis heterosexual males. Most of the partial solutions are non-technical in nature. Some are technical if it concerns online dating.

Online dating could probably help a lot if it was optimized for actually providing a solution instead of maximizing profit. If these services actually manage to find a matching long-term partner, they will lose two customers.

There’s a Dutch app that’s pretty good (it’s called Breeze). Many tech orgs do find a good solution but they are usually not blitz scaling

Perhaps you'd lose two customers but uh people are a renewable resource. If your service actually worked well you'd have an endless supply of future customers as your previous customers reproduced.

But its definitely a problem that actually doing matchmaking isn't as profitable as a chat app. Well for a publicly traded company in today's environment of short-term thinking; perhaps if it was a dividend company it would be feasible.

Dating falls under the sales and marketing department, which a lot of technical people neglect to their detriment.

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”?

"Wishful thinking".

Maybe Panglossianism.

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

Any deliberate action makes clear that this is only sometimes a fallacy.

As the sysadmin/ops dude who has always been on the practical end of things, most problems are leadership and not technical imho.

Exactly, there are tonnes of technical problems that don't have viable technical solutions for that reason.

Or where solutions are simply standing by in readiness until there is a landscape free of leadership deficiencies and their accompanying obstacles, before deployment can commence.

No, say you're on a team of five with two consistently poor performers that not only fail to achieve limited tasks, but constantly draw off support from the rest of the team.

There's no technical fix for that. The nuclear option of getting them sacked and replaced dents team morale and probably wouldn't let the team back up to speed for three or four months with all the onboarding required.

Coaching in areas where they should be self-learning consumes the focus of others on the team or in the business.

Ignoring them and ploughing ahead without assigning them work drastically reduces team effectiveness.

Not much in the way of a technical fix in sight - unless copilot suddenly becomes really really good.

IDK about coaching. If you've ever been seriously coached for performance (think sports) an effective coach will look you dead in the eye and tell you you're terrible. At work, in technical fields, everyone likes to be liked and shy's away from being a bastard to their peers and reports. Especially if the conditions aren't that great and killing yourself for your current gig isn't giving you windfall returns.

Giving people the tools to succeed or at least being clear to them that they and need to do better is a managers job.

Putting them on gardening leave is a technical fix to that.

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.

I strong recommend the book The Wizard and The Prophet. We are all here enjoying over abundance of food thanks the third agricultural revolution. Technology defeated COVID. Our technology wizards keep scoring big points. The prophets claim that our wizards no only are not averting the global collapse of civilization, they are accelerating it.

Nobody needs a microwave oven but who can wait a few minutes to warm up their food?

No, there are problems that are societal loadcaring and can not be fixed in the short term without widespread chaos and lawlessness ensuing. There can be local optima of minimal suffering approached, but every flower throws a shade and kills another flower.

Did you mean "societally load-bearing"?

Problems in this world are of 2 types. Technical and political.

Do all "technical" problems have technical fixes. A very sound YES!

What about political problems? Sometime they can be fixed with a technical fix but ALL of them can be fixed with assassination.

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.

It sort of bugs me when people who claim that a problem cannot be solved with technology act like that problem was caused by technology. You get both or neither, you can't have just one.

Of course you can. Technology can irreversibly change societies.

Do you have a technical solution to the potential for mutually assured destruction through nuclear weapons?

Mutually assured destruction is a technical solution - when it is suicidal for either side to attack each other (because of a large and robust nuclear arsenal), both can be confident the other won't attack.

There are potentially other technical solutions. Anti-ballistic missile systems could make nuclear strikes non viable, as could more advanced defenses. One could imagine weapons designed to remotely pre-detonate nuclear weapons making them more dangerous to possess than to use. You could by subterfuge render your adversary's nuclear capabilities inoperable. You could find technical solutions to the issues that make the countries adversaries in the first place, for example eliminating dependence on a resource you compete over. You could spread propaganda to install a friendly government.

There could be and almost certainly are even better technical solutions that I don't know, and perhaps no one currently knows. Every problem ever solved was at some point unsolved.

You are misunderstanding me bringing up mutually assured destruction. Sure, it prevents preemptive strikes, but it doesn't prevent accidental launches, broken early warning systems and bad communication.

Do you think the fact that we haven't done any of these other measures to a degree that the danger is no longer substantial in 70 or so years is a matter of technology or priority? If it's priority, how do we prioritize? Is that, perhaps, a non-technical problem? If it's a tech advancement problem, how do not constantly have a rolling window of uncontrolled potentially civilization-ending technology?

> You are misunderstanding me bringing up mutually assured destruction. Sure, it prevents preemptive strikes, but it doesn't prevent accidental launches, broken early warning systems and bad communication.

No I understand just fine. We are just using different definitions of problem.

In my definition of problem, mutually assured destruction is a solution to the problem of nuclear strikes. Accidental launches, broken early warning systems, and miscommunication are all additional problems, which have their own solutions. There also exist alternative, better solutions to the initial problem (again nuclear strikes), which might avoid some of these additional problems.

> Do you think the fact that we haven't done any of these other measures to a degree that the danger is no longer substantial in 70 or so years is a matter of technology or priority?

Clearly technology. Nuclear war is an existential threat that has occupied the minds of policy makers and the public alike for decades, and there is arguably no higher priority than preventing it. If someone just had a silver bullet lying around that would eliminate that threat and allow the world to sleep easy it would have been implemented immediately, regardless of cost. It's not like our current solution is free, maintaining a nuclear deterrent is massively expensive and of course carries catastrophic risk if it fails. Substantial effort has been placed into developing some of these alternative solutions, but to date mutually assured destruction remains the best solution available. But technological advance continues, and the idea that a better solution could not eventually be found is silly.

> If it's a tech advancement problem, how do not constantly have a rolling window of uncontrolled potentially civilization-ending technology?

That is very clearly a different problem - preventing existential threats from being developed in the future versus dealing with existential threats already developed. Let's rephrase the question as "how do we create a situation where people aren't willing to go through the effort to create more capable weapons of mass destruction?" Again, I don't have answers to all the worlds problems, but it's reasonable to believe that a series of technical fixes to the root causes of the problem exist.

Things like stuxnet.

I'm with you in the first sentence, but the second doesn't make sense to me.

All 4 combinations of (not-)solved-by-tech and (not-)caused-by-tech are possible.

Can you give a concrete example of caused by technology, but not solvable (in principle if that was what you meant) by technology? I am having trouble coming up with one.

Seems to me like the initial causing of the problem would have to be a one-time self-destructive event. Like maybe we blow up the moon or something and then don't survive the aftermath. We can't use tech to solve the problem if the problem is that we're extinct.

I think that's pretty far out from the sort of thing that people are thinking of when they talk about things you can and can't do with technology, so I think it's more sensible to just say that the category is empty.

> a concrete example of caused by technology, but not solvable

Consider any kind of unrest caused by the automation of tasks that formerly required a professional human, such as how the industrial revolution affected textile-manufacturing and the Luddite reaction. The new technology is a major and necessary cause of the situation, yet even with 200 years of hindsight it's hard to imagine any new followup invention that would promptly solve it.

Another category would be ecological or pollution issues, which in many cases involve social and legal solutions. For example, the new chemical technology of leaded gasoline. We didn't solve by inventing a De-Leadifier Device, or even the Cheaper New Formula, but because it became (mostly) banned.

It probably goes without saying, but for "solvable with technology" I am not including things like inventing a time-machine to go back and make it never-have-happened, or the idea that it'll be solved eventually when the Ascension Device elevates our descendants beyond such mortal concerns, etc.

One way or another, there must be solutions. I always think about companies sending rockets to Mars. So what's stopping us from fixing a few bugs

And the not asked often enough corollary: just because there exists a technical solution to a problem, does that mean it's the right solution?

I often see objections to technical solutions because they have the gall to actually solve a problem, but do so in a way that the objector doesn't want. If a problem is seen as a way to force a particular solution someone wants for other reasons, alternative solutions are threats.

All problems except the problem of too much abstraction

Sounds like a question for discrete math professors.

Obviously, no.

But it's simpler than all the things the article goes in to.

Tech "leaders" get rich(er) if they can convince a bunch of people they have the solutions to their problems. There are various ways to accomplish this and any specific tech and even tech itself is practically incidental.

Each hype wave is just another opportunity to do so. I think tech is generally popular among the people trying to get rich(er) because it's changing pretty fast which provides a regular series of hype waves with regular opportunities to convince people you have the solution they need. (You even get fresh opportunities to convince people they have brand new kinds of problems, which, of course, you have the solution to. Tech is very flexible.)

Not all problems have technical fixes, but all fixes are technical. Technology is the application of knowledge to solve problems. Some technologies fall outside of what typically comes to mind when the word is brought up, for example languages and currency and tax codes are all technologies. Anything that actually fixes a problem is going to wind up being technical. There is a long and ever growing list of problems solved by technology. It is arguably the hallmark of our species to look for technical solutions to problems, and we will continue to do so until we go extinct.

There are problems that don't have solutions. Some people want to do A, some people want to do B, you can not do both, and doing neither will piss off everyone - no matter what someone is going to be unhappy. You might find better "solutions" or solve adjacent problems, like "we'll do A today and B tomorrow" but the core issue is intractable. It is the human condition that we will always have some such problems, but they are few and generally affect the upper levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. For the lower level stuff - typically anything involving material needs - technical solutions exist.

The problem with this article and the many others like it is that it fails to distinguish between the search for genuine technical solutions to problems and tech bros proposing bad technical solutions to problems. That a problem theoretically has a technical solution obviously does not mean your slight twist on a note taking app is such a solution. Why these narratives are pushed is reasonably easy to understand - it boosts the ego of the person who developed the proposed "solution" and asserts a value of the product to both potential customers and investors. In particular, the phenomenon is heavily fueled by entrepreneurs with little understanding of the underlying problem pitching solutions to investors who have equally little understanding of the underlying problem.

I'm fine with calling out dumb ideas, but going further to this narrative of "some proposed technical fixes wouldn't work therefore technical fixes don't work and anyone looking for a technical fix is delusional" leads to a defeatist attitude. For every solvable problem a technical solution does exist, it's just really unlikely you'll stumble upon such a solution after watching a few hours of videos on the latest tech fad.

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