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Comment by praptak | Hacker News Reader

I disagree that creating new things should be prioritised[0]. There's too many things already and the most pressing problems have solutions which are not new, just hard to apply for political reasons.

[0] Saying "prioritised" instead of "good", because "creating good new things" is tautologically, uninterestingly "good".

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> There's too many things already

In what sense?

History hasn't finished. There's more things today than there were yesterday, and there will be more things tomorrow than there are today.

If you stop making new things because you think there's already enough things, you're just confining yourself to the world as it exists today. Do you think the world has finished? Do you think it can't be improved?

If you want to build the world of tomorrow you're going to have to make some of the things that exist tomorrow that don't exist today.

And once you've accepted that you need to make new things, I don't think it's much of a leap to accept that it's good to make good new things.

If something is difficult/impossible to apply for political reasons, maybe something new can make it easier/possible.

It might be a new philosophy, message, movement, technology, space, gathering, poem, or otherwise.

If something is so hard to do, for political reasons, it might be time to try something new. The goal might be the same, but maybe a new approach will yield better results.

Not everyone can create new things, or create new things all the time. The rest of the time they can make better use of existing things

That too, but my disagreement is more fundamental: even if you can create good new things, there are probably[0] better things to do with your resources than creating them.

[0] This is a small escape hatch for "what if one can only create new things" or "actual cure for cancer".

Yes absolutely, you can do both.

One good thing about new ideas is that it becomes an enabler for everyone else who are not working on new ideas. Similar to how technology democratises peoples abilities.

Political problems can be solved with technical solutions. Take the problem of food insecurity in third-world countries as an example. It's a hard problem to solve because transporting food overland via unpaved roads through politically unstable areas is expensive and dangerous. Long-term, using highly-productive first-world agribusiness to feed the third-world will fail, because no matter how cheaply agribusiness can produce food the transportation costs will make the whole enterprise cost prohibitive. This is a political problem: we can easily produce enough food to feed the entire world, but we can't get that food to the places where it is most needed due to political instability. But it's a political problem with an engineering solution. If the tools and techniques needed to efficiently grow food are cheap and widely available, farmers in politically unstable areas can simply grow their own food without a dependence on far away agribusiness. GMO crops crafted for nutritional value and hardiness, easily accessible guides on farming best practices, weather forecasting, irrigation, fertilizer, pesticides, financial markets to hedge against risk, cheap tools and machinery; these are all unsolved or partially solved problems. Whenever someone comes up with a "good new thing" that improves the SOTA in terms of value per dollar in one of these areas, we get closer to solving the political problem of global food security.

If political realities prevent us from solving problems, then we can either change the political realities or create new solutions. Individuals generally can't change political realities, but they can create good new things that work around them. So it is good advice.

> This is a political problem: we can easily produce enough food to feed the entire world, but we can't get that food to the places where it is most needed due to political instability. But it's a political problem with an engineering solution.

There isn't really a technical solution to the problem of political instability.

> If the tools and techniques needed to efficiently grow food are cheap and widely available, farmers in politically unstable areas can simply grow their own food without a dependence on far away agribusiness.

You posit political instability as a problem but your solution doesn't address it. Thinking that, in a politically unstable environment, it would be simple to grow food if only you had better tools and techniques is naive. If the political environment was stable people would be able to feed themselves even without newest tools and techniques.

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