Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)
improvesomething.today
improvesomething.today
Sometimes this means 'creating' a new problem by pointing to something unconsidered that's 10x more important.
When a problem survives this, usually it's worth solving.
I am happy to report I only worked during the meetings and a bit outside of it, and feel totally vindicated by this approach.
Choose your battles.
Spoiler: neither the commodity solution or the in-house solution will ever be perfect, and you should be really self critical of whether you're building something in-house to scratch your own itch.
If you can find a commodity solution with the right extension points that's often the best solution, failing that many times it's worth accepting the limitations, rarely it's worth investing in the totally bespoke thing (outside of your core domain/proposition).
But there is enough truth in it to at least be worth the humor.
My conservative friends respond to a problem by mashing all its symptoms, and often operate on assumptions they have never tested. And would resist testing.
My liberal friends respond to a solution, veering away hard from the solution's costs, without first asking how they can be mitigated or if the accounting still works out positive.
Disclaimer: Could be anecdotal. Could be projection. But for my population of five people, the correlation is 100%! They would all likely agree too. Given enough beer, and with my recorder out of sight.
Conservative: "homelessness is a problem! make homelessness illegal and people will get homes because they are homeless by choice!" ("is there any evidence that people are homeless by choice?" *crickets*)
Liberal: "defund the police!" ("but who would deter petty crime?" *crickets*)
American homelessness problem is massively fueled by lack of inpatient psychiatric healthcare. People who are clearly out of their mind are allowed to live like wild animals, so that no one violates their rights not to be institutionalized.
While the asylums of yesterday were quite often bad, this is no better and a balance should be reached. Instead the pendulum just swung wildly from extreme A to extreme B.
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Edit: I must come back to your statement:
"Minsk people must live in fear of losing their homes, knowing that if they do, they will be disappeared."
There is a hidden assumption in there, namely, the expectation that if someone loses their home, their inevitable fate is to camp in the street, start fires etc. It might be so in your jurisdiction, but that is not really true worldwide. Many places in the world will try to help you somehow, at least up to a point.
Of course, if you have such help available and still refuse to make use of it and instead start living in an encampment and bother/harass other people, you aren't an innocent victim anymore, but a general nuisance. In that case, why shouldn't you be punished for your anti-social behavior? Unless you are insane, of course. In that case, a hospital should it be.
Ultimately it is about which level of antisocial behavior under which conditions is tolerated by which society. I noticed that the American left is really into glorification of antisocial behaviour, which it re-interprets as a creative rebellion against the capitalist society that should never be corrected by anyone. This worldview is much less widespread in Europe and almost absent in Asia.
Outside the US, you will often get at least some help, but if you turn it down, the law will prefer peace of the commons to your right of doing whatever you feel like. E.g. most countries will at least try kick smelly people out of libraries and public transport, because it is an expensive, subsidized commons that shouldn't be repulsive for median customers, who are quite often poor-ish themselves.
A person in my family started one of the first rape crises centers in the U.S. She always said "Police need to be social workers, and social workers need to be police" summarizing the issues each faced most that they were poorly prepared for all those generations ago.
If you want dumb conservative positions on homelessness I would suggest "just lock them all up", "just make them get jobs", "just get them out of MY neighborhood."
Self-described conservative friend: Specific views about dealing with cultural differences that require some kind of resolution. The desire for immediate "simple" solutions, without any signs of awareness or respect for the "others" and why solutions were not attempted before.
My view: Patience is necessary for a real solution. Resolving these kinds of differences takes time, and often is best done case by case directly by the people involved in each situation until a common pattern emerges. The people needing accommodations deserve some extra respect, for the lack of it that made them invisible until recently.
Self-described liberal friend: Inability to consider economic closure over environmental costs, so the market maximizes resource/impact efficiencies relative to their actual costs. The dissonance being this would raise prices.
My view: We are destroying the environment, which economically should be viewed as a commonly held asset, not an unowned asset. The result is we are not optimizing its future value. Any (slowly introduced) rational pricing optimizes both costs and efficiencies, and incentivizes improvements for both. The longer we wait, the more damage our economy subsidizes.
These are reasonable intelligent people. I cannot tell you their nuanced views, just their reactions and a common human theme: reluctance to go deeper.
- Avoidance
- Mitigation
- Transference
- Acceptance
It's YOUR problem, actually.
I do have a problem, but problems are good if you think about it.
No matter how many problems I fix, there is always a new problem...
These problems aren't that problematic, they're trade-offs.
The "pushing around" could be about letting the right person/team handle it. "Preserving" could be due to lack of business justification to "solve" it. Promoting new problem could be due to poor understanding of the problem and solution, usually due to consultants pushing for it.
If we 'solved' crime, homelessness, drug use, poverty, etc.; then budgets would decrease and political power would diminish. Those in charge of solving the problem often have the least incentive to do so.
"75% to 83% of released prisoners are arrested for a new crime" https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/2018-update-prisone...
You don’t need to delete your comment. It’s not a big deal. We all have different days.
That's like those stories of LLMs saying "I fixed the vulnerability in your app" by deleting the project entirely
Oh so you do believe in justice
This applies more directly to something like foster care. My state is going through a budget crisis and anecdatally the result is significantly fewer kids coming into and remaining in care. It moves at the margins so a borderline case that might have resulted in removal before now doesn't.
As you note it's unlikely that some problems can be completely solved. But our resource allocation is mostly fixed or varies based on circumstances beyond whatever problem is being solved.
And yes, I do think that individuals and departments feel threatened that they will be impacted if something like that actually happened.
It's not that they perpetuate their own raison d'être, it's that they are addressing path dependent social problems, and changing a system with embedded systemic memory within a vast number of crevices (public, private, and cultural) to hide those memories is orders of magnitude more effort than creating the system at the start.
I live in Portland, OR where we have a large homeless problem and I continually hear that the groups being given money to help are incentivized to keep homelessness high for their own purposes. Like, obviously people who are paid like to keep getting paid but how would they go about making this happen when their job is the opposite?
It is much harder and expensive for homeless programs to create shelters or homes. It is also difficult if not illegal to force people into housing.
The real answer is that the electorate is vehemently opposed to providing paths like that if those paths feel even remotely like "unfair handouts". Votes hate that idea even if it would be empirically cheaper. We collectively preserve the problem of homelessness because we feel like people who can't/won't work deserve to be unhappy, because we believe that we need the threat of homelessness to coerce people into working, because we believe people on drugs/etc are undisciplined and immoral, because... well, you get the idea.
You know what does though? Making it really hard to get a home. That makes more people homeless. I hope that's obvious.
When I was there, I counted about 2 drug users out of 100 people in a shelter in Spokane, Washington. The rest were either ex convicts, disabled/mental issues, or just simply lost their home.
No family nearby. No friends willing to take you. No money to pay for rent even in the cheapest areas. No cheap temporary accommodation nearby of any sort. No government provided emergency housing available.
If you want to make it personal, I live in Sweden. There are lots of options available and no one lives on the streets if not for a mental illness that prevents you from seeking help, as help is available and easy to get. You can get a salary for indeterminate amount of time and pay for your own accommodation as long as you show you’re looking for jobs. If your job pays too little you can get a stipend from the government to pay for rent and food. So yeah I am sure I would never get homeless even if everything went wrong for me. If you live in a country where that’s not the case, you should really question what should the priorities of your country be (notice that basically all developed countries in the world and even many developing ones provide everything I mentioned above, with possibly one single, big exception).
I don't know about you, but that sounds horrible to me. I don't see how anyone can be surprised or aggrieved that some people choose to stay away from them under those conditions.
My state chose to outlaw homelessness [0] and to make it illegal for cities & counties to offer places to lawfully camp unless the campsites are basically enough to be KOA Campgrounds.
Actually solving homelessness is politically unacceptable, therefore it will be criminalized & preserved.
Notes:
0 - The crime is "unlawful camping".
Simplistic version: San Francisco spends roughly $100,000/year on each homeless person. In services, salaries for people working on it, rent for office buildings etc. I am willing to bet many of these people would not be homeless if we just gave them $100,000/year without all the middle bureaucracy layers.
(Yes, this is a real thing that happens, though I'm not sure the extent. See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/... )
We had a successful campaign to recall a progressive prosecutor over less.
"Replace services with direct transfers" would eliminate homelessness for 1 year. Then new people would become homeless, and you'd have no services, because your budget is already committed to the "year 1 homeless-cohort."
The money spent grows quadratically (not linearly) over time.
Thus, cutting all budget for cash transfers could increase homelessness by 80%! (Are those 14,498 now-homeless people eligible for this year's $100k? They can't be, since you already spent it on the 7,973 currently-homeless people).
Model the situation as "X(t) people become homeless at year t, Y(t) people become housed at time t," and you'll see the most important metric is "how much can we decrease X and increase Y per dollar spent"?
"Number of dollars per current homeless" is not really meaningful at all.
It's unlikely there's a trivial arbitrage to eliminate homelessness in a city full of engineers.
It’s like history was the first casualty of late stage capitalism and no one knows about the new deal or the war on poverty.
Don't you need to spend on bureaucracy to figure this out? That then increases the cost.
As it should. It is not responsible to give millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to an intern and tell them to start passing it out to random people on the street.
For homelessness, it's things like shelters, free meals, needle exchanges, etc. Make the life of the homeless easier without actually getting them into permanent housing. The actual solution to eliminate homelessness is to build more housing, along with financial arrangements to incentivize ownership and make it possible.
For taxes, it's accountants and tax preparation software like TurboTax or H&R block. The actual solution is to make the tax code simple enough that anyone can understand it and then withhold the appropriate amount so that nobody even needs to file. The big tax preparers have repeatedly lobbied against this.
For medicine, it's lots of prescription medication that you have to be on for life to "manage" your condition, as well as recurrent doctor's visits to diagnose and treat it. The actual solution for the vast majority of conditions that kill Americans today is diet, exercise, fiber, reduce stress, stop smoking, and wear your seatbelt. Modern medicine is also very adept at solving acute problems like broken bones, bacterial infections, appendicitis, etc. But once you've got a chronic condition of indeterminate source (many of which are actually solved by the advice above), you're in the system and can expect to pay through the nose for no solution.
For many construction projects (like say CAHSR), it's performing endless studies about how to build the project without actually building it. Some level of design is necessary for successful outcomes, but many agencies go around in circles with proposals and reports and environmental impact studies and voter referendums without actually having anyone actually pick up a shovel and start moving dirt.
I love the idea of building more housing, but I think a lot of homeless people have an income of literally 0, so wouldn't they be homeless regardless of how cheap housing is?
> For many construction projects (like say CAHSR), it's performing endless studies about how to build the project without actually building it. Some level of design is necessary for successful outcomes, but many agencies go around in circles with proposals and reports and environmental impact studies and voter referendums without actually having anyone actually pick up a shovel and start moving dirt.
Environmental impact studies are required by federal law for projects receiving federal funding. It's not CAHSR's fault that they have to be done. You then have to go through the process of acquiring land along the track, which you probably should do before people start moving dirt (it's going to be pretty embarrassing if your track has a hole in the middle where someone refused to sell their house).
There's research that shows why increased housing prices cause increased homelessness. One of the mechanisms is that the family and friends of the homeless can no longer afford the additional space to house the folks who have literally $0 because they themselves are priced out of larger homes or have to rent space to make ends meet.[1]
> Unlike Diona’s mom, Sherman’s parents had extra space. That’s very common among homeowning, empty-nest parents, meaning that a great deal of vacant housing is in the hands of the two people who are most likely to love and forgive an adult child in dire circumstances. But in more expensive regions, fewer parents (or other loving figures) have that resource, either because they couldn’t afford to buy a house in the first place or because there are demands from multiple family members to share the legacy residence.
[1] https://doodles.mountainmath.ca/posts/2025-01-16-homelessnes...
So NGO’s go from combating homelessness to being the organization about homelessness.
I sometimes think organizations should be set up with hard end dates. At which point the organization is disbanded and resources redistributed. If the problem still exists a new ord should be created with a new scope and new timeline.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patie...
They proposed 1) Address large markets; 2) Address disorders with high incidence; and 3) Constant innovation and portfolio expansion.
Does that sound like to you they proposed not curing patients?
This applies to both public and private spheres. Just as justice systems farm criminals, dating apps farm romantically frustrated people and so on.
This can play out in a couple ways. People can avoid solving the problem, because they think at that point the work is done forever. This is incorrect. People can also be scared (for good reason) that whoever is in charge will mistakenly assume no maintenance is needed after “solving” a problem and let everyone go. This would be incompetence in leadership.
I see both of these things play out on a smaller scale at work all the time. We keep solving the same problems, because ever time it’s “solved” people move on to new projects the upkeep falls behind, and the problem grows again.
You could go even further and say that the modern Western preference for whack-a-mole politics rather than long term competence is one of the reasons that countries like China is on the rise.
When I lead teams and thought of how to motivate them to get certain things done, like code quality, I found it best to frame why certain things got done as a mixture of constraints and incentives. ie. What was preventing people from doing a thing and what motivated them to do thing.
You're basically arguing that there's no constraints to these problems and that people are incentivized to proliferate them. Do you distrust people that much?
Isn't it easier to surmise that there could be a lot of constraints and not a lot of incentives to solve these issues?
Or heck... just a shit ton of constraints than incentives?
I mean... there are people who are incentivized to keep drug use going: drug dealers and kingpins. And I'm sure there are some with their hand in governments. But there's no way that's the default.
Like politicians are going "without the homeless, I won't have anything to do anymore!". Like the street workers are thinking "shit, what'll I do if this goldmine dries up"?
Ridiculous.
As it is, they're spending other people's money on other people's problems with effectively no accountability.
Politicians too, by having big problems they guarantee they can get people to vote for them by promising to solve those problems. But people are getting smart to that. The Who said it well: We won't get fooled again.
Doctors have their Hippocratic oath. Do police and firemen have something similar, or don't they need it?
Crime is really hard to solve, but many cities in the USA and elsewhere have managed to largely do it.
Homelessness is something I think is very much an American problem among developed nations. It’s always shocking to see the campgrounds in American cities, some of the richest in the world, coming from Europe. I suspect it’s mostly related to drug abuse and the lack of social assistance for those in need which the Americans are allergic to solving due to the culture of freedom, or autonomy at all costs (which somehow gets interpreted as not having to pay taxes to help those in need).
My company is stifled by a bunch of engineers in leadership positions who always choose to defer up the chain rather than make a decision themselves.
The people in leadership positions should be active participants, and not all decisions will be ones they are are able to make locally - but they should feel comfortable to present a POV and recommendation/tradeoffs upwards when that's the case. If the buck stops with them then they should be aware that "do nothing" is a decision that they are making.
“Inadvertently”? Seldom.
They look in the mirror and say “good job playing the hand you’re dealt - keep it up!” even while what they do is objectively terrible.
Humans have an incredible capacity for rationalizing their own behavior.
Everyone rationalizes their emotional responses. Hangry. Rush-hour impatience in traffic. If you can avoid it, never appear before a judge just before lunch or the end of the day.
It might not be intentional but it's not inadvertent
Not so directly, but I do think that a lot of people don't put any effort into being a good person.
Think of the shopping cart problem. Good people return their shopping carts to the store or a cart return. Many people can't be bothered to do that.
People think "oh I'm not bad for leaving my cart in a parking spot" they think "stealing or damaging a shopping cart is what bad people do"
But they're still kinda bad people for not returning their carts. They're certainly choosing not to actively be good people.
I'd bet you'd get a litany of complaints about the parking lot, the cart, the store, the weather, anything but their own decisions.
Which isn't something I think good people say
It's the inverse of the essentialist fallacy. Faced with a bunch of evidence (if they cared to look) that they are consistently making life worse for themselves and everyone around them, their reaction is "I am not a bad person. I didn't even really do bad things, I just did the same stuff anyone else would do, plus it wasn't that bad, plus I like to think I'm awesome, so that's what I think."
BTW I think this is an inherent human trait and I have it too. Some are just really good at it.
There are plenty of people who are motivated by hurting/harming their "enemies". You may have heard them brag "own the libs", or similar rhetoric, while doing something objectively terrible.
> have "problem"; don't care: no problem
Software development traditionally is expensive, slow, adapts poorly, and so on. This worked in our favour as it gave us high paying jobs where we could always blame a framework, Microsoft, whatever, and estimate a week to move a button. These people are the ones who are the loudest at filling the silence with anti-AI propaganda because they desperately want to hold onto that problem.
Hire consultants about the problem
The better you are at the game the higher you climb!
But it helps. Perhaps. Maybe even more so if you (=consultant) leave with just the recommendations, without actually implementing them. Which is what most of the Big 4 consulting companies do.
(Guilty, to be honest. And that's why (partly) I gave up mgmt consulting)
But it helps to understand where people are coming from to realize why the problems exist in the first place.
Weaponize it.
Study it.
Blog about it.
in any case, as a hard core problem solver who is currently overwhelmed with problems I am bieng forced into no choice paragmatic responses. where I have lost any reserve capacity, deflect, move, deny a problem and get some rest, eat, shave the yak, before rejoining the fray with enough energy to perform is just part of the routine now. ie: triage or go under, which may be habit forming
Denying that the problem is a “problem” would be.
In the first case, the affected do nothing because there is no problem.
In the second, it’s “not a problem” because they did a thing and moved it elsewhere.
Perhaps I am not as smart as author, but how is "brainstorming ideas" doing the "destroys the human ability to learn and think critically"? It is just cooperative work! Rich kids have private tutors, and do the "brainstorming" all the time!
I heard similar arguments when google search become widely available!