
To Make the World Better, Think Small - dnetesn
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/opinion/to-make-the-world-better-think-small.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0
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danso
I agree with the headline, even if the content of the op-ed is kind of a mess.
Reminds me of Etsy's Code as Craft Speaker Series. My favorite talks by far
were the ones that focused on pretty minute issues, such as how to do A/B
testing at scale, or how to manage multiple CDNs. Not because those are issues
I've ever had to deal with professionally, but because how the details are
dealt with are not only interesting from a technical standpoint, but they
provide concrete info about a company's values and expectations. In the talk
about multiple CDNs, for example, I found it interesting that Etsy had built a
substantial amount of infrastructure to auto-detect the failure of a CDN, but
it was always up to the engineer on-duty to wake up and push the button to
switch CDNs.

In contrast, sometimes the Etsy talks would have grander topics, such as how
to be a better entrepreneur, which were often filled with platitudes that
offered no real insight or actionable advice.

As a teacher, I tell students that the best way to make an impact is to focus
on the details. Because if you even know the details of an important problem
like world hunger or injustice, it at least means you've done some research.
More importantly, students need to realize that if something is indeed a big,
"important" problem, it means that many, many people have been working on it.
If these problems could be solved simply by people thinking, "I want to end
world hunger!", then they wouldn't be big, complex problems.

~~~
tapan_k
> I tell students that the best way to make an impact is to focus on the
> details

Thank you for the insight in your last paragraph. Do you have references that
will help me explore this even more?

~~~
danso
I'm sure there are essays and writeups about this that I don't have off the
top of my head. I do have a lot of examples.

In journalism, this insight becomes quite obvious after you've been on a beat
for a few years and see how things really work, that is, how things are mostly
mundane, and corruption or injustice isn't obvious because if they were, they
would've been snuffed out (or obfuscated). So the devil is always in the
details.

One of my favorite Pulitzer-winning stories is an investigation from the Sun-
Sentinel (Florida) newspaper that majorly busted cops for speeding.
Ostensibly, the big picture idea here is "who polices the police?"...but that
by definition is an incredibly tricky thing to identify. After all, it's the
police who create and record the data related to law breaking. So how did the
Sun-Sentinel do it?

It started off with this widely-shared viral video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk44_bIhmGY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk44_bIhmGY)

But the Sun-Sentinel reporters weren't content with the status quo -- i.e.
shrugging and thinking _oh everyone knows that cops speed all the time_. They
wanted to _prove_ it. And their method was quite ingenious and so
mathematically airtight that cops were being disciplined even before the story
came out: [http://www.ire.org/blog/ire-news/2013/04/15/how-sun-
sentinel...](http://www.ire.org/blog/ire-news/2013/04/15/how-sun-sentinel-
reported-its-pulitzer-prize-winni/)

Here's the entry in the Pulitzer Awards for 2013:
[http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/sun-
sentinel](http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/sun-sentinel)

If you go through the Pulitzer winning entries, many of them include the cover
letters for the award submission. Those letters will often describe how a
small detail or curiosity grew into a big investigation.

The tech scene is full of examples. Is there a single successful unicorn that,
whatever their lofty motto is today, didn't start with fulfilling a very basic
need? Facebook's mission today is to connect the world, but its early
prototype was a faster way to lookup co-eds. Likewise, Google's mission to
organize the world's information began with the implementation of the almost
too-obvious (but genius) PageRank/Backrub algorithm.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20090126204112/http://ilpubs.sta...](https://web.archive.org/web/20090126204112/http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf)

And of course, there's always Dr. Feynman's recounting of how he came up with
the idea that would eventually lead to his Nobel Prize:
[https://www.physics.ohio-
state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html](https://www.physics.ohio-
state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html)

~~~
tapan_k
Thank you!

------
kweinber
It is a little sad that Brooks calls W.C. Fields a misanthrope because of his
comment. He was clearly making a joke. . . which he was known to do because he
was one of the most famous comedians of all time. His schtick was acting like
a misanthrope to ultimately make a sympathetic point.

And he even used his dying breaths to make a joke about the obvious injustice
of the world and the callousness that allows it to persist. . . talk about
timing. . .

------
clumsysmurf
The AEI certainly doesn't "Think Small".

"From 1990 to 2014, AEI received more than $111 million in disclosed
contributions"

[http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Enterprise_Ins...](http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Enterprise_Institute)

The board of directors of the Donors Trust "the dark money ATM of the right"
is comprised of the president of the AEI, and the AEI is one of the largest
recipients of money from the Donors Trust.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/donors-trust-capital-fund-
con...](http://www.businessinsider.com/donors-trust-capital-fund-conservative-
dark-money-2013-2)

------
manmal
I basically agree with the author, to a certain degree. Only looking at local
problems reminds me very much of Biedermeier, when people grew so frustrated
with things happening in the wider world that they retreated into their comfy
personal world:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biedermeier](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biedermeier)

------
known
Just saw [https://www.amazon.in/p2p](https://www.amazon.in/p2p)

------
gragas
Once again, NYT shoving morality down my throat.

~~~
mark_edward
They violently forced you to click on the link in HN and violated your
individual rights?

~~~
gragas
Not at all.

Still, it seems that every single op-ed in the Times has to do with why X
liberal opinion is moral and, if you think otherwise, then you are either
stupid or immoral. I have yet to see a single NYT opinion article that isn't
formatted in such a way.

~~~
gipp
That description really doesn't apply to this article at all. I'm not sure how
"working on a small, local level is probably more effective for individuals"
is a liberal opinion, and any judgments on _you_ from the author would seem to
just be your own projections, as there's nothing like that in here.

~~~
hsitz
I agree. If anything, the idea tends to be a conservative one, given that
conservatives tend to avoid problem solving of any kind at the federal (i.e.,
large scale) level. Conservatives fight against solving almost everything at
national level, want problem solving to be smaller, more local. This tends to
be an issue for progressives because rich localities have fewer problems (but
many resources to solve them) and poor localities tend to have more problems
(but fewer resources to solve them).

~~~
WalterSear
And, then, when they have power at the state level, they invariably do shit
like this:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-
environment/wp/20...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-
environment/wp/2016/12/30/yes-this-is-real-michigan-just-banned-banning-
plastic-bags/)

Forcing their will and the will of their lobbyists on those below them.
Conservatives' professed interest in smaller more, individualized and
localized solutions is a shell game.

