
Work on these things - jger15
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/12/work-on-these-things.html
======
wslh
I would add new ways of searching in Internet. If I searched for food recipes
in the 2000s I would find independent blogs with some real local/family taste.
Now I have a hundreds of results from click bait sites with the same
commoditized recipes and the ugly blog with a good recipe deep in the long
tail. We can say that we need improvements in the long tail when the tail
deserves to move up (or to the left in a xy chart).

Internet search is a driver for the world economy, a tiny improvement would
improve the life of entrepreneurs and their ecosystem beyond elite circles.

~~~
zozbot234
The problem with this is that black-hat SEO's have learned to mimic
"independent blogs" and their linking/referencing networks (blogrolls, etc.)
to the point that search engines are basically forced to discount all of these
results. We need trusted, curated guides to the "independent" Internet, like
the ODP/DMOZ of old. For both humans and search engines alike.

~~~
pcmaffey
Ive got a half baked project for a blog search engine that won’t index any
pages with ads...

~~~
yifanl
How do you define "ad"?

Keep in mind that as soon as you do define it, people are going to look for a
workaround.

~~~
bostik
> How do you define "ad"?

Attempt to sell.

Whether that's for an agenda, a product, a way of life, service, access, or
anything else with a direct (or indirect) transaction of value - it's a dead
giveaway.

~~~
yifanl
Is a recipe for my grandma's minestrone soup (which requires you to buy a
specific brand of chicken stock) selling you something?

Is a blogpost highlighting a particularly efficient way to write a tight loop
selling you something?

Is a plain white webpage selling you the benefits of that particular shade of
white?

~~~
bostik
I'll take your questions at face value. You are likely being downvoted for
your use of an aggressive tone, but that's another matter.

1) Recipe for a good minestrone soup, no. Actively endorsing a specific brand
of an ingredient, yes.

2) No. (One might argue you're building a brand and advertising yourself. I
don't, necessarily. If the efficient loop was possible to create using only a
particular compiler, then yes.)

3) Yes. The page is selling a particular idea, and most likely lying by
accident. After all, how many screens have been calibrated for colour
correction accuracy? Are you, as a reader, getting the correct information?

~~~
yifanl
Apologies for the brash tone.

I take the view that making a value judgment on an idea is essentially selling
that idea. i.e. "A is better than B" is clearly advocating for A, as is "A is
good"

I disagree with ads in general, but my problem is that blocking any form of
endorsement as you suggested above would mean we can't transmit really any
useful information. Obviously that means there's some acceptable level of
endorsement... but that goes back to the problem of having a game-able filter.

~~~
bostik
Don't worry, I am well aware that my answer came off as snarky and brash so a
similarly phrased response should not have been unexpected. And I know that my
position is extreme. Even with the overall attitude change over the past 6-8
years about advertising[ß] my views are still outside the mainstream.

This is a personal opinion, but I believe you _can_ do endorsements without
falling into advertising trap. It takes effort, because you need to quantify
your reasons of choosing a particular option (or a set of options) over the
remaining ones. You need to specify the reasons, be painfully aware of and
outline your own biases, and be willing to acknowledge the tradeoffs in your
stated choice.

Obviously, if you are externally incentivised to make a particular choice
before you broadcast about it, that's an ad. As one may imagine, I absolutely
detest the entire influencer phenomenon - to the point of treating any product
or service using them as bad actors perpetuating a disgusting system.

ß: Back in 2011/2012 HN was, in general, _very_ pro-advertising. A lot of the
[vocal] posters made their money on it or dealt with large advertising budgets
on a daily basis. Ad block users were derided as parasites or thieves. Anyone
questioning the common good was pushed away. Compare to the tone shift over
the past couple of years and the difference is stark.

------
nimbius
>A comprehensive guide to the American healthcare system.

im afraid this might be a moving target at best. So much of American
healthcare is arbitrary, clandestine, and opaque. Prices are rarely made
public, and justification or schedule for increase in drug prices or premiums
is almost never made except in the most dire circumstances (Insulin inflation
for example) and even then, its almost condescendingly boilerplate. Even
seemingly simple things like ACA exchange markets and Medicare are mind-
numbingly complex institutions whos coverage varies widely from state to
state. Healthcare coverage is also governed by religious code in many states,
where simple services like abortion, contraceptives, and family planning are
subject to strict Judeo-Christian moral laws. many service providers can
refuse to even process drug prescriptions should the customers request cause
the employee some religious moral unrest.

>Who are the actors and what are their incentives?

Pharmaceutically these are largely institutions borne of dynastic wealth
seeking profit. They run advertisements and sponsor content in local, state,
and national news in order to drive customers to consume drugs and treatments,
but they also lobby and in some cases bribe physicians and caregivers to give
preferential treatment to their products.

~~~
slumdev
> simple services like abortion

This is dishonest. Philosophers call it "begging the question."

For someone who considers a fetus to be a human life, distinct from the
mother's, with all its own dignity, this is not a "simple service".

~~~
zaptheimpaler
Simple and moral are different. You're entitled to your opinion on the
morality of abortion, but it is a simple medical procedure.

~~~
slumdev
This is not the way the parent comment was using the word "simple". This is
obvious from context.

------
m12k
"Summaries of the state of knowledge in different fields": I've been thinking
a lot about this one lately. There's so much confusion (and willful
disinformation) in the world when it comes to science, and so many journalists
don't understand that a single article published in a journal does not mean
that there is now a scientific consensus around this - that usually comes
years later when a meta-study comes along. In most fields, as an outsider, you
basically have to get lucky that one of these meta-studies has cropped up
recently and you happen to talk to an expert that can point you at it. In
medicine there is the Cochrane organization that does a pretty good job of
communicating these findings in a clear way. But why isn't there something
like this for all fields of science, constantly updated, so journalists,
policy-makers and curious amateurs like myself have a single point of entry
when we want to understand the state of the art in a given scientific field? A
trustworthy source where I could check what's certain and what's still up in
the air when it comes to CRISPR, which variants of string theory have we
managed to disprove using colliders, which are still being considered, what do
the currently best climate models look like and how certain are we of their
accuracy?

It'd be a huge undertaking - continuously interviewing researchers,
quantifying and communicating their answers in a way that non-experts can
understand. But on the other hand, all the science we're already doing is a
huge undertaking, and it's crazy that we let all the knowledge that these
experts accumulate just languish in obscure journals targeted only at other
experts, and letting the 'state of the art' just be this implicit thing in the
heads of dozens of experts, instead of being stated explicitly somewhere
accessible.

~~~
jimbokun
In the long run, this could also help combat the "Fake News" phenomenon.

Part of the Utopian mindset of the early Internet was the belief that making
more content available to people would automatically lead to people being
better educated and informed. But of course it also opened up people up to
unprecedented amounts of disinformation, deliberate or otherwise.

Slowly establishing authorities on given topics and building their reputation
could help over time to filter the wheat from the chaff on various topics.

------
smolder
Society failing some potentially super effective people is observable. If we
employed half as many tricks to align people with challenging (skills-
appropriate) and socially valuable work as we do to align potential buyers
with products, I think a lot more would get done and a lot more people could
live meaningful lives. I know several examples of people not doing things
they're good at. Actively marketing yourself as a requirement for getting
valuable work is an obstacle for many. Sometimes business culture is an
obstacle.

Another thing is the chilling effect that our surveillance state has. Hacking
away on tech in the US is not as appealing as it was (for some) before it was
clear that your prospects are mostly being a cog in a system geared towards
social control.

I think people need real privacy to learn, grow, and collaborate, or they just
won't do that to the degree necessary to meet their potential.

Schools in the US are a big problem, and seem to be victims of broken politics
and ideological battles on the regular. Profiteering in higher education also
doesn't help.

------
jamix
> Life expectancy in Hong Kong is 84.23 years, more than five years longer
> than the US and the highest in the world. Hong Kong is not that wealthy
> (median household income is $38,000 USD); it’s somewhat polluted; people
> don’t obviously eat what seems like a healthy diet; and they don’t seem to
> exercise a great deal. What should we learn from this?

We should learn that Hong Kong is probably a smaller territory so any of its
"average" metrics has a higher chance of being an outlier, out of sheer
randomness.

~~~
greatestdana
It's over 7 million people. That seems like a robust dataset to me.

~~~
aabhay
The fact that it’s a smaller territory means that effects that would even out
in larger territories don’t apply. I.e. it’s a relative effect.

Here’s an example: suppose a large retirement community of Chinese immigrants
exists in Hong Kong, raising the average age. In order for this kind of
retirement community to shift the age distribution the same amount in a
country 10x larger, that retirement community would have to be 10x or so
larger as well. A 10x larger retirement community is way less likely.

This isn’t to say that all small things lie on the extremes of the
distribution, only that an extreme value is likelier to come from a smaller
sample.

------
dmos62
IQ, life expectancy, top-tier universities, super effective, culture of
excellence, higher GDP, worker productivity, state of knowledge. Given that a
list of priorities betrays a view of the world, I find something eery about
this one. Nothing said is obviously wrong, but there's something between the
lines that I can't quite put my finger on. To retreat to imagery, I feel like
a forest is being missed for the trees, but with a hint of violence.

~~~
muzani
I think what society is really missing is this sense of belonging. We're
raised to think that wealth correlates with happiness but it clearly doesn't.

History has always formed these loops of prosperity, then spirituality. I mean
it's nice not to starve, but I think people would be happier being part of a
tight knit tribe who support one another, even more than having air-
conditioning and dating apps.

~~~
blaser-waffle
> We're raised to think that wealth correlates with happiness but it clearly
> doesn't.

Studies show it does, to a degree. Once you hit something like $70-80k the
satisfaction levels off.

It's one of those hygiene things -- not having it will make you (or others)
miserable, but having it doesn't mean you're good or happy.

~~~
muzani
For the individual, yes.

For a society, I think the culture of making as much as possible has left
everyone slightly worse off, instead of slightly better off as we were
promised.

~~~
harimau777
Do you think that trying to get everyone to the 70k level (or the equivalent
in their region) has made society worse off?

~~~
muzani
If society was focused on getting everyone to 70k, everyone would be happier.
But instead, modern society encourages people to make as much as possible,
create as many jobs as possible, and pay as close as possible to 15k.

------
jaimebuelta
Is the American healthcare system the most influential?

Well, from the point of view that it sets a bad example, it is...

~~~
m12k
I mean they pay roughly 3-4 times as much for the same level of service as the
single payer healthcare in my country. So it's a massive market with much
larger profit margins, the lack of vertical integration adds not just one, but
many layers of profit generation (and total cost increase) compared to a
single-payer solution, and you can skew the perverse incentives in favor of
your product in ways that are not legal or possible in other countries (e.g.
lobbying/bribing doctors to favor your new drug). So yes, it's definitely
influential, and it attracts companies, but not only in favorable or sensible
ways if you're a consumer/patient.

------
AznHisoka
"Bloomberg Terminal for everything. Figure out a way to build a growing corpus
of structured data across the broadest variety of domains."

What domains do you suppose will have the biggest impact?

~~~
nicholast
This already kind of exists with Wolfram language's built in knowledge-base.

------
kd5bjo
Point of order: Based on the anti-linkbait guideline for titles, can this be
changed to something less imperative and more informative?

“Underfunded research initiatives” seems like a reasonable start, but maybe
someone can come upwith something better.

------
monkeydust
You do not need a Bloomberg terminal for everything but one for each industry
vertical. What Bloomberg did for capital markets ..for.. healthcare...retail
etc.

------
skuthus
_Bloomberg Terminal for everything_

Isn't that Wolfram Alpha?

~~~
AznHisoka
I interpreted this as building a terminal for each of all the various domains
out there. Not just 1 Terminal with all the different data you need. That
would close to impossible, and impractical to build.

Rather, focus on a specific domain, like startup funding for instance,
organize/collect data on that, and allow people to draw correlations and
insights from that data.

And to answer your question, does Wolfram Alpha tell me how much funding all
food delivery startups had in 2019?

~~~
OkGoDoIt
Would the ideal form of this look substantially different from crunchbase?
I’ve never used a Bloomberg terminal myself, is this suggesting something
about the user experience or just having all the data centralized in one
place?

~~~
AznHisoka
It would not. startup funding was an example of a domain where there are
products like crunch base that just collect, aggregate and centralize all that
data. The user experience is the easy part

------
wazoox
> South Korea and Japan have developed much more rapidly than many Asian
> countries, despite many others adopting relatively free “Washington
> Consensus”-style trade policies.

On the contrary, these two countries didn't implement such policies at all;
they used the opposite method, strict protectionism and state-managed
capitalism.

See "kicking away the ladder" by Ha-Joon Chang.

~~~
cdavid
I think that's exactly his point, actually, although I thought that was quite
well understood. E.g. "How Asia works" explained the difference between
taiwan/japan/s korea on one hand, and philipines/indonesia/malaysia on the
other hand exactly around this axis.

Tyler Cowen tends to be one of the few famous economist who do admit that even
though not well understood, there is such a thing as "culture" that influences
economics and that is important, so I guess that's his angle. Another mystery
under that angle is why France managed to modernize so well in XIXth, even
though it had bad institutions. See e.g. Rodrik/Cowen talking about this in
[https://medium.com/conversations-with-
tyler/a-conversation-w...](https://medium.com/conversations-with-
tyler/a-conversation-with-dani-rodrik-e02cf8784b9d) (search for "Barrington
Moore" section). In How Asia Works, the author argued quite convincingly about
the importance of land reform, and how splitting huge landlors domains into
small pots of lands was critical. As each farmer would get incentivized to
improve their production, skills and market mechanisms develop much more
quickly.

~~~
earlINmeyerkeg
Chinese emperors have done this type of land reform innumerable times and it
has always ended up in famine and disaster/regime change. Land consolidation
became a thing (as it inevitably does) and baron landlords became commonplace
as the consolidation of fields occurred. The positive aspect of land
redistribution via the equal field system is that it alters the power
structure for the corrupt landlords who should not have power and prevent
progressive changes that benefit society. The negative aspect is it's
borderline impossible to vet who is "worthy" of being a landlord. The Chinese
unfortunately would let "laissez-faire" take over property control.

Eventually someone who knew how to get a leg up on others would take advantage
of others financial incompetence, likely mortgage the property, then acquire
it, eventually leading up to owning basically a whole province thus becoming
basically creating their own landed title and domain. Then suddenly you've got
a feudalistic system that has always existed, but the head government now may
even have a worse problem they created themselves. It's happened when the
south basically broke off after the final rebellion during the Tang dynasty.
These landholders eventually had enough power and cultural difference that
they could break from the north and retain full autonomy.

~~~
cdavid
Necessary but not sufficient and all that... In how Asia works, Studwell
argued quite convincingly how land reforms in Japan, South Korea, etc. was a
prelude to successful industrialization because it allowed creating financial
surplus thanks to increase agricultural output across a significant part of
the population.

And in China, it is well acknowledged that the reform from 1978 were a
significant step toward China economic growth:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_Rural_Reform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_Rural_Reform)

~~~
earlINmeyerkeg
But like I said about how these wide sweeping reforms, they create instability
and also famine. The reason it ended up being good (as your link also shows)
was due to land consolidation. Millions of independent farmers does not create
a food surplus as much as a few consolidated landmasses that can maximize
production. As I stated, the consolidation inevitably occurs and always have
in the many times China has performed land redistribution.

The primary reason the growth occurred was because of the land consolidation.
Instead of having millions of independent farmers, they consolidated the land
and only required hundreds of thousands of laborers to work on the land to
maximize production. Thus allowing for a massive labor force that could be
utilized for industrial production.

------
ptah
> "American healthcare system"

i would say it is more of a market than a system

~~~
dTal
In what sense? Surely a market involves some sort of comparative choice? Who
is even in a position to do that? People get their insurance from their
employers, and are treated at the nearest hospital (where the prices are an
outright secret beforehand). I can't see how market economics apply even a
little bit, as far as the person in need of care is concerned.

~~~
TheHypnotist
In my case, you have a choice between PPO and HSA. But i know people who opt
to be on their spouses insurance.

~~~
knightofmars
The running joke in our office is, "If I get married again my spouse is going
to work in government."

------
type-2
This.. doesn't make much sense actually.

------
nathan_compton
The dismal science indeed.

------
perfunctory
The top post on HN, muses about capital allocation, has no mention of climate
change. I guess we are doomed.

~~~
viburnum
Tyler Cowen’s whole gimmick is to play dumb and distract people from the
actual issue. Back when unemployment was 10% he wrote about “zero marginal
product” people. He literally called people useless. As if the financial
crisis was caused by video games and dirty movies on the internet. When
pressed on it he admitted he doesn’t know much about macroeconomics. Change
the subject, then play dumb, that’s his only move.

~~~
soVeryTired
While we're running through Tyler's greatest hits, he also argued in favour of
high prices for drugs [0], since lower prices would lower innovation.

 _If the advocate of lower drug prices does not have clear quantitative
evidence for a conclusion of “lowering drug prices will not harm innovation
very much,” commit the analysis to the flames, for it harbors nothing but
sophistry and illusion._

Tyler Cowen is the opposite of Batman. I genuinely don't understand why he
gets so much press.

[0]
[https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/ar...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/are-
pharmaceutical-drug-prices-too-high.html)

------
haskellandchill
> One of the single interventions that could do the most to improve global
> welfare would be to improve the efficiency of the partner/marriage matching
> ecosystem

hilarious, are they just throwing this out there or is there anything to back
this up?

~~~
aabhay
Agreed. This seems like a true ‘first world problem’.

~~~
icebraining
In what sense?

