
Ask HN: What Are the Big Problems? - dredmorbius
I&#x27;m leaving this open-ended, there&#x27;s no specific criteria for responses.<p>I&#x27;m interested in both your list and the reasons why. Submitting your list before reading other&#x27;s contributions would be preferred.<p>Optionally: who is (or isn&#x27;t) successfully addressing them. Individuals, organizations, companies, governments, other. How and&#x2F;or why not?<p>I&#x27;ve submitted this question previously to HN (most recently over three years ago), and ask it periodically on several forums for seven years now.<p>I&#x27;ve written fairly extensively on my own views, reasonably findable if you wish, but my interest here is in gaining fresh input, resetting my own biases, and not colouring the discussion overly myself.
======
dredmorbius
I'm going to add one to my previous lists: the problem of narrative.

------
fuzzfactor
Maybe not as much interest or ability to visualize the big picture as you
would think.

~~~
dredmorbius
Oh, I'm gaining an appreciation of that.

There are numerous reasons for posts to fail to take traction on HN, and I've
had my share of hits and misses. Your suggested mechanism may be one of them.

------
teorija
There are a lot of problems (almost) nobody is tackling. For example, there's
no effective

1\. "exercise theory" in STEM subjects like math. Just because you learned all
there's to learn from your book, your teacher, your circle of experts doesn't
mean you will immediately be able to tackle some random (appropriate to your
level of development) problems in some randomly chosen textbooks, papers,
journals etc. The only people who work on similar problems are those who work
on tangentially related fields like, say, general problems of edjumacation or
writing tips and tricks books for taking tests s.a. SAT, GMAT or PhD prelims
whose main message is just "practice till you're blue in the face". Most any
master or expert knows just practice alone (however many years you do it) is
not enough. Sometimes, a person might have a sudden weird insight that can
make all subsequent practice (in a narrow subject, field or a chapter in a
book) unnecessary. But all(?) inquiry into such phenomena are easily shut down
simply by labeling them some amorphous concept like "talent".

2\. no resources for learning how to read humongous code like you would a
novel. The current situation is that everyone is a writer of code, but not a
reader. Everybody is a Shakespeare, but no one can read :) I trawled Amazon
back to front and sideways and looked through hundreds of books and found only
one related to the subject: [0]. I don't know how good a book this one is,
though

3\. solutions for nasal problems. The existing solutions, be they cosmetic or
more serious are stuck in medieval times. For example, post-nasal drip is an
annoying and non-life-threatening problem that causes some slightly
embarrassing problems like bad breath, but there's no effective solution to
this problem

4\. speaking of bad breath, believe it or not, there's currently no solution
for people suffering from chronic halitosis; if you're a microbiologist and/or
chemist who knows their way around germs, you could probably devise a solution
and sell it to companies (those that are still stuck in the early 20th
century) like J&J and become a billionaire :)

5\. "root cause of health problems" theory. Say, a person suffers from bad
complexion. Nothing helps. One day while at the gym, they injure their lower
back trying to set a new personal deadlift record. While recovering they
realize, their lower back hurts if they drive it forward while standing or
walking. From there they discover they have natural anterior tilt which is
aggravated by their way of exercising. They opt for other exercises like hack
squats. The next thing they know their complexion is cleared up and as a
bonus, the persistent feeling of butterflies in the stomach is gone (which
they might have attributed to their generally anxious personality). Basically,
as it turns out, the problem was: aggressive anterior tilt that is a problem
on a good day -> the tilt is aggravated by the style of exercise -> general
chronic inflammation -> anxiety and bad complexion. But development of such a
"theory" might be a brutally difficult problem for historical, cultural and
logistical reasons

... but forget about these problems, there are very many lower hanging apples
out there like, say, effective alternative to free weights for people who
cannot train with them for any reason (disabled, frail, unique body
constitution etc). The current "alternatives" like Smith machines are
inadequate. Also, wouldn't it be awesome if dogs could walk themselves? How
about a "smart collar" that can make it happen? Yeah, I know your nhd probably
doesn't allow unaccompanied dogs roam around free :)

There are many, many, many,...,many persistent and nagging problems that are
waiting for solutions. A lot of these can't be dealt with just by writing
another app.

