I think the best social good comes from fostering a more civilized environment. Sure, we need things like fire fighters and EMS. But keep in mind that fire fighters also try to do fire prevention. Sometimes, people get so focused on how to be a hero (metaphorically looking for the best way to fight the worst conflagrations) that they overlook opportunities to do more valuable though less "sexy" prevention.
Anything that helps feed people well or better, promotes germ control, reduces social friction in some way, helps marginalized peoples earn a living or helps people of limited means access basic decent housing promotes the social good. But those things are often not the heroics people have in mind when asking this type question.
This. We have had a horrible track record with tech volunteers, in part because our mission is not tech-centric, so they don't get any glory. It doesn't mean there isn't anything for them to do - it's just that the story isn't about technology ... or them.
There is a mountain of boring, yet critically important work waiting for people to just roll up their sleeves and pitch in.
Yeah, the last hackathon-type thing I was at, we had a few projects that desperately needed a little bit of TLC from someone with solid programming chops to help push them forward.
Instead, we ended up with half a dozen prototypes of new projects solving problems no one had.
Go ask the people doing the work - not the folks looking to enrich themselves by "disrupting" (read: injecting software into) every industry imaginable.
I mean this is Y-Combinator after all, not exactly a hub of philanthropy.
Because long experience tells me that it is inherently hard to see and measure the disasters you prevented. This makes it incredibly hard to feel like you are accomplishing anything and harder still to convince other people you are actually adding value.
Y2K was supposed to be a global meltdown. There were people who prepped for that like a coming apocalypse. It was prevented and many people remember it as "Ha! Can you believe those fools ever believed we were in real danger?!"
No one gets up today and goes "Oh, thank god they fixed that and I am not living in the Y2K post apocalypse! My ATM still works and life goes on!"
I was molested for 2.5 years as a child in part because my mother stopped being a homemaker and began doing paid work outside the house. The direct cause and effect connection is extremely clear to me not only due to first hand experience but because of extensive reading on the topic. This is part of why I was a full time homemaker until my sons were 19 and 16. No one ever molested them. There was damn little opportunity for anyone to get them alone. I made sure of it.
I get straight up told I just got lucky and do not actually know shit all about preventing bad things from happening. When I try to share such information to help other people I basically get told "Shit happens. You can't stop it. Quit blaming the victims."
Sorry to hear about your experience, but you make a very salient point and I also agree that you made an enlightened (if hard earned) decision regarding the best thing you could do for your children.
In my experience there are thousands of people doing the hard work day in and day out, quietly holding the line. It's a constant effort and constant tension, but for those who won't settle for anything less than revolution - that sort of work, no matter how vital, just isn't compelling enough. I personally find the prevalence of this kind of attitude very disturbing, although I suppose it is just human nature in the end - perhaps with a bit of celebrity/hero worship thrown in.
I try to assume they just don't see it because it is hard to see.
I also have a serious medical condition and have gotten off all drugs. I am routinely told I am crazy, making that up, it is a tall tale, my success is because my condition is mild, it is wild coincidence...etc etc...and I cannot possibly actually know anything useful. People who don't think I am straight up crazy and have acted on my suggestions have said things to me like "I fed my child like you suggested and they are in the ER less, but they aren't taking fewer drugs." What they mean is the child still needs the same maintenance drugs. They completely miss the fact that fewer ER visits means fewer antibiotics and other drugs, thus fewer ER visits means their child is taking fewer drugs.
Even people who have it clear in their mind that A prevented B have difficulty measuring the things that have not happened. They still mentally minimize the value of the accomplishment. It takes real and significant effort to try to quantify in a meaningful way that "We prevented X amount of catastrophe with our work." It is much easier to see lives saved by an ambulance than lives saved by the local gym or the local organic grocer.
> It takes real and significant effort to try to quantify in a meaningful way that "We prevented X amount of catastrophe with our work." It is much easier to see lives saved by an ambulance than lives saved by the local gym or the local organic grocer.
Maybe something could be done to help / teach people to better quantify it (caveats about Goodhart's law notwithstanding)?
I have a zillion little blogs about various things that interest me (but, wait, there's more! I also leave comments like the ones above in various online forums!). Maybe over the course of the next 30 years, my writing shall become popular and this issue will substantially change.
Well, maybe you could aggregate some of those comments like 'edw519 did :). His "best of"[0] is actually a pretty solid reading about programming and entrepreneurship.
I'm very sorry about your experiences, and at the same time thank you for sharing them.
Here and elsewhere in the thread you make really good points about prevention and about non-obvious benefits of mundane things. That said, within the context of the topic, I can read your remarks in two ways:
1/ Helping society is much less obvious than it looks at first, so just drop the whole techie do-gooder savior attitude and get back to your job.
2/ Helping society is much less obvious than it looks at first, so please think about this space hard, and make sure to look at the unsexy, non-obvious places.
I'm not really sure which of the two you mean more, but I'll choose to read it as 2/.
Or, 3, it can be read to mean exactly what I said in my first remark:
I think the best social good comes from fostering a more civilized environment.
There are myriad ways to foster a more civilized environment. Pick whichever one fascinates you and go with that. Some people find snails endlessly fascinating. Others find computer security endlessly fascinating. Both interests have potential to be used to further the greater good.
Just because it is boring to you or me doesn't mean it will bore everyone. Sometimes it helps to have a larger perspective, like the story about the two brick layers. When asked what they are doing, one says "Building a wall." and the other says "Building a cathedral!" Both answers are equally valid, but I bet the second guy is a lot more jazzed to go to work in the morning.
NGOs are not simply biding their time waiting for the next Tech Messiah to come along and save the world. Their tech problems are terribly boring and mundane.
We deal with this all the time. Well meaning techie comes along with a bunch of ideas, none of which are particularly compelling and all require a ton of work (on both sides). When we don't immediately do backflips, they disappear. Rinse, repeat.
It's good that you mention this and it's an important datapoint for OP's question. That said, I don't think OP gave any indication anywhere to dismiss them as fly-by-night techie seeking social status. There are people (myself included) honestly asking how they could maximize their positive impact on this world, especially using the skills they already have.
Yes yes, #notalltechies - but as stated above, best thing you can do is to take your wildly disproportionate capacity for earning, do the due diligence and find a group worth sponsoring.
edit:
Let me explain why donations like these are particularly valuable for orgs that survive on donations. Every bit of grant money comes with a huge amount of donor service attached to it, from the initial grant writing, to metric collection, to reporting and presentation - then the hassle of having to do it all again next year and hoping you still have the donor's attention. Of course all of these things take away from your core mission, and sooner or later you are wasting huge amounts of time doing fundraising and donor service.
If you find under resourced people doing effective work for a cause you believe in, a no strings attached gift at the right time can be a huge relief.
As someone currently running a nonprofit (a Hackerspace), I can sign under what you wrote. Grant money is utterly annoying to secure and requires spending huge amounts of time that would be better spent on actually doing the things the organization exists for.
Anything that helps feed people well or better, promotes germ control, reduces social friction in some way, helps marginalized peoples earn a living or helps people of limited means access basic decent housing promotes the social good. But those things are often not the heroics people have in mind when asking this type question.