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Ask HN: What are the big/important problems to work on?
122 points by toombowoombo on Aug 7, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 205 comments
I keep seeing critiques against working on tasks that are meant to maximize user engagement. A recent comment that I saw on the subject went in the lines of: <these are not the big/important problems of our lives>. Therefore my question comes because I cannot seem to see by myself what the real problems are.

A short argumentation would be valuable too, just so it's understandable where you come from.

Thanks & Happy Monday!




If we lose the war on general-purpose computing, authoritarianism and corporatism are likely to rule the world.

Winning that war is prerequisite to everything else.

If you're worried about climate change, remember that authoritarian regimes don't care about climate change.

If you're worried about injustices, remember that authoritarian regimes don't care about them and actually manufacture them.

If you're worried about any particular political thing, remember that authoritarian regimes don't even let you speak your dissent.

If you're worried about economics and making a living, remember that authoritarian regimes don't care if you have enough food.

Authoritarian regimes only care about themselves and their power. They'll make sure they're insulated from climate change. They'll make sure the law doesn't apply to them. They'll make sure they have megaphones for their propaganda. They'll make sure they always have food and shelter.

So what can you do?

Write Free Software. Get people to use Firefox and Ladybird (once it's ready). Refuse to work for companies that are locking down computers. Shift the culture until it is shameful to even do so. Reject remote attestation. Accept inconvenience in the software you use. Preach to everyday people about using Free Software. Teach them about privacy and control issues. Help them install Linux on their laptops. Root their phones for them. Be their tech support when things go wrong.

Most of all, learn UX and make your Free Software more usable and convenient than the freedom-snuffing software. Until Free Software is more convenient, there is very little way we can win this war.

This is something Free Software enthusiasts are really blind about: we can't just make software how nerds want it; we need to make software that will be useful and convenient for everyday people.


Authoritarian regimes are actually correlated with the popularity of free software.

Russia and China both have government-mandated forks of Linux. Chinese companies like Linaro, Huawei and Alibaba contribute to Linux kernel very actively.

When the war against Ukraine escalated 1.5 years ago, proprietary software companies like Microsoft, Adobe and Apple quit Russia due to international sanctions and reputational risks. Since then, pretty sure free software became even more popular over there.


Remember that while authoritarian regimes may use Free Software themselves, that doesn't mean they'll freely let their citizens use it.


Russia and China let their citizens use whatever software they please, be it commercial, pirated, or free. By itself, software is harmless to these autocrats.

These regimes care about telecom, not software. Both Russia and China restrict usage of the internet with a combination of technical, legal, and repressive methods.


This is more about hurting Microsoft/America than supporting free software. IBM was one of the earliest major supporters of Linux and, some would argue, the main reason for its rise from a basement project to a formidable alternative to Windows.


Hitler liked dogs too. Just because dictators are correlated to dogs, that doesn’t mean dogs bear any blame for dictators.


Yes, indeed. And it doesn’t mean promoting or discouraging dogs helps removing dictators from power.


It does if dogs are causal to having thriving, independent family units, individuals, and communities.


As soon as dogs will start causing noticeable changes to the society, they will be banned and dog ownership criminalized.

By the way, last week Russians signed a new law which makes collaboration with an unregistered foreign non-profit organization a crime, punishable by 2 years in jail: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-unregstered-ngos-putin-decree... Pretty sure a contribution to an open-source project can be viewed as such collaboration. It seems unlike using software, Russian government views any international collaboration as a potential treat.


Humans look for "strong leadership" whenever they feel threatened, respectively have an uncertain outlook onto the future.

Authoritarian states are the result of a societal phase-change, occurring when a majorty feels this way. Those presumably "strong leaders" usually lack any sense for democratic ideas of relinquishing their position.

And manufacturing further "threats" down the line is easy to do. Which is why authoritarian regimes behave the way they do.

If you want to counter authoritarianism, you have to help people feel save about their future.


+! on the above... I think a lot of this comes down to more positive messaging. The past 20+ years has seen a progression in USA sucks (as a US citizen) and that has eroded confidence, along with a lot of other issues. Saying the US is a great nation is absolutely frowned upon. There are plenty of things wrong, and the past is anything but perfect. That said, societal breakdown leads to that level of insecurity which means more chances for a loss of freedom.

Share at least one positive interest story a day on social media with friends... more people do that, more people see more good in the world. Make an effort. Sometimes it's harder to seek out though. I'm not immune from the negativity even if I don't always agree with it.

Make an effort not to confuse people with their views, and don't talk down to people with differing political perspectives. Most people are mostly good most of the time... stop making assertions that tear people down.


Okay, I guess I worded things poorly.

I believe that without general-purpose computing in the hands of regular folk, getting out of authoritarianism is impossible.

Why? Because authoritarians will still have access to general-purpose computing, and that gives them an even greater amount of power that is even harder to overcome.


Believing that Free software will save the world from authoritarian regimes is … how can I put it diplomatically … wishful thinking not matching real world realities. It would be great if it was true of course, but a fist in your face by an authoritarian regime will quickly teach you otherwise.


Yeah, this mindset reeks of the same kind of mentality that tech-bro SV startups... "I'm the main character, with this technology (I found an open source GitHub repo with 50k stars) I will save the world!" but with an open-source Stallman-esque twist.

Open source software is a great thing for humanity, but as software engineers, we should keep the big picture in mind. Software is software. The sky has been blue and the grass has been green since long before software existed, and the sky will be blue and the grass will be green long after software ceases to exist.


Lawrence Lessig was at the least a fellow traveller of the people who care about general purpose computing (Creative Commons, FSF, EFF, etc etc). He pivoted to campaign finance reform, because he thought that was even more fundamental. Get corporate money out of politics, and much of the pressure on software/hardware freedom disappears.

Me, I'd go one step further and say electoral reform is what's needed (in the UK and US, at least). At least then, if we vote for crooks I'll be confident we deserve what we get.


I suggest instead cutting to the heart of it:

* Ensure that men with guns cannot be paid.

If you do that, every empire falls. It is not necessarily a technically sophisticated problem - it happens naturally through economic constraints. Technology can have a role in how rapidly that develops, though. The "this software shall be used for Good, not Evil" clause may be enough to tip a balance.


Authoritarian regimes can care about climate change and they can be even more effective. Chinas transition to carbon neutral energy is progressing at a much higher rate than the US and most countries in the EU.


I support all your action items but based on your preamble I was expecting something more along the lines of political engagement/activism.


The world's hardest problems are generally uninteresting because they aren't problems you personally can do anything about without years of training.

"What is the highest-impact problem you are capable of solving?"

^^ I think this question is more powerful and much more difficult.

Learning your limits is incredibly hard. You have to border between optimism and pessimism -- between ego and humility.

After you understand your capabilities, follow your curiosity to find great problems. I think the discovery of good problems is itself the important trait. If you rely upon others to tell you which problems are important, you will spin directionless without understanding the underlying principles.


I think an issue people have is they believe they are good at solving problems which they then think they can do minimal research on something and will be able to solve problems in that domain.

I've spent my career building web based software for solving business problems. That doesn't translate at all to solving anything that qualifies as a problem for the world or humanity. I don't intend on changing my career trajectory at this point, I'm fine with solving these types of problems for the money it pays. This doesn't mean I don't care about big/important problems just that my contributions to those will be small in nature based on my personal time/money.


You can certainly join teams and projects that work on "important issues" - whichever you feel these are. You don't need to solve them all by yourself.

You also don't need to do any of the technical work yourself. You can do HR, funding, art, management for that team.


i feel that the highest impact comes from efforts that have a long term effect. one of these is to change the attitude everyone takes towards the world.

what the world needs the most is more people who understand that we all need to make an effort and contribute to make things better for everyone.

to get people to reach this understanding and be serious about it and also feel like they can actually have an impact, and more importantly have the hope that it will work and is not futile takes living by example and impress that on your family, friends and neighbors. then as your resources allow engage in the local community and show other that making a contribution is easy and worthwhile.

this way slowly there will be more and more people who will pick up this attitude until a critical mass is reached at which point solving otherwise huge problems (like climate change) becomes easy because the majority will be supportive.


There's almost always more you can do.

1. Get your home in order, groom yourself, take care of your family.

2. Get more involved in your local community, church, charity, local politics

3. Get some issue awareness and vote without being a useful idiot

Those three categories are all things that most people are more than capable of and simply don't... "I don't have time..." meh, most people have time to spend an hour on social media, hours on youtube or playing games every day. There's plenty of time.

I was in the dating pool about 7 years ago, and one thing I always remembered was how much people would say they wanted a relationship, but wouldn't actually take the time to meet someone during the week after work. I mean, if it's something that matters to you, it's something you want in your life to accomplish you make the time.

You don't reap rewards and accomplishments without effort.


Even if you could solve the hardest problem, you still need to eat while working on it. This means that one of the most important problems to solve is more efficient basics. 500 years ago 95% of the world males were farmers (maybe enslaved, but still farmer). Women had to spend 10 hours per day making clothing. (Historians can give better numbers and details of the sex difference, but for this discussion the above is close enough despite missing many details)

Making the basics more efficient is always helpful. Though this is hard as a lot of smart people are already on the job.


Your ego should slightly overshoot your ability.


or what's a 360° feedback performance review for?


Great answer!


I would take a different approach than many other problems here.

- Healing damaged relationships in your life.

- Addressing unresolved internal traumas and fully integrating them.

- Replacing addictive and avoidant behaviours and taking care of the problems in your life head on.

I don't have "the answer" to any of these, obviously, but they are certainly big and important.


Yeah this is where my mind went as well, instead of something like "climate change" or "self-driving cars".

If you're in the United States, I think the biggest problem you can solve is to make sure that you and your family are as insulated as possible from the US healthcare system.

- Get and stay as healthy and fit as possible

- Get enough money to where you can afford the majority of the care you and your family need (either through work insurance or straight cash)

- Learn how to advocate for yourself and your family

- Understand how to minimize your chances of going broke as a result of a health issue


This is one of the saddest comments I’ve read of late.


Too many powerful people are incentivized to maintain the status quo. As an average individual it's better to understand and deal with the system than pretend it doesn't exist.


This is probably close to the correct answer. The “real big” problems are also things you have little influence on - but your own like you have major influence on. And you can’t easily change others, but you can work on yourself. (It won’t be easy.)


Get yourself and your house in order first. You can't help someone else effectively if you are a total mess. That said, community engagement, volunteering and charity are all things that help you get your priorities straight as well. But you need to get your own shit in order pretty early on.


Apologies for the USA centric views:

Tackling climate change mitigation and remediation.

Getting more people off social media.

Protecting libraries.

Making the police more professional. Raising the bar for police candidates. Stopping the racism and fascism embedded in some police department cultures.

Overhauling the US political system to work for the people rather than the rich.

Protecting the rights of women, including bodily autonomy.

Protecting the rights of queer people.

Protecting the rights of non white people.

Reducing plastics use.

Planting more trees.

Improving housing construction standards.

Giving everyone a permanent place to live.

Decoupling healthcare from employment.

Universal healthcare.

Increasing the number of doctors and nurses.

4 day working week.

Forcing healthcare professionals to work normal number of hours.

Teaching good parenting at school. And various other life skills.

Improving teacher conditions.

Preventing fascism from continuing to rise in America.


This list is biased in a few ways, so it’s harder to calm these “major problems” when some of them are just fear mongered out of proportion.

To round it out though, here’s another list:

Uplifting the many men falling out of society

Protecting children and their parental rights

Reforming harmful public sector unions like schools and police

Eliminating systemically racist anti white laws in everything from affirmative action to farm subsidies

Eliminating anti white bias in hiring

Reversing the rapidly declining birth rates

Reducing the normalization of sexual degeneracy from porn addiction to the proliferation of digital prostitution (onlyfans)

Reversing the declining trust in institutions (media, public health, DOJ, etc)


The rise of the far right is in large part due to mainline society failing to "Uplifting the many men falling out of society", "Protecting children and their parental rights", and "Reversing the declining trust in institutions (media, public health, DOJ, etc)"

The Left doesn't believe these are issues, but are instead moral failings or the result of a reduction in privilege by cishet white men. Their statements to that effect have pushed ~a dozen of my friends from D to R voters.


Would add "encouraging public policy around walkable communities" to your already top notch list. chef kiss


Fantastic list. A lot of each are places anyone can start helping with too.


At least you are easy to filter, thank you.


I enthusiastically support this list


I have the feeling that we are looking at climate change wrong.

All the discussion is about reducing CO2 emissions. But we have nothing to show for it. Even the during the Covid lockdowns, CO2 emissions were reduced by only 10%:

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

CO2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. That means even if we permanently take the extreme measures of the Covid lockdowns, global warming would be in 11 years were it would be in 10 years if we did nothing.

Yes, we should continue to push towards reducing CO2 emissions. A carbon tax would probably be the most effective way to achieve that.

But that will only give us more time to prepare for the inevitable: Living on a planet with higher temperatures and all kinds of problems that arise from it. It will happen.

What technologies can we develop to cope with it?


Why would you expect the COVID "lockdowns" to meaningfully reduce CO2 emissions? There was no concerted effort to reduce emissions or energy consumption, and in fact the opposite happened.

Demand for shipping, including large shipping containers and many small online-order car deliveries, skyrocketed.

People were working from home instead of large office buildings, which means less efficient use of energy in smaller heating and cooling systems

Energy use in homes (for heating, cooking, cooling, and lighting etc) is responsible for about 11% of greenhouse gas emissions.

Energy use in commercial buildings about 7%.

On the other hand, fossil fuels being directly vented into the atmosphere (from leaks, or burning excess fuel) also contributes 7%.

Agriculture, mostly meat and dairy production, and deforestation driven by producing feed for livestock, is responsible for about 18% of greenhouse emissions.

Reducing emissions is really straightforward, and no mystery. It hardly needs new technology, just better deployment of the technologies we already have.

Coal produces about a quarter of total energy, but nearly HALF of all emissions. We need to stop burning coal YESTERDAY.

We only generate about 10% of total energy using low-carbon sources like nuclear and renewable energy. We need to scale those up.

In addition, we need to replace inefficient energy use with more efficient energy use.

Lighting accounts for roughly 5% of all energy consumption. With incandescent lighting being 5x to 10x less efficient than LEDs, we can save about 1% of global emissions just by switching all the remaining incandescent light bulbs.


You list things we could tackle to reduce CO2 emissions.

And yes, we should. And we will tackle them to some degree.

But that does not change the fact that we will live on a warmer planet in the future.

We can't make the planet cooler by taking these measures. They only slow down the pace at which it heats up.

That's the point of my post. That we should also incentivize the development of new technologies that will help mankind live on the warmer planet.


It will happen, we all know it, and people are most certainly thinking about it. But it shouldn't be opposed to reducing CO2. Even if it is already happening, reducing CO2 will (most likely) also reduce the warming itself, and make the future slightly more bearable.

Moreover, global warming is just the tip of the iceberg, it's the thing that is presented to us in the most direct ways, but other things like mass extinctions of species, oil depravity, overpopulation, forever chemicals etc. Etc. Will be a problem someday also.

So instead of trying to "cope" with every catastrophy that is thrown at us (while making living on earth more and more annoying), maybe we should think about the solutions on a global scale, because there's no way it will happen without that

So there's really nothing one can do. Even living the regular lifestyle of any western country is by itself a contribution to the issue. Stop fooling yourself with technical solutions, as it will only push the issue for later, or be counter productive

Changes can't come without a massive overhaul of our economy and society (probably for the worse)


> So there's really nothing one can do

This is a cop-out. There's always something you can do. The problem is that it's often very complex, or requires more experience, or more influence, etc. Meaning that before you can noticeably move the needle, you need to get 10 years of prep work behind you. But the fact that it's difficult or time-consuming is a completely different story than it being "impossible."

Sorry, but I get tired of people throwing up their hands and saying "I can't do anything about this situation" when they really mean "this situation is so difficult that I'd rather go take a nap than deal with it."


overpopulation is not a someday problem at all. Either it already was the problem and is the direct cause of global warming or you haven't been paying attention to demographics which show global population peaking in the 2050s because of India and China modernization.


There's tons here, too, once we get past the laser focus on removing CO2 and averting global warming. Off the top of my head:

1.) Every major city needs evacuation plans, and evacuation routes, in case of a natural disaster. Because disasters will get more frequent. Right now these are terribly inadequate, as we saw with Hurricane Rita. Solving this starts with FEMA, but probably requires advances in transportation, ability to quickly lay new infrastructure, construction technologies, information & coordination tech.

2.) Low-lying cities will need large seawalls and levees, like what Foster City just built. It cost them a few billion, but it's still cheaper than rebuilding all the buildings after a flood. Imagine scaling this up to every coastal or river city.

3.) We need better strategies to let wildfires burn in the wild yet quickly arrest their progress when they get close to populated areas.

4.) We need cheap insulation, and even cheaper ways to retrofit all the old housing stock in the U.S. with cheap insulation.

5.) We need more efficient and cheaper HVAC systems, ideally ones that don't burn fossil fuels.

6.) We need huge investments in the electric grid to support EVs + beefier HVAC. We also need software systems to manage this smartly, so eg. we can stagger EV charging and not put huge loads on the grid all at once. HVAC also serves as a big battery in a well-insulated home; you can time heat-pump loads for when they'll be most effective and retain that heat within the home during peak load times.

A lot of these will also require extensive public/private cooperation, which is its own sort of problem, and one that's also fairly amenable to software assistance (once the people in charge get tech-savvy enough).


Sucking the carbondioxide out of the atmosphere doesn't seem to be a feasable plan, considering how vast earth's atmosphere is. My growing feeling is that we are long at the point where we need to start putting heavy restrictions in place to avoid desaster. Carbon capture technologies are already in development, but that alone isn't good enough to avert the coming crisis.


I don't disagree but what is the point of single countries putting restrictions in place while developing countries continue to rely on burning carbon? It would handicap the economies of some while others just carry on. As those countries develop they are going to burn more and more carbon. Those developing countries also have massive populations, they will not intentionally handicap their growth while others have already benefited.


> All the discussion is about reducing CO2 emissions. But we have nothing to show for it. Even the during the Covid lockdowns, CO2 emissions were reduced by only 10%

I am not sure that many here know the fact that man-made CO2 emissions are only about 10% of the natural CO2 emissions [0]

> That total dwarfs humanity’s contribution, amounting to ten times as much CO2 as humans produce through activities such as burning fossil fuels.

The problem with man-made CO2 emissions that even though they are small relative to natural CO2 emissions, they change careful CO2 balance in atmosphere and over decades tips the CO2 balance.

Unfortunately, only relying on reducing man-made CO2 makes for a lousy control variable precisely because man-made CO2 is only 10% of total CO2 emissions (kind of a second-order effect). Any effect of reducing it will only show up decades later and we do not know what the new CO2 equilibrium point will be. We need to think out of the box and develop alternative and active climate engineering methods. It will not be easy but we should study, discuss and debate all alternative without exceptions.

[0] https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-carbon-dioxide-does...

EDIT: grammar & some wordings.


All fine but if say 2% is the tipping quantity (I'm pulling numbers out of my arse here) and it happens so that those 10% are the only percents we as humans can influence, shouldn't we push to reduce those 10% and keep an enjoyable planet for our grandchildren? Only a couple hundred years ago the equilibrium was without any human 10& so we have pretty clear numbers here. Decades later is nothing on the scale of the humankind and we claim all the time we are pushing our species forward (remember the saying "one small step for the man..."?) while currently doing things the majority agrees are harming ourselves. It's only that this majority won't agree to even try to do anything about it.


> All fine but if say 2% is the tipping quantity (I'm pulling numbers out of my arse here) and it happens so that those 10% are the only percents we as humans can influence, shouldn't we push to reduce those 10% and keep an enjoyable planet for our grandchildren?

Of course, we should do it and reduce our carbon emissions as much as we can. But in addition to it we should be researching additional ways to control the climate -- reflectivity of the oceans, stratospheric reflecting particulates, methane control, etc. Putting all the eggs in the CO2 control basket might not solve climate for this or next generations.


I mentioned that because reducing CO2 is the only known and proven way to solve climate as for now. Research? Sure. But let's not claim we don't know what to do and use that as a reason to wait until the hypothetical research results are in to do anything.


I think a lot about the problem of increasing heat waves causing heat-related illnesses and death. The amount of consecutive days spent above a wet-bulb temperature of 32 degrees C is expected to increase most for countries in the tropical regions of our world (and subtropics).

Many of the countries in these regions are quite poor. Many have weak electrical grids that may fail in severe heat waves, and many residents are unserved in the first place.

If I could quit my job and work on anything else, I think it would be this problem. I don't know enough to say where efforts should be focused. In some cases, providing AC units and improving the electrical infrastructure may be the answer. Maybe in others, the answer is installing geothermal heat pumps, or some other off-grid solution like solar absorption chillers.


Disagree, we should be prioritizing developing and improving carbon capture capabilities such that we can outmatch and overcome existing emission levels. Most people aren't going to reduce their CO2 emissions if it means a noticeably worse lifestyle.

Accepting that CO2 emissions are unbeatable, so the best we can do is cope, sounds like a loser mindset. Those who believe in the inevitability of increasing CO2 emissions have already accepted defeat. The game is far from over and hope is not lost.


I do think material science break throughs for carbon capture is the most sensical way to solve this. But huge space projects or chalk dust airlifts are cool too.


Recently, my friends and I were discussing same thing about climate change that we are focused on symptoms instead of the main cause.

It is a bit controversial but I think the best way to deal with climate change is to have less kids. I say that as a parent.

It sounds authoritarian and having kids is basic animal instinct. And probably smarter minds have already thought about it and realized that it would be easier to do everything else except ask people to have less kids.


CO2 absorption is the new technology that is more promising than reducing CO2 emissions. Imagine, you could buy a device that can absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and which can subsequently be either converted to a form that is more eco friendly or could be stored in a way that doesn't contribute to global warming, governments and people would invest in that.


Sounds like a tree.


We’d need to increase the world’s forests by something like 700 mature trees, per year, per person, for ever.


5.6 trillion trees per year... unless we plant them on the ocean that won't fit


Aren't those devices called trees? They absorb CO2, store CO2 and water eco-friendly, reduce ground temperature, prevent erosion, create natural habitats for animals and can be used as construction materials. Governments: I'll send you my PayPal in a PM.


Carbon capture is a scam.


At this point in the climate emergency, we need more constructive conversations. Simply stating that carbon capture is a scam deflects the conversation from productive avenues. How about: "Carbon capture is an unproven technology, which hasn't stopped companies like X from trying to make a buck doing it. We should be focusing more on Y, because it can help today."


Just curious, how are companies such Noya [1] scammers? I would like to know more about the technical due diligence part. Thinking about Theranos story and how easy was to realize the company was an scam.

I agree to the general idea that we need to plant trees and create technologies to solve the problem.

[1] https://www.noya.co/


The main problem is there is simply too much carbon for us to be physically able to pull enough carbon out of the air to make a dent in our emissions.

Carbon capture might be able to help if we land on some breakthrough, but it cannot save us.

Remember that carbon is *heavy* (carbon dioxide is actually almost twice the weight of the fossil fuels that were burned to make it -- though hopefully you can avoid capturing the oxygen)

We currently emit something like 15 billion tons of carbon each year.

That is more than 3x the amount of cement made each year (4.5 billion tons). More than 3x the amount of food that's made each year (about 4 billion tons). About 8x the amount of steel made each year (2 billion tons). About 30x the amount of plastic made each year (about 0.5 billion tons)

Can we build a logistic system capable of processing, transporting, and storing carbon -- a completely useless material -- in quantities that exceed the global food, cement, steel, and plastic production combined?


I doubt they are scammers in the traditional sense. But it's worth thinking about the total carbon cost to 'capture' and 'store' a given amount of carbon.

What I would be surprised to find is that there was a massive differential between the cost (in carbon) for raw materials, manufacturing, distribution/transportation and running (energy + people costs) and the amount of carbon captured.

It's a bit like perpetual motion machines. If you zoom in enough, they can seem to move forever. But if you zoom out they are getting energy from somewhere.

On the small scale they transform money into sequestered carbon. But how much of that money goes (directly or indirectly) into generating carbon?


The amount of money invested in systems that emit carbon is massive. Those companies are happy to bet a few million here or there on the slight possibility that carbon capture might work. So it’s a good little revenue earner if you can create a few nice diagrams.


Rainforests might disagree


I think the main problem is that lots of people car about CO2 emissions but feel (and largely are) powerless to do anything about it as so much of globally emissions are from business.

Governments need to support CO2 reduction and force businesses to cut emissions.

On top of that we need CO2 capture, and yes, we are not going to reduce emissions enough so we will need to adapt a changing climate.


yeah a lot of the emissions remedies seem to overlook the realities of geopolitics. "Just force people to do it", what with your gas guzzling jet engine Abrams Tanks? At a base level the militaries of the world aren't giving up carbon and we only have like 2 decades left to do something.

We either need to to remove the carbon, affect the albedo of the earth, or deflect radiation coming to earth. Or all 3.

Deflecting radiation is a large engineering project. Maybe you should try to send a fleet of sun shields to the L1 Lagrange point. Or maybe you should try to pump large amounts of chalk dust into the atmosphere. I'm unsure what would be the better use of time. I've read that even just painting all the roads white buys us a few years.

Of all these possible solutions, the sun shield at the L1 Lagrange point might be necessary for humanity beyond just applications of global warming. It sounds big and ridiculous, but we really should consider it.


People generally seem to miss the point that humanity in its current state is fully dependent on fossil fuel and that will change only very very slowly. So, emissions will be there to stay for a while. Fundamental research into capturing it at scale would be a good endeavor.


Wind proof umbrellas and wireless fans


1. Books or e-books, send books to countries with low literacy rates.

2. Get non-fossil fuel energy to poor countries. They are burning coal or without power due to cost/availability. They still need to go thru all the ages richer countries have gone thru.

3. Clean water. Feel free to research water wars and Wikipedia doesn’t list all of them.

4. Weather forecasting. It is not great especially for disasters. I think the goal is 2 weeks of accurate forecast globally.

5. Getting people together without social media. Like a church but not religious, it is good to have a network of people to speak to.

6. Wicked problems: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

7. Natural language processing. We are repeatedly doing work that has already been completed or solved but we do not know about it. Ex: underground flowering and underground fruiting palm “discovered” but known to locals for a very long time.

8. Communications. It seems to be the problem almost always. Too much data to digest, not enough, frequency of data, etc.

9. tried to get to 10 but just search: difficult problem, Unsolved problems in (math, physics, philosophy, etc)


Tearing down the political circus, big government and achieving a pocket of anarchism powered by free, unconstrained trade.

Green, sustainable, plentiful energy. Turning trash into products.

Achieve greater and more harmonious integration of technology and nature.

Fostering small decentralised groups, communities, instead of large institutions, companies, projects. Doing more research on how small groups of people behave, as opposed to what sociology has been doing for the past 75 years.

Making technology work for us. Dedicating 40 hours a week for 50 years to full time employment, for the privilege of hiding from the rain, is a level of slavery most people are happy to defend.

Declaring the current computing stack as bankrupt and unsustainable and explore novel ways of expanding human intellect through technology. The current code-compile-run model was already ancient in the 1970s. We have reached a local maxima, time to try something different.

--

These are the things I care about, and not enough time nor connections to make a significant dent to any of them, just yet. Happy to chat about any of this with other restless souls.


Where do you live? I'd suggest moving to a small community and seeing what kind of impact you can have! I'm considering a "Free Apple Tree Initiative" where I am to get a shit load of apple tree planted around my small town at what I consider to be very small personal cost to myself.


Oh man, I would if I had any contacts at all. I live in London, and my deep, deep dream is move to the countryside in a large farm house/art and hacking collective with like minded engineers.

Imagine a high tech eco-commune as close as possible to nature and social life. Gigabit fibre and organic garden. A solarpunk, Raspberry PI powered collective of nerds and artists.

But I don't know where to start, and don't know where to recruit others for this endeavour.


in austria there is a popular model where a small group of people (10-20 families) pool their resources to build a house they can all live in with shared ownership. these also can be found elsewhere.

i don't know where to start though. i guess it is a combination of picking a target area and finding others interested. also choosing what is important to you. like how close do you want to live to the city. i fear that more isolated locations work better for an already close knit group as opposed to one that just finds itself.

an alternative approach might be to buy a piece of land and start building for yourself but with expansion in mind and then invite others to join you for short or long term stays. (like build an area with rooms for guests and if you find some that want to stay expand as needed)


> an alternative approach might be to buy a piece of land and start building for yourself

Yeah I thought about that... if only land was not so expensive in Europe and UK. I can't afford to do this investment by myself just yet, but that is what I'm working towards anyway.


> Doing more research on how small groups of people behave, as opposed to what sociology has been doing for the past 75 years.

I think that's one of the roles of anthropology.


OK, perhaps not how they behave, but how best to leverage their potential, while sociological research has mostly been applied to making people work in harmony in large companies or institutions.

In fact during my short research on the matter, one source explicitly lamented the fact that pretty much no one has been doing any significant study on small group dynamics since the 70s. All the money is how to make us efficient cogs for the Machine, not how to form small, nimble groups up to of 5 or 6 that are tightly united and motivated in the pursuit of a single goal, often massively more productive than a large system that mostly relies on politics and hierarchy to keep everyone marching in the same direction.


Well it might sound trite, but sociology is predominantly made up of left wing big government types, so there's no surprise there.


I feel like this can really vary by person. Some things may be more important to others.

I personally think seeking ways to improve transit and reduce car dependency is an important task. A lot of other commentors mention electric cars. These are conflicting goals but both solve similar problems and may be worthwhile to work on.

If you are interested in seeing what jobs are actually out there, I think "80,000 Hours" is a good place to start: https://80000hours.org/start-here/?int_campaign=2021-12--pri.... I don't think they are always perfect, but I think the idea is in the right place and their job board often has roles that are working on important problems for humanity.


Provding access to electricity to people in less-econmically developed nations.

South, East and West Africa still have massive issues with providing one of the most transformative technologies ever, to their populations, particularly in rural areas.

Average rural electrification rate across Africa is 29%, with places like Zambia at only 11%. https://www.usaid.gov/powerafrica/zambia

Access to electricity obviously has impact across many aspects of life, but for many of the people I have spoken with, their immediate priority is improving their kids education. If you don't have electricity you can't study after dark.

This particuarly impacts girls, who not only don't get the light to study after dark like the boys, they are also responsible for collecting firewood, which is used to get even a little (crappy) light.

So after a day at school, the girls go out to collect additional firewood to create light, then are obvisouly exahsted, don't have very good light to study and fall behind in school.

That's just at the bottom of the ladder. All the way up industry, they are all impacted by poor electircity supplies.

In my opinion, it's a transformational area to be working in.


Seems like the tech side is solved on that, we just need more people actually making and distributing the stuff.

I wonder what the goal of all the education initiatives are over there though. Are they planning to go to college and do STEM? Do they intend to come to the US, or work there? Is better math skill more useful in daily life aside from STEM than it is here? Seems like the stuff that comes after getting an education is just as important.


I’d strongly disagree that the tech is solved.

We are talking about providing an 1/8th of the worlds population with electricity for the first time. That is a huge challenge.

Now add into that doing it in a way that won’t destroy the planet and the fact these people are in some of the remotest areas of the world, it’s definitely not a solved problem on the tech side.

We haven’t even figured out how to supply the current population sustainably let alone another 850 million.


Electricity might not be solved, but just providing lighting is much easier. It takes less than a watt to make enough light to study by more comfortably than firelight, and you only need it when it is neither daylight outside or time to sleep.

Poor places also tend to have plenty of sun.

I would think that you only need a 1W LED, maybe 12Wh LTO battery (It lasts 20 years), and a 10W solar panel per 2 or 3 people, if that, for the use case of not burning stuff just for light.

The groups distributing things like that already seem convinced that's enough to really change their life.


yes, but the tech needed to bring electrification from 11% to say 50% or maybe even 80% is there already. i read for example that uganda is capable of producing much more electricity than they need themselves. and there certainly are more untapped resources in africa that can be accessed with existing technology before we reach the point of needing new tech to reach everyone else. let's not perfect be the enemy of the good here.

as more people get access to electricity and better education their combined wealth will rise creating the financial resources to tackle the harder problems. on step at a time.


> but the tech needed to bring electrification from 11% to say 50% or maybe even 80% is there already.

Do you have any basis for this claim?

If this were true, why are so many of the companies working in the field tech and innovation-led?

https://www.ruralelec.org/current-members

Just as example of the kind of problems faced: how do you electrify thatched roofed houses made from mud bricks? Can’t really insert plugs.


that particular problem doesn't seem very hard to me. how do you put electricity in any house? you lay a cable and attach an outlet to it. what does the wall have to do with it? i'd need to read up and learn more details to understand how this is really a serious problem that can't be worked around.

seems to me the major problem is scale and distribution and cost, getting electricity to remote areas. and sure, maybe there are some technical solutions that can help make things easier and cheaper, but i don't see any problems that could not be overcome.

but i have only spent a short time in africa so my understanding of the reality there is quite limited. i'd really like to know more about what the actual roadblocks are and where technological innovations are required to move forward.


In non-software domains:

0.De-acidification of ocean water and rapid fossil fuels phaseout in all industries, preferably before the marine foodchain collapse and de-oxygenation of oceans.

1.Methods for clearing microplastic, PFAS and heavy metals(both of which accumulate in microplastic).

2.developing a sustainable plastic/rubber alternatives without fossil fuels.

3.Development of better supercapacitors and decentralized/distributed electricity storage(as alternative to fossil fuels).

4.Development of non-chemical space launch methods, space factories and asteroid mining.

5.Development of cheap/effective desalinization methods.

6.Development of environmentally friendly re-usable building materials and replaceable building components/parts.

In software: Open-source decentralized alternatives for proprietary AI APIs/tools would have biggest long-term impact. Its probably the most important field in software engineering right now, having this power locked in proprietary corporate walled gardens like "Open"AI would also force mainstream AI use to depend on whims of centralized API providers.


> Development of cheap/effective desalinization methods.

Turns out this is largely impossible due to thermodynamics. The best we'll ever get is something like half the cost of what we're able to do today, which is very far from cheap.


Solving the trust and bad actor problems on the internet, without turning the internet into a set of restrictive walled gardens.

Personally I think it's partly solvable with a combination of cryptographically signed HTML elements and a web of trust similar to Raph Levien's https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato or https://keybase.io/

But it's going to be a big piece of work.


That’s a political not a technical problem.


I don't think the post specifies it has to be a technical problem. Besides, it's not a social-political problem until someone does the technical work. Does anyone have a proof-of-concept implementation for Firefox or Chromium yet? No.


it's a social problem, and the only way i believe we can ultimately solve it is by teaching everyone to be better people. until we do that there will always be people who will try to take advantage and become a bad actor.

teaching people to be better is the only way to avoid oppressive technical measures. because most technical measures will end up being oppresive at least for some minority or corner cases that don't fit the expectations.

i also fear that technical measures have a tendency to get in the way of diversity as they force the same behavior on everyone and punish or prevent people doing things differently.


...but mere education doesn't work (not against those who want to be a "bad actor") ... if anything, more education makes it possible for more people to be "bad actors"


you are right, mere STEM education could help enable bad actors. but children are not born wanting to be bad actors.

part of the education needs to be moral education, starting from childhood, about what is good and bad behavior. good rolemodels, etc. we will never completely eliminate bad behavior but we can reduce the likelihood of it occurring by teaching everyone about good behavior.


Keybase is over, but worry not, KeyOxide to the rescue!


Richard Hamming gave a very influential lecture called “You and your research” — there are a few versions of it online and it’s been discussed here a few times before.

He poses the same question in pretty much the same way, “why aren’t you working on the most important questions in your field?”

I would say that what he defines as “important” is along the lines of “what will be the most influential?” - the sorts of things that bring Nobel prizes and glory.

But no one can tell you what is important: it depends on your own values; it’s a question you have to ask yourself.


Here are my two:

1. Software supply chains. Our civilization is built on top of a layer of software that has a gaping security hole the size of a gas giant planet. It's also recursive - software dependencies themselves have further dependencies and so on. As we get into a world with autonomous trucks driving down highways at 60mph and cars that collect a complete profile of location data history of unsuspecting drivers and upload them for "analysis", this problem will explode in ways that very few people can even imagine much less predict.

2. Linux distro upgrades. An Ubuntu LTS release or an RHEL release will eventually come to end of life. At that time, performing an upgrade across a fleet of servers is a complete fucking nightmare. You test everything that you know to test, hit deploy and watch as your servers go down and reboot with a new software version and restart various services and containers and hope everything will be ok. This is not sustainable. A solution is needed and is worth $$$.


Not really answering the question, but…

Ignore those people - it’s perfectly OK to work on small problems, or even just to work to support a family or put food on the table. Little things add up to big things. Don’t beat yourself up about doing “just” earthly tasks. Enjoy the moment. Quit comparing yourself to a straw man aggregated from the best slivers of imperfect people. There’s a good chance any given person’s grand vision of what’s important turns out to be misguided anyway.


My thoughts:

* Some new kind of wholesome work that gives anybody with a mobile phone a source of income, enough to pay for shelter and food.

* Invent a way that an organisation's operations that cannot fail because the operations are desired by people and it is not dependent on funding or property.

* Abstract the problem of costs so that we can indeed have good things and they are sustainable and kept alive.

* Heal the world wide web.


"What does it mean to be human?"

We are about to see machines surpass human performance at every conceivable task.

I therefore consider the problem of understanding what humans are at the fundamental, existential level (besides second-class machines) to be the deepest and most important problem of today.

And I suspect it will be the only problem left for the humans of tomorrow.


Climate change.


+ Ecological collapse


Biggest unsolved problem I'm aware of is product discovery. Given an intention, I want to buy a thing, say a TV; finding an actual good product (according to whatever criteria) has gotten absurdly difficult due to a confluence of effects, including the closure of brick and mortar stores, the death of magazines, the rise of e-commerce market platforms, dropshipping, paid reviews, straight up scams, etc.


I have not noticed that. All I ever need to do is look at a the first few Google results and the big brands I already know, and read then one-star reviews on Amazon. They all have the same 4.9 star rating, but some will say "Feels cheap and plasticky", while others will say "Started smoking after a day".

I've had a lot of bad results with anything niche and unusual, now I try to stick with really popular products that are so well known that someone would have told me if there was a problem.

Power tools don't break. Flashlights charge with USB and are way brighter. The pasta can be whole wheat or made with chickpeas. Pretty much everything mass produced is pretty great at least for the buyer.

I suppose I do hear a lot about simple hand tools and the like not being what they used to be though. It seems like most stuff people complain about is low tech stuff that has mostly need replaced by something high tech, causing everyone to forget how to make the simpler stuff, that often wss as much art as science to make.


> bad results with anything niche and unusual

In a way, this is exactly the problem. Product discovery for consumer items is pretty much solved. However, product discovery for niche industrial or scientific items is a difficult area. If you have tons of $$$, it's easy to find representatives for the big suppliers. However, for each of these large suppliers, there are 10 or 100 smaller or even "cottage industry" suppliers. The problem is how you find them in the first place, and how to gain confidence in the quality of what they offer.


With that I think a lot of it is knowing what's near impossible to mess up so you might as well buy the cheapest crap you can find, and what matters so much you should just pay for the big brands even if you have to make everything else crappier to afford it.

It's all the same lottery of counterfeit chips, some product categories they have it figured out, some they don't.

And a lot of the time, you can just design in such a way that it doesn't matter if the parts are quality.

Like, yeah, if you make a lot, you will see a few failures in power conversion or handling parts. So use a USB supply they can swap.

One or two switches are going to break most likely. So don't use a mechanical lid switch that's constantly held down, unless you make it swappable.

Your 3D printed part might have varying quality, so design in such a way that it still works on a badly tuned printer.

There's always that one part that you don't know which one to get and none look very good, but I see a lot of commercial products with lots of unnecessary unique niche parts that could have been a common standard thing.


> The pasta can be whole wheat or made with chickpeas

I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard nothing about complaints about Banza up to and including bugs in the packaging.


All of the original product discovery avenues were bought and paid for by advertisers - magazines, news columns, tv ads.

But in the past it was still useful. These days it’s still paid for by advertisers but now you’ve got dropshippers, scammers, cheap ali-baba goods, and almost no verification of quality or authenticity.

Is the problem exacerbated accepting advertising money? Can it be solved by only accepting consumer money? Consumer reports is one of those.


This might be helpful: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/


In 2015 the UN created 17 ‘Global Goals’ (https://www.globalgoals.org/) that are meant to be a "shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future":

Goal 1: No poverty

Goal 2: Zero hunger (No hunger)

Goal 3: Good health and well-being

Goal 4: Quality education

Goal 5: Gender equality

Goal 6: Clean water and sanitation

Goal 7: Affordable and clean energy

Goal 8: Decent work and economic growth

Goal 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

Goal 10: Reduced inequality

Goal 11: Sustainable cities and communities

Goal 12: Responsible consumption and production

Goal 13: Climate action

Goal 14: Life below water

Goal 15: Life on land

Goal 16: Peace, justice and strong institutions

Goal 17: Partnership for the goals

Each one is broken down into subtasks and targets. Making a dent in any of them would be worthwhile - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sustainable_Developmen...


Local government SaaS.

There's so much business processing in local government whose cost could be cut by an order of magnitude if extracted into external software. In an inflationary world with stretched budgets, this could add much needed resources to public services.

For example, instead of each police force building their own video reporting system they could share an external one. Similar for booking GP appointments, managing jury duty, applying for council tax discounts and managing parking permits.

People might critique this comment by referring to SaaS solutions which already solve these problems. However, none of these are adopted at scale.

The biggest barrier to widespread adoption lies in the sales process. Marketing to governments is hard and the challenge of effectively addressing privacy/ethics/sovereignty concerns is bigger than with most private sector actors.


That was more-or-less the premise of the company profiled in Startup.com[0], govWorks

They were somewhere between 6-10 years too early - but had a great premise for a company

-------

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup.com


I don't think big and important are synonymous. One of the most important problems in many communities is the vanishing of so called 'third places'. The places people go that isn't their home or work. Many communities lack them them nowadays.

This is something everyone can work on, you don't need to be a climate scientist or solve global peace. If you're a programmer as many people here are you can work on buildings things for your community, your neighborhood, a civic organisation, and so on.

The alternative to building some soulless ad platform isn't some world changing thing, it's simply to build small scale things with good incentives for people around you. That is important, and if enough people do it, collectively it will have a big impact.


If you can solve human greed then all other problems will resolve


What does it mean to "solve human greed"?


Create a system or structure that naturally dis-incentivizes greedy activity and promotes pro-social community development


if everything was automated and the only fields left were science or arts, ie exploring the universe or entertaining those who do, well imagine a world where half the people are researching scientific endeavors, I don't think you can get much closer to star Trek unless we have first contact with the vulkans.


imagine a world where half the people are researching scientific endeavors

exactly this. most people i talk to about this feel their mind blown when they think about the implications. i don't know why this is so hard to imagine.


I'm sorry, but I stopped believing that this could ever happen a long long time ago. This is a belief that you can fill the world with people like yourself, heck I'll even venture that these are my 'ideal' people too. Where every conversation is something productive positive and curious and all of our fellow humans energies are directed away from petty rivalries over social status and access to mating partners , and toward minimizing suffering and maximizing whatever it is that makes humanity distinct from the rest of the flying molecular clouds of entropy that make up the universe.

And then, you see what people actually do with the little free time, the precious little free time they actually have. An astonishingly large group spends hours a week in a ritual that involves sticking prosthetic bristles the size of paint brushes to their eyelids because it looks "hot." another group spends an equal amount of time fitting obnoxious light bars to their oversized pretend work vehicles to blind other drivers and pedestrians because its "cool."

A still greater group, which encapsulates these two examples as well as many others like rhem, is chiefly interested in acquiring toys to show off to one another; a behavior that remarkably doesn't seem to ever get curbed no matter how wealthy and maximally free to do whatever they want, (like the aforementioned research and artistic pursuits) people become. As having access to essentially limitless energy and resources is comparable to winning the lottery, just for an entire civilization instead of a handful of people, as a sample ask yourself what is the fraction of today's lottery jackpot winners you suppose have taken their sudden windfall and with it the freedom and flexibility to do anything they want, and turned it toward personal pursuit of any of these noble interests such as you describe?

I don't mean throwing some money at it for bragging rights and to feel like they've made some contribution to the world, I mean personal interest where they themselves engage in a focused program of skill development to a degree of expertise beyond what can be purchased off the shelf. I would wager that it's as close to zero as makes no difference, and this does not bode well for a future in which everyone is given a comparable access to leisure and resources to spend as they choose.


This is a belief that you can fill the world with people like yourself

not at all. unless you limit the definition of being like yourself to be interested in learning useful things.

you are not seeing the bigger picture: when most people are out of work because what they were doing until now is automated, we will have to come up with ways to keep them busy.

but even if most of todays work is automated, there is still a lot of other work that humans can do: we need more doctors and teachers for example. but also artists and entertainers.

so what needs to happen is that our education changes. basically, school is no longer just about learning the basics you need to function in society, but school will be more focused on training teachers, doctors, scientists, artists, entertainers and any other work that still should be done by humans. and no matter how much these people are like your or myself, when that happens, we will end up with a lot more scientists.


teach people not to be greedy. see my other related comments on this page.


With sentient robots?


Maybe?

However we would need to do two things that just aren't going to happen on this planet with humans:

1. Ensure that these robots will work for humans for free forever with no ethical liabilities (Is it ethical to keep a conscious robot as a slave?) or long term existential risks 2. All value/money/etc... created by the robot would be 100% be captured by the individual using/running/owning the new robot slave

Perfectly possible to do technically but unlikely as the political-economic structure that dominates the world will destroy whatever it creates along with the customers and employees to the temporary benefit of a tiny group of people.


This.


Rutger Bregman recently twote about a "Hogwarts for do-gooders" which is an incubator for charities/non-profits for problems that are important, neglected, and tractcable [0].

Because there isn't a profit-incentive, there are many gaps in the market with a lot of low-hanging fruit with high ROI for every charitable dollar.

[0] https://twitter.com/rcbregman/status/1688526388004077568


I think there’s a lot of value if it’s possible to make saas as low cost as software.

Software that I write and you run on your machine costs me nothing extra per user to run (assuming I provide zero user support). So I, and others, don’t mind sharing so much.

That’s not the same for saas as there’s a cost for each user.

It seems to me that there are more saas utilities that are needed and that’s resulting in less free software.

Figuring out some kind of super low cost grid/distributed compute that doesn’t get abused to death seems important to having more software shared and thus a wonderful future state for humanity.

So even basic stuff like a password manager service is costing $5/month/user and I don’t think they scales. I run hundreds of little utilities thatI accumulate over my life. I can’t afford to pay $5/month for all of them and so would like to find some way to solve this so when there are real non-zero costs per user it can be covered and scaled. (Obviously some companies and people don’t want to give their stuff away for free and wish to sell their service, more power to them, but there’s not really a way for me to offer something that needs saas functions without me standing up and running a server and that’s a very different task than just writing software, giving it away and buggering off).


SaaS is "as low cost as software" ... or, at least, the "Saa" part is

It's the Service that you're paying for - not the Software

You cannot rationally compare a provided Service to your "zero user support" offering

People pay for SaaS precisely because it's simpler/cheaper (at least on some vectors of analysis) then running it yourself

You can run a "free" email server, for example

But the amount of cost you will incur doing so (time, effort to get other servers/services to accept you, etc) is almost guaranteed to be more than just paying someone who does that for their service


The internet seems to be a really good tool for sliding some people into ideologies of hate.

If you could avoid or correct that course, like at an architectural and protocol level that'd fix a big problem of the internet.

I'd only accept that it's not possible if someone could somehow demonstrate a logical proof (such as, presume a system existed, then prove by contradiction that it's not possible, etc). That would be an achievement in itself.


I doubt the solution to ideologies of hate is blocking them at the architectural or protocol level. That sounds just as dystopic, if not more.


I agree but I don't think the suggestion was to block ideologies. Rather, change the online ecosystem to stop driving people toward rage. How to do it is another question.


blocking wasn't the suggestion. It was the identification of the problem. It's a complex and sophisticated topic.

Mass shootings that start with people being radicalized by some kind of online patterns and systems is certainly a problem worth trying to fundamentally tackle somehow.

I've got no fixes so that's why I mentioned it.


I see, then I misunderstood. My bad


The problem is specific to advertisements on the internet, and modern social media enabled by them.

Ad companies have strong financial incentive to maximize user engagement. Over time, they discovered the best way to achieve that is promoting outrage culture. Angry people generate tons of clicks, page views, and comments.

Before mass advertisements, content providers paid for bandwidth instead of earning money per views. I don’t believe internet had such polarizing effect back then.


I think it's more complicated. You'll find lots of really organized and popular hate groups in telegram channels, on tor and other places where there is no real advertisement model.

Back in the Usenet and BBS days there were lots of online hate stuff. https://timeline.com/white-supremacist-early-internet-5e9167...

There's something deeper about the medium, structure, engagement - it's complicated but it also might be solvable somehow.


I agree the hate was always there, but this was equally true even before any internets. I don’t think it’s possible to do anything about that. Arresting all these people, or censoring their speech, or banning them from the internet is IMO less than ideal.

Still, before the modern internet infested with ads, there was no incentive for platforms to actively promote these polarizing views. The opposite was true, because network bandwidth costed them money.

Modern internet ecosystem does just that, at great scale. No longer these are small groups general population is unaware about and not interested in. The polarizing content is now actively promoted by both mainstream media, and huge social media platforms. It’s so profitable they can’t resist, and their shareholders don’t care about the externalities it causes to the general public.

These externalities of ad tech aren’t limited to political polarization. For social media, mental health is another major one. Teenagers are especially vulnerable, and it seems there’s strong correlation between mental health and social media use. Here’s some article about the topic: https://www.newportacademy.com/resources/well-being/effect-o...


There's a couple axioms we need to agree on.

1: The Mark Twain adage "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."

2: Given (1) Successful hate mongering is based on methods and patterns of propagating deceptions and lies that are distinct from good faith efforts of say historians or scholars

3: These methods are easier to do on how the web is currently configured than the scholarly ones.

4: The current configuration for the web is one of many. Choices were made in the late 80s/early 90s on which axioms of choice and constellation of ideas would be implemented to construct the web in a certain manner that still exist.

5: There exists some configuration C0 that makes the methods and patterns of lies and hate mongering more difficult then it currently is.

6: There exists some configuration C1 that makes the methods and patterns of good faith efforts less difficult then it currently is.

If we can agree that these premises are all plausible then the next and way harder job is to show that C0 and C1 either can or cannot exist by discretely defining everything else in those other premises.

We're talking probably multi-year PhD level work here. Maybe it involves rethinking network-routing or DNS, introducing new protocols like an SSL for cross-checking reliabilty - I have no idea. This is not trivial.

We have real world analogs for this by gatekeeping titles and activities such as "doctor". But these legacy protections have atrophied due to the web and the institutional choices of the internet have eroded the earlier institutional choices of how we, say, use the term doctor and what significance and authority we bestow unto it.

The cement of the internet has long dried and we sit here thinking the decisions of the 20th century are somehow taken as natural law. In reality, it's all mutable institutional choices that we've forgotten to continue questioning. Whether that is worth doing or a waste of time I have no idea.


>1: The Mark Twain adage "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."

"The one who first states a case seems right: Until the other comes and cross-examines." Proverbs 18:17

Reserving judgement until one has all (or, at least, most) of the facts is the first step towards preventing the spread of lies.

"Always tell the truth. Or, at least don't lie." --Jordan Peterson

Humans are very quick to spread rumors, gossip, half-heard/misheard 'facts', uncorroborated/unsourced/unevidenced stories, etc because we have an innate desire to tell others something "secret". To feel like we are in a position of authority or power because we know something you don't.

And sometimes we can tell the truth that looks especially bad.

My dad likes to tell this story from when he was about 12.

One Monday morning, his little brother walked into Kindergarten with a giant black eye. His teacher asked what happened, and he replied, "my brother hit me in the head with a baseball bat."

This, of course, was obvious cause for alarm.

So they pulled my dad out of class and asked him what happened to his little brother, to which he replied, "I hit him in the head with a baseball bat."

As they were getting ready to call their dad for a parent-teacher conference - possibly even to consider pressing charges on behalf of the injured child, they went and found their 9-year-old sister, and asked her what happened to her little brother. She told them, "oh - my older brother hit him in the head with a baseball bat."

But she went on to provide context: "he was hitting pop flies to me to catch to practice for softball season, and our little brother ran behind him while he was on a backswing, and got knocked down."

Neither brother lied about what happened.

Indeed, they both "told the truth".

But neither told enough of the story to prevent/correct some likely misconceptions about what had happened. Had they been asked, "why did you brother hit you"/"why did you hit your brother", either would have filled-in the 10 seconds of backstory necessary to change the impression of the adults asking from horror over abuse to sympathy for an accident, and relief it was not more serious than "just" a black eye.

As data and information moves in ever-larger volumes ever-faster around the world, curating it into something that is both understandable and which contains enough context to be able to come to a proper conclusion about what you're seeing/hearing is becoming possibly the biggest issue facing society as a whole.

10 seconds of video probably doesn't have enough context to be fully understood - especially when it could be cut together, deep-faked, dubbed, etc

Solve the problem of ensuring information is reliable, accurate, and contains enough context to be understood properly, and you'll have solved social media


hate was always there, but this was equally true even before any internets. I don’t think it’s possible to do anything about that

this can be addressed by teaching people to be better and to get a better understanding of each other. on the individual level and in school, our education needs to focus on this.


I agree in theory, but in practice I’m not sure that’s likely to happen.

I think parents and peers have more influence on the children compared to the education system. For this reason, the real problem here isn’t “how to improve education” it’s “how to improve the society”. Sadly, this one is way harder to solve ‘coz education is only a part of that.


i am not limiting education to school. of course parents and friends matter too. see my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37038109


> There's something deeper about the medium, structure, engagement

Online communities bypass physical networking limit of social groups due shallow, memetic and low-cost nature of participation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number


I think it's possible.

We're working on the problem of protocol-level solutions here: https://social-protocols.org/


Great answer. Related: attention hijacking. There's so much online psychological manipulation that manipulates people's attention and intentionality.


  - Sustainable *and* scalable agriculture
  - Energy sector transition to renewable
I quit finance and work on EV chargers. The energy sector seems like an interesting place to be as a software engineer. A lot of the software problems has to do with customer acquisition, user interaction, and pricing, but there are lots of real engineering problems, too.


Social media fracturing relationships.

This hurts on a personal level (families, friendships). More importantly, what is the effect on society when we can't listen to each other?

Our contempt for each other has increased civil strife and violence, and we simply can't tackle large problems. Think about COVID-19, where political issues have prevented us from even agreeing on the cause of this plague - to say nothing of preventing the next one. And now imagine coordinating to prevent possible AI catastrophe.

We don't need to all think alike. But we better repair civil discourse if we're going to address any other problems.


Did really nobody answer "raising kids" yet? Then I'll do.


Top priority: ensure our continued existence as a species/planet against all existential threats.

Next most important: human aging and longevity.

Next most important: AI, energy

After that: we're into sci-fi very, very quickly. It's hard to imagine what will be important, we're going to be sprinting in every direction. A million things are incredibly important to support what we're already doing, too. These are just the most important frontiers. There's some other incredible problems falling by the wayside, like loss of biodiversity that is billions of years of code written by nature.

For most of us as individuals, I think the most ambitious work is to help solve human aging and death in our own lifetimes. We're probably the first generations who can call that possible, if it is possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwEKg5cjkKQ


I think an inevitable but mostly untapped direction of research is to leverage biotechnology to manufacture materials to replace plastics, metals, chemicals etc., that either don't have renewable sources or can't be biodegraded back into source material. We can go even further and create new biological machines, bioengineered motors and computers and all kinds of shit scaled up from existing models in nature.

The technology of nature and life is far more advanced than anything we have conjured up ourselves, and the more we learn from it and harness it, the more we will be able to advance and evolve our technological progress without creating all the geopolitical and environmental problems that usually come with these advancements.


Scaling worker cooperatives. Giving tools/automation that makes it viable.

Building HR-alternative software for workers to organize with and provide for themselves the things that HR denies them (pay transparency, mutual aid, feedback accountability, worker rights training, etc)


Looking at the responses here, I see a pattern: generality in the form of downstream consequences rather than specificity of upstream causes, e.g., “world hunger” rather than “lack of low-cost drought-resistant soil-regenerating edible plants” (I’m making that up — I have no idea why hunger still exists, and I’d assume it is mostly political).

“Make something people want” sounds simple, but it is really hard to identify specific gaps in people’s lives that are the primary, but many-step-removed, cause of the problems in people’s lives.

Maybe it is possible to go from general to specific by asking, “Why? What’s missing?” until you get to something very specific that is missing that is the root problem.


>I have no idea why hunger still exists, and I’d assume it is mostly political

You're dead right

"World hunger" has been a solved problem for 40 years

Distribution is hard - but doable

It's corruption that needs to be solved


As some others have mentioned in this thread, the most important problems are often not the most interesting.

For example, Code for America has several "civic tech" projects where volunteer software engineers can make apps to make it easier for recipients of government benefits to navigate the system. These kinds of "civic tech" apps make government more efficient. They have a direct and measurable positive impact on poverty and inequality.

But these projects are not particularly interesting from a technological perspective. They are not rocket science. They are just web apps. A lot of the time, solving important problems is not particularly complicated or difficult. You just have to care. In other words, you have to be able to prioritize your values over your ego. Will you be able to put on your resume that you learned a fancy new technology? Probably not. But will you be able to say that you had a positive impact? Probably yes.

If you are a software engineer looking to make a positive impact, you should search for terms like "civic tech" or "humane tech" to find projects that are driven by humane values, not profits. Or you should reach out to a nonprofit organization and ask if they need help with their website. They could often use help with making it easier to get donations, communicate their message, contact a politician, or do other stuff related to their website.

The other thing to remember is that solving the most important problems is not just thankless, most of the time. It also doesn't pay well, because it often involves serving people and communities who don't have the ability to pay much. But if you are one of those patient people who prioritizes your values over your ego and your finances, I respect you, and even though I don't know your name, you are my favorite kind of person.

I think the world would be a beautiful place if the most important problems were also the most financially lucrative to solve. But we don't live in that world. We can't expect the financial incentives to line up with what's important. If you serve a nonprofit that aims to make the world a better place, you probably can't do it for the money. It has to be because you care.


I think you need to think of it from 2 perspectives. What if I only had 5 years to make an impact and what if I had 20. The UN has its 17 sustainable goals [1] which can give you a better idea of what challenges face us at a macro level.

Start with your skill set, what do you have a unique advantage in that others don't? Are you a biologist? Work on creating more nutrient-dense banana or something. Know how to code? Solve a simple problem that wastes tons of time at a large scale (help your DMV or help people navigate something cumbersome using tech).

[1] https://www.globalgoals.org/take-action/?id=1


I do fear that as climate change evolves and we get to face more severe consequences of that the democracies will turn to authoritarianism as there would no longer be a win-win game to play. Together with surveilance and deception tech this might cement and worsen conditions of the poor as their power to organise would diminish whereas they would be most affected by the worsening climate.

Thus one of the important problems in my opinion is a solution which could circumvent surveilance and deception tech and help people to organise more effectivelly. Personally I am interested in publically verifiable software independent remote voting systems.


Non-exploitative business models.


Maybe to expand on this a bit, I suspect supply chain transparency is an important goal. It's generally accepted that if you're using a phone, you're probably using a product that at some level relied on slave labor / forced labor.

Some companies, like Fairphone, have made huge strides into addressing this problem, but there's a big question about how sustainable they are in our present economy. They may fail because of restrictions they have imposed on themselves, that every other company should be operating under as well.


Wonderful question!

The most important problem at the societal level is: sustenance, stability, avoidance of complete ruin. And by extension, all the sub-processes that contribute to those goals. Education, economy, law, healthcare, training -- all these contribute to the resolution of social problems.

The most important problem at the individual level is: that of realising the nature of self, the mind, the system called "thought"; moving towards an understanding of what the actual position of the individual is in the greater universal order.

In most popular culture discourses, one rarely sees any focused activity towards these goals in meaningful ways.


i like to be more direct and outright state that everyones position in the greater order is that of a contributor to a better world. there is nothing else that is required from the individual besides that.

i find that this is important because an "understanding of what the actual position of the individual is in the greater universal order" also works when i say "your position is to be a slave, deal with it."

so moving towards an understanding of the position of the individual is not enough. we also need to be clear that this position is the same for everyone, and that we are all part of this equally. there is no hierarchy.

combine that with the realization that progress is only achievable through collaboration and you realize that if we want to solve the worlds problems we need to contribute and collaborate.


Whether a billionaire in the condo or a beggar on the street, both are equally subject to laws of the universe. This is true under both physical and mental platforms. That's the position of every human.

The so-called master and slave both "obey" the dictates of the universe.

For instance, you were given no choice about where/when and in what conditions you were born. There is no choice on the matter of upbringing either. Upto an extent, no influence over the early education process as well.

You have zero control over most of your bodily and mental processes.

The body ages and disintegrates over time. And there's not much you can do about it.

And let's not get started about the mind.

Quick check: What's going to be your next thought? You have no idea what your next thought is going to be.

Given these indisputable indications at human helplessness (mostly), we still go on about all sorts of narratives about master, slave, freedom, equality, whatnot.

I recommend you read David Bohm's Thought as a System [1] to learn about what I am talking about in more depth. It may free you from some potentially problematic assumptions you make in your answer.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Thought-as-System-Key-Ideas/dp/041511...

PS: It is important to differentiate action from understanding. More and more action doesn't clear up mental fog on its own (that is, more "contribution", will not automatically give more "clarity"). Bohm recommends "dialogue" as a way to cultivate insight (not that it always works, but there's some potential in it).


please tell me what problematic assumptions i am making.

to me this is quite clear. i see the purpose of life to be part of our civilization and contribute to it to move it forward. beyond that there is only personal improvement to become a better person. both are equally important because we can't wait to be a better person before we contribute. on the contrary, contributing is part of what makes us a better person. so i focus on contributing and trying to become a better person through my contributions.


While I appreciate your good intentions, we should not confuse them with assured good consequences.

The proverb "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" is quite apt here. If human history is to be considered, there's strong reason to be cautious towards good intentions alone.

When people fought world wars, they did for the country, their people, all with good intentions.

When great geniuses created the A bomb and destroyed millions, they did it with good intentions.

Good intent is always on surplus in human history, but good consequences have been on deficit.

Bohm tried to debug this disparity, this freak result from human conduct. His answer? The illusory and deceptive nature of thought is the root cause. The worries about next world war, ecological disasters, unbridled hate, international conflict all can be traced to thought considered as a system.

Some of his insights are:

Thought is not as simple and straightforward as it was thought (yep). You're not running thought, but thought is running you (yep). Most thought is conditioned, thus ineffective and often leads to dysfunctional or harmful actions. And many other insights. I am sorry I cannot fully summarize his work/understanding here due to time limitations. Please give his works a read.


you are right. good intentions alone are not enough.

the best way to assure good consequences is to talk to those who would be affected, or, if noone is directly affected, research by a sufficiently diverse group of people into possible consequences.

that requires consultation with everyone involved and ideally unity in our common goals.

so as an individual we should make an effort to contribute, and as a community we should collaborate and consult to develop common goals that take care of the needs of everyone.


I would call understanding what's the underlying mechanism behind LLMs and other deep models such a problem. I.e. what's the internal representation? How it emerges over training? What its failure modes.

There're two reasons:

- In order to substantially improve these models we need to understand what they do. Something similar happened with steam engines when thermodynamics helped to explain what they do and improve them substantially.

- We need to understand their failure modes in order to understand their safety profile. I.e. it's AI safety problem.


I recommend taking some time to consciously assess your own values. When I went through this exercise several years ago, I wrote down things like “family”, “helping others”, “pursuit of knowledge”, “health”.

Once you understand what is important to you, set out to find ways to align your actions with those values. For instance, if I value family and don’t think I’m spending enough time with my family, I should make a goal to spend a certain amount of time with my family. The “real problems” are whatever you decide they are.


Pushing IPv4 to end of life. If we can get even just half way there our approach to online technologies will change wildly. For example, we can do so much more with so much less without reliance upon a server between two people trying to message each other. That means superior capabilities and you get things like inherent privacy and end-to-end encryption for free (and with less effort).


The worlds is full of problems, no shortages there, the evolution engine is still churning.

however, the problems occur with what is meant by "big" [more quantitative, utilizing science + engineering] or "important" [more qualitative, utilizing humanities].

without a common framework of tools, standards and ways it's hard-to-impossible to agree on the existence of 'the problem' and/or how 'big/important' it is.


I have moved from scientific research to the tech industry working on inane problems to working in health data science. I get infinitely more reward working on what I feel are important issues than I did working for something I didn’t care about (even though the money was much better!).

The important issues as I see it:

* improving health care, access to health care and generally helping people to live healthier lives.

* helping in some way those in poverty around the world.

* Climate change


There are more big & important things than can be listed. I think the best idea I ever heard is to pick the one that you are most energized about and do that.

> I keep seeing critiques against working on tasks that are meant to maximize user engagement.

Well, sure, because that's work against the best interest of users. Even if there were no big & important things to be done, that's one that should not be done.


With regards to global warming, one important task is to more accurately and convincingly measure the cost of climate change. People are already working on this topic, but all the work is quite napkin-mathsy at this point, and of course heavily politicized. If one could very convincingly predict the future cost of climate change it would do a lot to convince people to pay today to avoid the worst in the future.


It's an interesting dilemma; while maximizing user engagement has its place, focusing on solving pressing societal challenges is equally crucial. Issues like climate change, healthcare accessibility, and social inequality are significant problems that require innovative solutions.

Perhaps a balanced approach can lead to meaningful contributions that address both user needs and broader global concerns.


The biggest problem IMHO is preventing AI research from killing all the people.

(In contrast, people's becoming enslaved is a much smaller risk because the kind of AI capable of enslaving people will probably also be able to create robots that are more reliable and efficient than people at whatever task the AI is contemplating enslaving people for.)


I think Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is good place to get inspiration for this. It's guided my last two job roles in agritech and biotech. But I'm becoming aware that there seems to be an (inverse) correlation between how much money/funding is available as you go down the triangle.


Self driving vehicles will eliminate the leading cause of death for grownups under 40.


Mass transit construction, promotion, and adoption would solve the same problem with technology that is easier to build and distribute.


The sad reality of our world is that transit hasn’t so far been able to eliminate cars.

We should keep on improving transit, but in the meantime, self driving cars will bring immense safety benefits for cyclists and pedestrians.

People will cycle more around self driving cars because they won’t tailgate and they will pass with the appropriate margin.


Is it realistic to think self-driving cars will have a 0% fatal accident rate?


No of course not. But even a 50% reduction would reduce immense amounts of suffering.


You said ‘eliminate’ the leading cause of death, not ‘greatly reduce’, hence the push back.


Okay, fair point.


For those concerned about CO2 (as they should) don't forget that were it not for human CO2 we would very soon be on the cusp of another ice age. The point is that we're at a tricky balancing point either way.


We need new ways of living in large-scale societies.

Current political systems at almost every scale are still essentially just monkey-troup dominance hierarchies.

Market capitalism does not work at this scale, or rather, it works too well, converting everything to paperclips.

We want the dynamism and innovation that markets bring, without the rentier-ing and enshitification. I notice a strand in recent reporting trying to distinguish 'rentiers' (bad) from 'capitalists' (good), but it's a false distinction; capitalism almost by definition is people with money using it (by owning the means of production, or of existence) for the goal of making more money. All other goals seem to have become incidental, and the environment, social harmony, individual wellbeing and sanity are all victims.

So many problems stem from the incentives these broken systems create. Unconstrained fossil-fuel use, deforestation, pollution of the commons, junk products designed for obsolescence, junk addictive diets, corruption, rash emotive decisionmaking, and on and on.


See the recent "Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36651506


Affordable electric vehicles


Get all humans on earth to ponder deeply on the question "Who am I?" - not until they find an answer - but until the question disappears.

This is the end of misery.


The biggest, most important problem to work on right now is any and every problem that's currently leading to the destruction of our planet's natural systems. Unchecked greed, rampant extreme inequality, resource abuse/waste, dis/misinformation, political extremism, all of the general stupidity that many (most?) of our richest, most powerful humans are guilty of encouraging/contributing to in the general populace of Planet Earth these days. If you can "increase user engagement" in anything that improves one of these critical areas, or anything related, you're doing humanity (and all life on Earth, really) a service.


Diseases of aging


LLM context window limitation.


If you hear it on the news everyday, it is not a important problem


I don't watch the news. What are you hearing about everyday?


Making child care affordable.


Cure for cancer


universal access to internet, universal access to hover powered transportation devices.


Make star-trek replicator.


Being a good person.

Caring for others.


Resource allocation.


The housing crisis.


I have a solution for this, but I'd need investors to pull it off. Essentially cheap communities of tiny homes and non traditional homes, like using earth bags which also have an insulation effect.

we could also build out a few extra beds per community for free hotel stays when you travel to a place with our network of communities.

Each community would have a huge warehouse to store shareable like cleaning supplies, tools, drills, recreational vehicles, lawnmowers, etc. These all then are loaned out like a library.

How many things do you own that really are used every single day and how many only a few times per year? What if you could use it wherever you wanted but didn't need a place to store it?

We'd also build in some fun things, and if we have enough land we could do glamping sites for extra money for the community.


I think things like this have been tried (like shipping container homes). Problem isn’t lack of capital for a solution like this, it’s lack of demand and zoning issues.

Houses made out of dirt or cargo containers don’t appreciate all that well, so while you have a shelter over your head, you’re still just throwing money away as if you’re renting (except you also have a mortgage with a big down payment and interest).

Maybe you could address homelessness with enough of these and made cheaply enough, but it won’t affect the housing crisis so much, because people want affordable but appreciating homes. Like the desire to buy cheap stocks that go up a lot, it’s easier said than done.


The issue isn't capital or demand, it's the insane Single Family regulations and the NIMBYs that defend the status quo to the death.


We need to widely adopt Operating Systems implementing capability based security.[1] It doesn't help that there is widespread confusion with the horrible permission flags systems in phones, tablets, etc.

Without capability based security, our current situation is analogous to having a power grid with no breakers or fuses, anywhere. (One bad load would take down the grid, or set things on fire, etc).

We've improvised systems to make up for the deficiency including Virtualization, Containerization, and systems like WASM. Mainframes hold on partially because they run processes without ambient authority, which is also a form of capabilities.

The general inability to secure general computing, in turn, leads to practices like blaming the users, or applications, or operating system vendors. It leads to band-aids like virus scanners, and immensely draconian IT management. It threatens to lead to government regulation of IT systems and US.

It also leads to users playing it safe. Since you can't safely run a program, no matter how clever you are, you're going to avoid any novel software, or web sites, to try to avoid compromise of your system. This leads us to Facebook, and all the other walled gardens. It also leads to app stores and all the evil that entails.

This leads, eventually to the loss of the war on general purpose computing.

---

Next, the Von Neuman architecture has hit its limits, we need to explore other techniques to get the most out of the billions of transistors we can put on a chip. I have some ideas[2], but welcome others.

As Kevlin Henney states, when you introduce concurrency, you change the laws of physics for software. I don't think this is widely understood.

---

We need a Memex, but copyright restrictionists will fight extremely hard against it, as the primary purpose is to copy information and the context it belongs in.

---

We need to push for internet connectivity, instead of internet "access". Everyone should be able to run their own hosts, servers, and services.

---

We need to build a second supply chain for everything, with full open source documentation. There should be laws to allow commercial trade secrets to be escrowed for some period of time, perhaps as long as 50 years, with the national archives, or other suitable organization.

Nothing, anywhere, should have a single source.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security

[2] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid


IMO the #1 biggest most important problem is the design of institutions.

Specifically we need to design institutions that can accept higher information throughput from their members. This applies to corporations, governments, academia, etc.

When I say information throughput, I mean, accept information from its members and change its own behavior in accordance. Our current institutions were designed when people had to travel days to go contribute to law writing etc. That's no longer the case. The amount of information going to and from our institutions is much larger, but the institutions themselves have not scaled. Institutional processes can be very similar if not equivalent to software. And there are a lot of preventable problems just from scaling.

For instance look at our red/blue culture wars and how obviously it corresponds to population density... maybe we need to have variation in policy based on population density. Instead whoever is in power pushes their policies on everyone. When a republican is in, the cities suffer, when a democrat is in, the countryside suffers.

We also have corporations making decisions that would not be made if the shareholders and employees were given all the information and polled for the best decision.

We have policies that are made "for the greater good" that don't compensate those who lose out. This makes them unpopular. Any policy that is against fossil fuels should also focus on providing compensation to the millions of people who depend on it for their livelihood.

We have insane amounts of waste in the government and 20% of people think their jobs that they're forced to work are meaningless.

The fact that there are some readily identifiable, strong patterns for some of them indicates that there could be a relatively straightforward cause. IMO these problems aren't impossible to solve. They just need a systematic approach. They need to be studied in academia like we study physics. Imagine if we spent the amount of money we do on particle accelerators to instead create a few dozen "test cities" where people can move there and experiment with different economic and social systems.

Until then, though there's still a whole lot of theoretical work that can be done understanding how information flows through an institution and ultimately affects and constrains its behavior




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