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I've asked this question a few times but haven't really gotten a satisfactory answer. There are a lot of what I might call "epic problems" out there. Malaria, h

I've asked this question a few times but haven't really gotten a satisfactory answer. There are a lot of what I might call "epic problems" out there. Malaria, homelessness, HIV, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality, gender inequality, hate crimes. I don't know anything about creating vaccines or cures for malaria or HIV. I don't have a degree in social work or behavior science. I don't have any experience with economics outside of personal investment and filing my income tax paperwork each year. I don't have billions of dollars to fund a company to focus on these things. I make a small salary relative to what's required for these things and have very limited knowledge. I'm a programmer and a manager. So how do I contribute to these problems? How can I take the skills I have and get homeless people the help they need? How do I take my web development skills and reduce income inequality? How do I help stop the next Trayvon Martin incident? I have no idea. This article goes into great detail about climate change, but I finished reading it and still have no idea. I don't even know where to start.

Hytosys 11y ago
> ...homelessness, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality These are all directly caused by an economic system which optimizes for profits instead of people. I would also argue that the other problems you listed are perpetuated by said system. You are looking to solve a social problem using individual means. You cannot do that. Join local fights, help replace this broken system.
sliverstorm 11y ago
Especially for social problems, my working theory is work to make people's lives better. A rising tide lifts all boats. The poor of today seem to be better off than the poor of two hundred years ago, as many things (including food) are available cheaper than ever. How can technology specifically help? The first thing that comes to mind- The entry of women into the workforce and subsequent advances in gender equality were, in my opinion, greatly aided by advances in textiles & housekeeping (washing machines, dishwashers, etc).
- danieltillett 11y ago
  Women have always been in the workforce - the only change over the last century that has occurred is middle and upper middle class women have entered the workforce. Working class women have never not worked.
jerf 11y ago
There is absolutely, positively nothing wrong with making "lots" of money in a conventional manner, and donating it to an effective charity taking on the target task. In fact, in the spirit of the Kantian imperative, if everybody actually dropped their "merely productive" jobs and then tried to "directly solve poverty", we'd have just made the poverty problem much, much worse! You may want to Google the term "effective altruism".
- knieveltech 11y ago
  Actually there's quite a bit wrong with this approach, the most obvious being the inefficiency incurred by funneling money through several layers of middlemen.
  - jerf 11y ago
    "You may want to Google the term 'effective altruism'."
    - knieveltech 11y ago
      For values of "obvious" apparently.
- KingMob 11y ago
  Except that solution cannot scale here. If most people with the ability to solve these issues chase after dollars, then there's fewer people actually working on it. Remember, there's no plan B for earth. We have to overcommit our resources to ensure success, since we won't get many "iterations" to find "product/market" fit.
  - jerf 11y ago
    "If most people with the ability to solve these issues chase after dollars, then there's fewer people actually working on it." We just discussed someone who believes, probably correctly, that they have no personal ability to solve the problems. Few of these problems, if any, can be solved by any one person. Collective action is necessary. What's wrong with empowering the collective? If the approach of powering the collective doesn't work, give up, eat and drink for tomorrow we die, because it's the only thing that can work.
drewrv 11y ago
I have this feeling a lot. Being able to ship software seems like such a powerful thing, and then you try to apply this skill to difficult social problem and you realize how unimportant code is. I suppose if problems like these could be solved by an app, they would have been solved already.
jaimeyap 11y ago
You pay taxes. You vote. You spread ideas that you believe help the world. That in and of itself is immensely useful. Your impact on the world isn't just what you directly build or finance. But also the impulses and ripples you leave through your interactions with other people. As a sofware developer, I hope to make enough to one day to not worry about providing for myself and family. So I can more directly contribute to solving the world's issues. But until then, I can continue to try to be a good person and individual economic contributor. Donate what I can (time, brain power and money) to good causes. And to spread knowledge and ideas that, if they reach enough people, can make big differences.
snowwrestler 11y ago
Most epic problems are really social problems. That is, we know how to prevent and treat malaria, we have plenty of land and homes, we know how to prevent and treat AIDS, we have plenty of places for refugees to live, we know how to stop contributing to man-made climate change, etc. Social problems need social solutions. That means a lot of people working together to enact or expand the solutions that we already know exist. If you're super rich like Bill Gates, you can bring people together with money. The Gates Foundation funds a LOT of projects that employ a lot of staff and volunteers, and they market the heck out of them so a lot of other people know it's happening. I'm not super rich, and neither are you. So we need to find ways to come together with other like-minded folks to push the rest of humanity to help fix the problem. One way this happens is politics--run for office to attract popular support, or find a candidate who you agree with and support them. But the real work of social change happens between elections, and the real platforms are not political parties, but mission-driven membership organizations. In the U.S. they're often called nonprofits, NGOs, institutes, foundations, etc. So: want to make a difference on an epic problem? Find one or more mission-driven organizations working that problem, and get involved. Sign up for their alerts, give them money, go to events, share their social messaging, volunteer, or even go work for them. I will say that the nonprofit world is, in general, well behind even big corporations when it comes to using software and technology. You know how the U.S. federal government has initiatives like the Digital Service and 18F to try to foster a modern tech mindset? Most nonprofits need that too.
grenzbegriff 11y ago
I think about the same things and ask the same question. My current plan is to save most of my money so I can reach financial independence very early. I'm 25 now, I'll be financially independent by 27, meaning I'll have enough money invested to live indefinitely on interest/dividends. My total expenses/spending is $25k/year and I'm sure I can keep them there if I want to. Most people who start making a silicon valley software engineer salary right out of college could be financially independent by 30 if they wanted to. It's just a math equation of spending, income, and compound interest that most people have never considered. (If anyone doesn't get how this works, I can explain.) Once I'm financially independent, I no longer have to worry about money for myself, so I can fully commit to finding a better way to use my time. This will probably mean meeting and talking to lots of people who are doing stuff in the world and looking for an opportunity that I'm excited about helping with, and that's a good fit for my skills. This might mean writing more code or it might not, I can learn new things too. I might come to the conclusion that continuing to be a software engineer making a silicon valley salary, living frugally and donating all my extra money is the most beneficial thing I can do, but I wouldn't be surprised if I find something better. Meanwhile, while I'm working and saving all this money, I get to be an example of someone who is frugal, healthy, happy, and incredibly excited about and enjoying life, to my friends and anyone I meet. I can inspire other people who are in similar circumstances to myself, to reduce their spending and resource consumption while still being happy. Demonstrating to people that sustainable happy lives are possible and much more fun than "normal" consumerism/consumption is something I'm really excited about.
- clock_tower 11y ago
  Congratulations! I spent my 20s having spotty, unpredictable employment and chasing large personal projects that never paid off, so I'm looking at financial independence around 43 instead. ($55,000/year of dividend income, ignoring capital gains; this will be after the 15% tax on dividends.) I wish I'd taken this possibility seriously at an earlier point in my life; I commend you for doing that, and I hope you find good ways to use your time.
  - grenzbegriff 11y ago
flopto 11y ago
This is a fantastic question, and have been asking myself for a while. It turns out that there a quite a few technology projects that are tackling exactly these problems, addressing these issues technologically is an active area of research, and there are a number of companies with jobs that focus directly on developing this sort of technology. One of my favorite projects is Rainforest Connection [1]: to help prevent illegal logging, they put recycled phones with solar panels in the tops of trees in rainforests, and then using some simple sound processing they listen for chainsaws and text the local villagers if they pick up on anything. The villagers then go out and stop the loggers. For some other examples, check out PartoPen [2], and Projecting Health [3]. Projects like these are the subject of the field of ICTD (Information and Communication Technologies for Development). Much of the research here focuses on health and education in developing regions, but many projects go outside of that. For a look at some of the recent research here, check out the latest ICTD conference [4]. There are ICTD graduate programs at maybe ten universities. Outside of academia, these sorts of projects are being tackled by Microsoft Research India [5], the teams in Google that used to be Google.org [6], IBM Watson [7], Palantir's philanthropy engineering [8], and various smaller companies like [9], [10], and [11]. EDIT: I'd also like to point out that climate modelling as chaosphere2112 mentioned is another way to work directly on global-level climate issues; most of the things I'm pointing to are local. [1] https://rfcx.org/ https://rfcx.org/ [2] http://www.partopen.com/ http://www.partopen.com/ [3] http://blog.path.org/2014/09/projecting-health-video-india/ http://blog.path.org/2014/09/projecting-health-video-india/ [4] http://ictd2015.org/papers-notes/ http://ictd2015.org/papers-notes/ [5] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/tem/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/tem/ [6] https://www.google.org/ https://www.google.org/ [7] http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_pubs.php?grp=2997 http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_pubs.... [8] https://www.palantir.com/philanthropy-engineering/ https://www.palantir.com/philanthropy-engineering/ [9] http://www.dimagi.com/ http://www.dimagi.com/ [10] https://www.commcarehq.org/home/ https://www.commcarehq.org/home/ [11] http://www.dekaresearch.com/water.shtml http://www.dekaresearch.com/water.shtml
jrsnyder 11y ago
As others have said in this thread, the bottleneck of solving epic problems is solving social problems. The bottleneck of solving social problems is coordination of individual behavior; cooperating. As far as I can see, the bottleneck of social coordination is information transfer, especially information transfer towards facilitation of trust. Solving epic problems usually requires making long-term investments. I think many individuals would make more long-term investments towards solutions to epic problems if they were able to establish more trust in the cooperative behavior of other individuals. I think it comes down to counteracting the dilemmas studied in game theory. I think there is opportunity to leverage software and the internet to create new/stronger information flows that can more often raise us above the pessimistic equilibrium of game theory dilemmas. Despite the increasing ubiquity of internet-connected hardware, messaging systems, and search engines, I think there is still a lot of opportunity for tech-trained people to improve and build information systems that provide key information to key places in support of social cooperation. Software and the internet has made information flow a lot more liquid, but there is still a lot of opportunity to improve query-ability of data sources, and improve the value of information propagation across communication networks. Ultimately, we can seek to increase cases where an individual changes his/her behavior, due to trust in other individuals changing their behavior.
agilebyte 11y ago
Check out https://80000hours.org/career-guide/start-here/ https://80000hours.org/career-guide/start-here/ that has a good guide on careers and how you can "do good". Sometimes it is through having a social impact outright, sometimes it is by earning to give.
noname123 11y ago
> Re: Malaria, homelessness, HIV, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality, gender inequality, hate crimes. There are tons of informatics needs for modeling malaria genome evolution specially against emergence of front-line drug resistance that is spreading from SE Asia to Africa. Tools need to be built to inform public health officials where the genome's gene flow is headed next to modify the front-line treatment to contain the spread (e.g., Real-time genomic surveillance of Artesminin resistance of Plasmodium). There is an entire open-source community of people uploading and sharing time-stamped genomic samples of malaria and host information if you are interested (http://www.malariagen.net/ http://www.malariagen.net/). Similarly for HIV, there are lots of public health research groups doing modeling of HIV transmission, applied to specific local communities to contain an epidemic. Web front-end needs to be made and data pipelines that crunch incoming input data is needed. Most of this work is done in academic labs where information is only broadcasted on papers but could use a nicer front-end open to public and automated back-end for production data crunching. (e.g., http://web2.research.partners.org/cepac/model.html http://web2.research.partners.org/cepac/model.html).
- magicalist 11y ago
  that's just stating that there is a need, not where to start :) I wouldn't have any idea on where to go to help out with those either
  - noname123 11y ago
    1) Join a lab as a programmer (e.g., National Weather Service (climate), J. Craig Institute (infectious diseases)) 2) Read the computational papers on a subject you are interested; replicate the results in the papers and open source your software/pipeline; apply the method to a newer data-set. 3) Contribute to a open source informatics toolchain used for the subject (e.g., https://github.com/bigdatagenomics/adam https://github.com/bigdatagenomics/adam)
Mz 11y ago
So, I am homeless. And a woman. And have taken a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy and, as far as I can tell, I appear to be the highest karma openly female member of HN. For some of the social stuff, it helps "minorities" (including women, even though we are hardly a minority, mathematically speaking) if you learn to bet the odds differently when talking to people. Here is a bit I wrote about that: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/04/what-fool-believes.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/04/what-fool-be... For homelessness: We are people. Stop viewing us as some Other. Also, most homeless people have health issues. Anything you can do to promote a wellness model is a good thing for the world. Hint: Help people eat better. Invite a homeless person to eat with you at Chipotle and buy them a Chipotle gift card or hand them some cash when you part. I write very occasionally about what helps the homeless here: http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2015/03/good-food-in-clean-civilized-environment.html http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2015/03/good-food-i... For climate and health stuff: Walk more, drive less. Recycle. Stop shaking hands. Stop blowing your nose around other people. (Go do that in a public bathroom, with the stall door shut.) There will always be problems. Do what you can, when you can. Find a way to make your peace with there never being enough.
personomas 11y ago
Listen to God, and he'll tell you what to do! Anyways, many "epic" problems are caused by our own sin: hate crimes, war, homelessness, gender inequality, etc, etc. Our sin is the cause of these problems. Not only sin found else where in the world, but our sin. So here's a starting point: love thy neighbor as thy self, read the bible with your heart, and rejoice for Jesus died for our sins! Finally, love God! And all of this will go along with in helping epic problems. Amen and God bless!!!
- IanDrake 11y ago
  I'm not sure why you're getting down voted. You're viewpoint is just as sane as the guy a few comments above (grenzbegriff) who thinks a lot about what he can do, but is too busy making sure he never again needs to work a day in his life. Heart warming stuff. As an atheist who is in the middle of listening to 90 hours of the King James bible, I think you should listen to the bible with your ears, not your heart. If you do, you will find all sorts of bigotry, slavery, bigamy, intolerance, and stonings for women to didn't yell loud enough while they were being raped. To be clear, this is the stuff God is cool with. In the bible God is a fickle asshole who can't make up his mind most of the time. One minute he's pissed because men want a king to reign over them, the next minute he's picking the king. One minute he's infallible, the next he's taking advice from humans. The one thing God is really, really sure about is our penis. He wants it circumcised.
  - personomas 11y ago
    Yeah, it's pretty disappointing that this community would reject a genuine opinion that has merit. I assume that this has been rejected for two reasons: 1) They don't believe in God, which is too bad, and I pray for them who down vote me that they make it to heaven, because in hell the fire never goes out [0]. 2) They reject the idea that their sins effect other people, which is also too bad, and they don't want to take responsibility for their own actions. People from #2 may be the same ones from #1 and vice-versa. You should read the bible with an open mind. Society in days of the coming of Israel was uncivil and ruthless, and it required rules and laws in order to remove the evil. Without it, we wouldn't have the same peace and harmony that we have today. As for the women being raped, I think you're referring to this [1] which goes something like: a man meets a virgin -- who has pledged to marry a man whom is not this man -- rapes her, but the women could have prevented it if she cries for help, then they're both guilty. This is the right decision because the women let this man have sex with her, and then later denounced as rape. That is why they're both sinful. If this wasn't clearing from reading that verse, it's clear from the very next verse Deuteronomy 22:25-26 that says that if a man rapes a women in the country whose screams are not heard, then she is not at fault because just nobody was there to save her. For all the other things you mention, I'd be happy to explain to you likewise, if you point something out specifically. Often, people who reject the bible are looking for rules & laws that conform with their beliefs, but their beliefs can be corrupted and blinded by evil. The word of God & Jesus is truth, and it's a word of love and wisdom and to those accept Him will see his glory. God led the people out of a darkness and slavery to freedom and glory. He said to the people of Israel: "Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand." --Isaiah 41:10. [0] Mark 9:43 http://www.biblestudytools.com/mark/9-43.html http://www.biblestudytools.com/mark/9-43.html [1] Deuteronomy 22:23-24 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+22%3A23%2CDeuteronomy+22%3A24&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+22%...
saalweachter 11y ago
Get involved in local government. As someone else pointed out, most epic problems are social problems. Building a moon base was a technical challenge in like the fifties, and now it's an organizational problem of getting a hundred million people to agree to do it. Government is our primary mechanism for solving organizational problems; you can invent other ones, but why bother? Our government -- assuming you're in the US or a similar country -- is a citizen government. While there are a lot of bureaucrats involved in carrying out policy and a some of our higher elected offices become full-time jobs, the vast majority of the policy makers are ordinary people taking time out of their ordinary lives to decide which problems we want to tackle and how. If you have reached a point of stability in your life and are looking for a way give back, start hanging around your local town, city, or county meetings. You'll find a lot of opportunities to just jump in and start helping -- events and ongoing activities you can lend a hand with, volunteer advisory boards you can lend your knowledge to. And if you find an area where no one seems interested in doing something, well, that's an opportunity for you to run for local office and try to start something new.
- tvanantwerp 11y ago
  Getting involved with local government may help to solve your local problems, but won't help with the epic ones. And from my own experience living and working in DC, getting involved with the federal government gives you only a very small chance of making a dent in whatever your pet issue is. I've worked with people who've lived here for 30+ years fighting for a single issue who've failed to make any meaningful progress.
  - saalweachter 11y ago
    Sure, but in local government you can (a) make real progress at a local level and (b) shape priorities of the layers of government above you. In local government you can adjust zoning to encourage low-income housing and encourage multi-use residential/commercial zones. You can demilitarize local police forces and encourage a "protect and serve" attitude. You can set up needle exchange programs to reduce the spread of blood-borne diseases. You can accept refugees into your community. There is also communication between different layers of government, both formal communication and informal networking -- a lot of state representatives and congressmen used to serve in local government. Getting involved in local government gives you another way to influence policy at a state and federal level.
nether 11y ago
I'm curious as to what motivates your question. Is there an expectation that a software developer could contribute to climatology more than a climatologist could to software problems?
- Jemaclus 11y ago
  That's a great question. I don't think it's a matter of "Can I contribute more than a climatologist? but rather "How can I help a climatologist make better models and predictions?" or "How can I help my city reduce homelessness?" or "How can I help microbiologists develop vaccines for Hepatitis C or HIV?". Maybe it's building software. Maybe it's just getting word of mouth out. I don't really know. But I have a particular set of skills that don't directly map to those industries, and I'm not sure how I can contribute beyond just throwing money at the problem. To give a little more context, my fiancee is a microbiologist (lab researcher). I talk to her often about her work, but I don't understand 95% of the jargon she's talking about, just like she doesn't know the difference between OOP and ASAP. I mean, at some point it's about educating myself on these issues. But like I said in my original post, I don't know where to start. If I don't know anything about microbiology, how do I learn enough to contribute software, without requiring a 4 year degree in microbiology? Does that make more sense?

Hytosys 11y ago

> ...homelessness, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality These are all directly caused by an economic system which optimizes for profits instead of people. I would also argue that the other problems you listed are perpetuated by said system. You are looking to solve a social problem using individual means. You cannot do that. Join local fights, help replace this broken system.

sliverstorm 11y ago

Especially for social problems, my working theory is work to make people's lives better. A rising tide lifts all boats. The poor of today seem to be better off than the poor of two hundred years ago, as many things (including food) are available cheaper than ever. How can technology specifically help? The first thing that comes to mind- The entry of women into the workforce and subsequent advances in gender equality were, in my opinion, greatly aided by advances in textiles & housekeeping (washing machines, dishwashers, etc).

danieltillett 11y ago
Women have always been in the workforce - the only change over the last century that has occurred is middle and upper middle class women have entered the workforce. Working class women have never not worked.

jerf 11y ago

There is absolutely, positively nothing wrong with making "lots" of money in a conventional manner, and donating it to an effective charity taking on the target task. In fact, in the spirit of the Kantian imperative, if everybody actually dropped their "merely productive" jobs and then tried to "directly solve poverty", we'd have just made the poverty problem much, much worse! You may want to Google the term "effective altruism".

knieveltech 11y ago
Actually there's quite a bit wrong with this approach, the most obvious being the inefficiency incurred by funneling money through several layers of middlemen.
- jerf 11y ago
  "You may want to Google the term 'effective altruism'."
  - knieveltech 11y ago
    For values of "obvious" apparently.
KingMob 11y ago
Except that solution cannot scale here. If most people with the ability to solve these issues chase after dollars, then there's fewer people actually working on it. Remember, there's no plan B for earth. We have to overcommit our resources to ensure success, since we won't get many "iterations" to find "product/market" fit.
- jerf 11y ago
  "If most people with the ability to solve these issues chase after dollars, then there's fewer people actually working on it." We just discussed someone who believes, probably correctly, that they have no personal ability to solve the problems. Few of these problems, if any, can be solved by any one person. Collective action is necessary. What's wrong with empowering the collective? If the approach of powering the collective doesn't work, give up, eat and drink for tomorrow we die, because it's the only thing that can work.

drewrv 11y ago

I have this feeling a lot. Being able to ship software seems like such a powerful thing, and then you try to apply this skill to difficult social problem and you realize how unimportant code is. I suppose if problems like these could be solved by an app, they would have been solved already.

jaimeyap 11y ago

You pay taxes. You vote. You spread ideas that you believe help the world. That in and of itself is immensely useful. Your impact on the world isn't just what you directly build or finance. But also the impulses and ripples you leave through your interactions with other people. As a sofware developer, I hope to make enough to one day to not worry about providing for myself and family. So I can more directly contribute to solving the world's issues. But until then, I can continue to try to be a good person and individual economic contributor. Donate what I can (time, brain power and money) to good causes. And to spread knowledge and ideas that, if they reach enough people, can make big differences.

snowwrestler 11y ago

Most epic problems are really social problems. That is, we know how to prevent and treat malaria, we have plenty of land and homes, we know how to prevent and treat AIDS, we have plenty of places for refugees to live, we know how to stop contributing to man-made climate change, etc. Social problems need social solutions. That means a lot of people working together to enact or expand the solutions that we already know exist. If you're super rich like Bill Gates, you can bring people together with money. The Gates Foundation funds a LOT of projects that employ a lot of staff and volunteers, and they market the heck out of them so a lot of other people know it's happening. I'm not super rich, and neither are you. So we need to find ways to come together with other like-minded folks to push the rest of humanity to help fix the problem. One way this happens is politics--run for office to attract popular support, or find a candidate who you agree with and support them. But the real work of social change happens between elections, and the real platforms are not political parties, but mission-driven membership organizations. In the U.S. they're often called nonprofits, NGOs, institutes, foundations, etc. So: want to make a difference on an epic problem? Find one or more mission-driven organizations working that problem, and get involved. Sign up for their alerts, give them money, go to events, share their social messaging, volunteer, or even go work for them. I will say that the nonprofit world is, in general, well behind even big corporations when it comes to using software and technology. You know how the U.S. federal government has initiatives like the Digital Service and 18F to try to foster a modern tech mindset? Most nonprofits need that too.

grenzbegriff 11y ago

I think about the same things and ask the same question. My current plan is to save most of my money so I can reach financial independence very early. I'm 25 now, I'll be financially independent by 27, meaning I'll have enough money invested to live indefinitely on interest/dividends. My total expenses/spending is $25k/year and I'm sure I can keep them there if I want to. Most people who start making a silicon valley software engineer salary right out of college could be financially independent by 30 if they wanted to. It's just a math equation of spending, income, and compound interest that most people have never considered. (If anyone doesn't get how this works, I can explain.) Once I'm financially independent, I no longer have to worry about money for myself, so I can fully commit to finding a better way to use my time. This will probably mean meeting and talking to lots of people who are doing stuff in the world and looking for an opportunity that I'm excited about helping with, and that's a good fit for my skills. This might mean writing more code or it might not, I can learn new things too. I might come to the conclusion that continuing to be a software engineer making a silicon valley salary, living frugally and donating all my extra money is the most beneficial thing I can do, but I wouldn't be surprised if I find something better. Meanwhile, while I'm working and saving all this money, I get to be an example of someone who is frugal, healthy, happy, and incredibly excited about and enjoying life, to my friends and anyone I meet. I can inspire other people who are in similar circumstances to myself, to reduce their spending and resource consumption while still being happy. Demonstrating to people that sustainable happy lives are possible and much more fun than "normal" consumerism/consumption is something I'm really excited about.

clock_tower 11y ago
Congratulations! I spent my 20s having spotty, unpredictable employment and chasing large personal projects that never paid off, so I'm looking at financial independence around 43 instead. ($55,000/year of dividend income, ignoring capital gains; this will be after the 15% tax on dividends.) I wish I'd taken this possibility seriously at an earlier point in my life; I commend you for doing that, and I hope you find good ways to use your time.
- grenzbegriff 11y ago

flopto 11y ago

This is a fantastic question, and have been asking myself for a while. It turns out that there a quite a few technology projects that are tackling exactly these problems, addressing these issues technologically is an active area of research, and there are a number of companies with jobs that focus directly on developing this sort of technology. One of my favorite projects is Rainforest Connection [1]: to help prevent illegal logging, they put recycled phones with solar panels in the tops of trees in rainforests, and then using some simple sound processing they listen for chainsaws and text the local villagers if they pick up on anything. The villagers then go out and stop the loggers. For some other examples, check out PartoPen [2], and Projecting Health [3]. Projects like these are the subject of the field of ICTD (Information and Communication Technologies for Development). Much of the research here focuses on health and education in developing regions, but many projects go outside of that. For a look at some of the recent research here, check out the latest ICTD conference [4]. There are ICTD graduate programs at maybe ten universities. Outside of academia, these sorts of projects are being tackled by Microsoft Research India [5], the teams in Google that used to be Google.org [6], IBM Watson [7], Palantir's philanthropy engineering [8], and various smaller companies like [9], [10], and [11]. EDIT: I'd also like to point out that climate modelling as chaosphere2112 mentioned is another way to work directly on global-level climate issues; most of the things I'm pointing to are local. [1] https://rfcx.org/ https://rfcx.org/ [2] http://www.partopen.com/ http://www.partopen.com/ [3] http://blog.path.org/2014/09/projecting-health-video-india/ http://blog.path.org/2014/09/projecting-health-video-india/ [4] http://ictd2015.org/papers-notes/ http://ictd2015.org/papers-notes/ [5] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/tem/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/tem/ [6] https://www.google.org/ https://www.google.org/ [7] http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_pubs.php?grp=2997 http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_pubs.... [8] https://www.palantir.com/philanthropy-engineering/ https://www.palantir.com/philanthropy-engineering/ [9] http://www.dimagi.com/ http://www.dimagi.com/ [10] https://www.commcarehq.org/home/ https://www.commcarehq.org/home/ [11] http://www.dekaresearch.com/water.shtml http://www.dekaresearch.com/water.shtml

jrsnyder 11y ago

As others have said in this thread, the bottleneck of solving epic problems is solving social problems. The bottleneck of solving social problems is coordination of individual behavior; cooperating. As far as I can see, the bottleneck of social coordination is information transfer, especially information transfer towards facilitation of trust. Solving epic problems usually requires making long-term investments. I think many individuals would make more long-term investments towards solutions to epic problems if they were able to establish more trust in the cooperative behavior of other individuals. I think it comes down to counteracting the dilemmas studied in game theory. I think there is opportunity to leverage software and the internet to create new/stronger information flows that can more often raise us above the pessimistic equilibrium of game theory dilemmas. Despite the increasing ubiquity of internet-connected hardware, messaging systems, and search engines, I think there is still a lot of opportunity for tech-trained people to improve and build information systems that provide key information to key places in support of social cooperation. Software and the internet has made information flow a lot more liquid, but there is still a lot of opportunity to improve query-ability of data sources, and improve the value of information propagation across communication networks. Ultimately, we can seek to increase cases where an individual changes his/her behavior, due to trust in other individuals changing their behavior.

agilebyte 11y ago

Check out https://80000hours.org/career-guide/start-here/ https://80000hours.org/career-guide/start-here/ that has a good guide on careers and how you can "do good". Sometimes it is through having a social impact outright, sometimes it is by earning to give.

noname123 11y ago

> Re: Malaria, homelessness, HIV, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality, gender inequality, hate crimes. There are tons of informatics needs for modeling malaria genome evolution specially against emergence of front-line drug resistance that is spreading from SE Asia to Africa. Tools need to be built to inform public health officials where the genome's gene flow is headed next to modify the front-line treatment to contain the spread (e.g., Real-time genomic surveillance of Artesminin resistance of Plasmodium). There is an entire open-source community of people uploading and sharing time-stamped genomic samples of malaria and host information if you are interested (http://www.malariagen.net/ http://www.malariagen.net/). Similarly for HIV, there are lots of public health research groups doing modeling of HIV transmission, applied to specific local communities to contain an epidemic. Web front-end needs to be made and data pipelines that crunch incoming input data is needed. Most of this work is done in academic labs where information is only broadcasted on papers but could use a nicer front-end open to public and automated back-end for production data crunching. (e.g., http://web2.research.partners.org/cepac/model.html http://web2.research.partners.org/cepac/model.html).

magicalist 11y ago
that's just stating that there is a need, not where to start :) I wouldn't have any idea on where to go to help out with those either
- noname123 11y ago
  1) Join a lab as a programmer (e.g., National Weather Service (climate), J. Craig Institute (infectious diseases)) 2) Read the computational papers on a subject you are interested; replicate the results in the papers and open source your software/pipeline; apply the method to a newer data-set. 3) Contribute to a open source informatics toolchain used for the subject (e.g., https://github.com/bigdatagenomics/adam https://github.com/bigdatagenomics/adam)

Mz 11y ago

So, I am homeless. And a woman. And have taken a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy and, as far as I can tell, I appear to be the highest karma openly female member of HN. For some of the social stuff, it helps "minorities" (including women, even though we are hardly a minority, mathematically speaking) if you learn to bet the odds differently when talking to people. Here is a bit I wrote about that: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/04/what-fool-believes.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/04/what-fool-be... For homelessness: We are people. Stop viewing us as some Other. Also, most homeless people have health issues. Anything you can do to promote a wellness model is a good thing for the world. Hint: Help people eat better. Invite a homeless person to eat with you at Chipotle and buy them a Chipotle gift card or hand them some cash when you part. I write very occasionally about what helps the homeless here: http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2015/03/good-food-in-clean-civilized-environment.html http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2015/03/good-food-i... For climate and health stuff: Walk more, drive less. Recycle. Stop shaking hands. Stop blowing your nose around other people. (Go do that in a public bathroom, with the stall door shut.) There will always be problems. Do what you can, when you can. Find a way to make your peace with there never being enough.

personomas 11y ago

Listen to God, and he'll tell you what to do! Anyways, many "epic" problems are caused by our own sin: hate crimes, war, homelessness, gender inequality, etc, etc. Our sin is the cause of these problems. Not only sin found else where in the world, but our sin. So here's a starting point: love thy neighbor as thy self, read the bible with your heart, and rejoice for Jesus died for our sins! Finally, love God! And all of this will go along with in helping epic problems. Amen and God bless!!!

IanDrake 11y ago
I'm not sure why you're getting down voted. You're viewpoint is just as sane as the guy a few comments above (grenzbegriff) who thinks a lot about what he can do, but is too busy making sure he never again needs to work a day in his life. Heart warming stuff. As an atheist who is in the middle of listening to 90 hours of the King James bible, I think you should listen to the bible with your ears, not your heart. If you do, you will find all sorts of bigotry, slavery, bigamy, intolerance, and stonings for women to didn't yell loud enough while they were being raped. To be clear, this is the stuff God is cool with. In the bible God is a fickle asshole who can't make up his mind most of the time. One minute he's pissed because men want a king to reign over them, the next minute he's picking the king. One minute he's infallible, the next he's taking advice from humans. The one thing God is really, really sure about is our penis. He wants it circumcised.
- personomas 11y ago
  Yeah, it's pretty disappointing that this community would reject a genuine opinion that has merit. I assume that this has been rejected for two reasons: 1) They don't believe in God, which is too bad, and I pray for them who down vote me that they make it to heaven, because in hell the fire never goes out [0]. 2) They reject the idea that their sins effect other people, which is also too bad, and they don't want to take responsibility for their own actions. People from #2 may be the same ones from #1 and vice-versa. You should read the bible with an open mind. Society in days of the coming of Israel was uncivil and ruthless, and it required rules and laws in order to remove the evil. Without it, we wouldn't have the same peace and harmony that we have today. As for the women being raped, I think you're referring to this [1] which goes something like: a man meets a virgin -- who has pledged to marry a man whom is not this man -- rapes her, but the women could have prevented it if she cries for help, then they're both guilty. This is the right decision because the women let this man have sex with her, and then later denounced as rape. That is why they're both sinful. If this wasn't clearing from reading that verse, it's clear from the very next verse Deuteronomy 22:25-26 that says that if a man rapes a women in the country whose screams are not heard, then she is not at fault because just nobody was there to save her. For all the other things you mention, I'd be happy to explain to you likewise, if you point something out specifically. Often, people who reject the bible are looking for rules & laws that conform with their beliefs, but their beliefs can be corrupted and blinded by evil. The word of God & Jesus is truth, and it's a word of love and wisdom and to those accept Him will see his glory. God led the people out of a darkness and slavery to freedom and glory. He said to the people of Israel: "Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand." --Isaiah 41:10. [0] Mark 9:43 http://www.biblestudytools.com/mark/9-43.html http://www.biblestudytools.com/mark/9-43.html [1] Deuteronomy 22:23-24 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+22%3A23%2CDeuteronomy+22%3A24&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+22%...

saalweachter 11y ago

Get involved in local government. As someone else pointed out, most epic problems are social problems. Building a moon base was a technical challenge in like the fifties, and now it's an organizational problem of getting a hundred million people to agree to do it. Government is our primary mechanism for solving organizational problems; you can invent other ones, but why bother? Our government -- assuming you're in the US or a similar country -- is a citizen government. While there are a lot of bureaucrats involved in carrying out policy and a some of our higher elected offices become full-time jobs, the vast majority of the policy makers are ordinary people taking time out of their ordinary lives to decide which problems we want to tackle and how. If you have reached a point of stability in your life and are looking for a way give back, start hanging around your local town, city, or county meetings. You'll find a lot of opportunities to just jump in and start helping -- events and ongoing activities you can lend a hand with, volunteer advisory boards you can lend your knowledge to. And if you find an area where no one seems interested in doing something, well, that's an opportunity for you to run for local office and try to start something new.

tvanantwerp 11y ago
Getting involved with local government may help to solve your local problems, but won't help with the epic ones. And from my own experience living and working in DC, getting involved with the federal government gives you only a very small chance of making a dent in whatever your pet issue is. I've worked with people who've lived here for 30+ years fighting for a single issue who've failed to make any meaningful progress.
- saalweachter 11y ago
  Sure, but in local government you can (a) make real progress at a local level and (b) shape priorities of the layers of government above you. In local government you can adjust zoning to encourage low-income housing and encourage multi-use residential/commercial zones. You can demilitarize local police forces and encourage a "protect and serve" attitude. You can set up needle exchange programs to reduce the spread of blood-borne diseases. You can accept refugees into your community. There is also communication between different layers of government, both formal communication and informal networking -- a lot of state representatives and congressmen used to serve in local government. Getting involved in local government gives you another way to influence policy at a state and federal level.

nether 11y ago

I'm curious as to what motivates your question. Is there an expectation that a software developer could contribute to climatology more than a climatologist could to software problems?

Jemaclus 11y ago
That's a great question. I don't think it's a matter of "Can I contribute more than a climatologist? but rather "How can I help a climatologist make better models and predictions?" or "How can I help my city reduce homelessness?" or "How can I help microbiologists develop vaccines for Hepatitis C or HIV?". Maybe it's building software. Maybe it's just getting word of mouth out. I don't really know. But I have a particular set of skills that don't directly map to those industries, and I'm not sure how I can contribute beyond just throwing money at the problem. To give a little more context, my fiancee is a microbiologist (lab researcher). I talk to her often about her work, but I don't understand 95% of the jargon she's talking about, just like she doesn't know the difference between OOP and ASAP. I mean, at some point it's about educating myself on these issues. But like I said in my original post, I don't know where to start. If I don't know anything about microbiology, how do I learn enough to contribute software, without requiring a 4 year degree in microbiology? Does that make more sense?