7 ms·

I 100% sympathize with this feeling too. But the pattern I see over and over again is: 1. Society is getting worse. 2. I'm really good at writing software. 3

I 100% sympathize with this feeling too. But the pattern I see over and over again is: 1. Society is getting worse. 2. I'm really good at writing software. 3. Therefore the solution is to write software to fix society. That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large: A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is". It doesn't matter how good you are at software if you don't have a software problem. Many problems cannot effectively be transformed into software problems. Instead of continuing to search for our keys where the light is, we should be bringing the light to where we lost our keys. That means accepting that we have to get outside of our comfort zone and improve our non-software skills. (This does not mean immediately thinking "I'll write software to bring the light to where I lost my keys!") [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

hotpotamus 5y ago
I've heard the streetlight one before but I also like "when you're a hammer, then every problem is a nail". I hadn't thought of it this way though perhaps I had felt it. It feels like this is the dream for AR/VR - to create a software defined reality that you can escape to.
- akolbe 5y ago
  Here is another version of that story, as told by Idries Shah. He attributes it to the Middle Eastern Mulla Nasrudin figure, and gives it a metaphysical interpretation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasreddin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasreddin A neighbor found Nasrudin down on his knees looking for something. "What have you lost, Mulla?" "My key," said Nasrudin. After a few minutes of searching, the other man said, "Where did you drop it?" "At home." "Then why, for heaven's sake, are you looking here?" "There is more light here." According to Shah, the German clown Karl Valentin (1882–1948) used to act the story out on stage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Valentin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Valentin
- mesozoic 5y ago
  The new AR/VR reality will become as shitty as the current one and assuredly do it much faster.
mcguire 5y ago
I usually refer to the streetlight effect as the statisticians' error, or the economist's error---those being two major fields where the data you can get may only be a very poor proxy for the problem.
__MatrixMan__ 5y ago
I like the analogy, but in many cases the societal ills that defi is trying to solve were caused by software in the first place (e.g. internet advertising as a democracy-eroder). Also, the protectors of the status-quo are putting a lot of software people to work in protecting that status quo, so tempting them to the other side means compatibility with their skillset. Lastly, anyone who would overturn the status quo must provide the people with an alternative that's at least as good. As underdogs, we can't afford to out-hire the banks, so the only way forward is to be more effective on a smaller manpower budget--which probably means leaning on crowd-sourced solutions mediated by software. It's easy to fall into the trap you're describing, but that doesn't mean that that's what is happening. It looks like the battles here are genuinely shaping up to be fought in software.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  How would decentralized finance affect the advertising driven business model of web applications?
  - entropicdrifter 5y ago
    Perhaps even more relevantly, how would any sort of decentralization help when the issue is an excessively unregulated market simply moving to the logical conclusion of its evolution?
  - yao420 5y ago
    I quite liked the coinhive approach of having the user run a blockchain workload as an alternative to ads. The project and economics didn’t work out for them but it was an interesting approach.
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      But that doesn't change a thing. Engagement is still the key metric for a service in this world. And that leads to the same problems.
  - fragmede 5y ago
shebek 5y ago
What this line of reasoning seems to be missing is that society seems to be getting worse largely because of software.
- munificent 5y ago
  I don't think you can aggregate all of society's changes into a single "worse" or "better" metric. It's like trying to decide if cheese is a better food than apples. What I think you can say is that software has had many good effects in various ways for various members of society and many bad effects for various members. Those effects and members are sometimes overlapping, sometimes not. There is no clear line between baby and bathwater. It's like trying to decide if iron or wheat has made society better or worse. I don't even think it's a particularly interesting question. A better question to me is, given where we are now, what incremental steps can we make it better, and for whom?
  - jacobr1 5y ago
    And even more confusing, the positive and negative impacts are quite likely to be second or third order phenomena. Managing unintended consequences of complex systems is no easy task, even in hindsight. > A better question to me is, given where we are now, what incremental steps can we make it better, and for whom? This is indeed a better question, and perhaps the best we can do in many situations. But we have plenty of systems where small changes have large secondary consequences or conversely small changes are just drowned out by the fact that the system is in some like of local minima
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Seems to and getting worse are two different islands. Things are better than ever for all progressive issues. More people are living healthier and wealthier than ever. Crime, wars are all down. How is software making society worse?
  - shebek 5y ago
    By concentrating power in the hands of unelected, unaccountable institutions. By fragmenting the cognitive capacities of regular human beings. By letting hatred and insanity reach a global audience. By diverting countless person-hours of intelligent labor towards largely useless endeavours. By becoming an opaque intermediary to an increasing fraction of all social interactions.
Y_Y 5y ago
What you describe reminds me of the (phenomenally successful) work of Douglas Englebart. He described his motivation as something similar to what you have, but of course with a more optimistic perspective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart#Guiding_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart#Guiding_phil...
Shorel 5y ago
Except: Law is code. And we run these programs. We are the processors. And I mean real laws, the ones written in congress. Whatever we are doing, in a sense, is trying to sidestep these laws.
- mavhc 5y ago
  Real laws are maths, slightly real laws are physics. Lawyer laws are just written to cause you to have to hire lawyers
darawk 5y ago
I think a better framing would be that the way to force society to fix itself is to use software to demonstrate how things could be different. DeFi and crypto have already forced major changes to TradFi by exactly this mechanism, and they will continue to do so, even if DeFi doesn't succeed on its own terms.
bb88 5y ago
That reminds me of an old joke: Q: How does an engineer cure constipation? A: He works it out with a pencil. Of course in neither sense of the connotation of the punchline, can the engineer cure his constipation. No, he'd need to see a medical professional to do that. I'm old enough to remember that the great promise of the internet in China was as a backdoor to free speech. That was until China contracted companies, many of them American, to help construct The Great Firewall. It was just this year that DuckDuckGo stopped giving results for "Tank Man" in the Free US because Bing didn't want to offend China. Facebook is being used as platform for misinformation, both for political and vaccine related. Facebook was supposed to connect us together, instead it's driven us apart. And now it's blockchain/crytpo/defi which will save us all. So in 2021 the joke is: Q: How does a crypto fanatic cure constipation? A: He offers shitcoins and convinces other people to mine for them.
- theduder99 5y ago
  haha nice modern version! I originally heard the first version as a mathemetician instead of an engineer.
posix86 5y ago
But can't the argument br made that programming, or computing generally, is the process of automating information processing - automating thought? Any many public offices and servants, as well as many regulatory processes and management positions are nothing but menial mental tasks? What decentralization provides is a platform on which these things can be automated and implemented much, much more easily than with traditional methods - because the issue of trust falls away. And, they are implemented in a way that is transparent to everyone.
- munificent 5y ago
  Computing doesn't automate thought. It only automates processing data. In order to process anything, data has to be deliberately loaded from the real world into a computer. And in order for that processing to accomplish anything, a human has to take the results and take action on them. If you think most social problems stem from people simply not knowing the right thing to do, then, sure, crunching some numbers might help. But my belief is that most social problems come from understanding the people around us, and having the right social structures and psychology to do the right thing. Computers will help with neither of those. It's like having a nonfunctioning trackpad or display. No amount of software is going to fix that.
  - posix86 5y ago
    Processing data IS what thinking is. This literally what Turing intended to do: Find a way to automate thinking. And a lot of what governmental positions today are doing is processing files, basically mapping files to files. A lot of corruption stems from the fact that this mapping can be done outside of the law with nobody noticing. This can be fixed.
- WJW 5y ago
  Transparent to everyone able to read the code, perhaps. Those poor souls who have not learned to program in whatever defi language is hip this month will just have to accept that they will have no say in governance, nor even be able to discern what is happening and why. Bureaucracy is bad enough when it's made out of humans, let alone when you have unfeeling machines executing a (possibly buggy) script.
selfhoster11 5y ago
> That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large Consider that as a coder/IT person, computers are just about the only lever I have at my disposal that has any chance of working. My voice gets lost in the noise floor of a democratic election, politics is dirty and more likely to turn you into a corrupt politician than into a corruption-resistant sane voice, and volunteering only has a limited impact. If I got gold by sheer blind luck of trying to solve problems with coding, then at least I had a ticket for that lottery.

hotpotamus 5y ago

I've heard the streetlight one before but I also like "when you're a hammer, then every problem is a nail". I hadn't thought of it this way though perhaps I had felt it. It feels like this is the dream for AR/VR - to create a software defined reality that you can escape to.

akolbe 5y ago
Here is another version of that story, as told by Idries Shah. He attributes it to the Middle Eastern Mulla Nasrudin figure, and gives it a metaphysical interpretation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasreddin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasreddin A neighbor found Nasrudin down on his knees looking for something. "What have you lost, Mulla?" "My key," said Nasrudin. After a few minutes of searching, the other man said, "Where did you drop it?" "At home." "Then why, for heaven's sake, are you looking here?" "There is more light here." According to Shah, the German clown Karl Valentin (1882–1948) used to act the story out on stage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Valentin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Valentin
mesozoic 5y ago
The new AR/VR reality will become as shitty as the current one and assuredly do it much faster.

mcguire 5y ago

I usually refer to the streetlight effect as the statisticians' error, or the economist's error---those being two major fields where the data you can get may only be a very poor proxy for the problem.

__MatrixMan__ 5y ago

I like the analogy, but in many cases the societal ills that defi is trying to solve were caused by software in the first place (e.g. internet advertising as a democracy-eroder). Also, the protectors of the status-quo are putting a lot of software people to work in protecting that status quo, so tempting them to the other side means compatibility with their skillset. Lastly, anyone who would overturn the status quo must provide the people with an alternative that's at least as good. As underdogs, we can't afford to out-hire the banks, so the only way forward is to be more effective on a smaller manpower budget--which probably means leaning on crowd-sourced solutions mediated by software. It's easy to fall into the trap you're describing, but that doesn't mean that that's what is happening. It looks like the battles here are genuinely shaping up to be fought in software.

UncleMeat 5y ago
How would decentralized finance affect the advertising driven business model of web applications?
- entropicdrifter 5y ago
  Perhaps even more relevantly, how would any sort of decentralization help when the issue is an excessively unregulated market simply moving to the logical conclusion of its evolution?
- yao420 5y ago
  I quite liked the coinhive approach of having the user run a blockchain workload as an alternative to ads. The project and economics didn’t work out for them but it was an interesting approach.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    But that doesn't change a thing. Engagement is still the key metric for a service in this world. And that leads to the same problems.
- fragmede 5y ago

shebek 5y ago

What this line of reasoning seems to be missing is that society seems to be getting worse largely because of software.

munificent 5y ago
I don't think you can aggregate all of society's changes into a single "worse" or "better" metric. It's like trying to decide if cheese is a better food than apples. What I think you can say is that software has had many good effects in various ways for various members of society and many bad effects for various members. Those effects and members are sometimes overlapping, sometimes not. There is no clear line between baby and bathwater. It's like trying to decide if iron or wheat has made society better or worse. I don't even think it's a particularly interesting question. A better question to me is, given where we are now, what incremental steps can we make it better, and for whom?
- jacobr1 5y ago
  And even more confusing, the positive and negative impacts are quite likely to be second or third order phenomena. Managing unintended consequences of complex systems is no easy task, even in hindsight. > A better question to me is, given where we are now, what incremental steps can we make it better, and for whom? This is indeed a better question, and perhaps the best we can do in many situations. But we have plenty of systems where small changes have large secondary consequences or conversely small changes are just drowned out by the fact that the system is in some like of local minima
ipaddr 5y ago
Seems to and getting worse are two different islands. Things are better than ever for all progressive issues. More people are living healthier and wealthier than ever. Crime, wars are all down. How is software making society worse?
- shebek 5y ago
  By concentrating power in the hands of unelected, unaccountable institutions. By fragmenting the cognitive capacities of regular human beings. By letting hatred and insanity reach a global audience. By diverting countless person-hours of intelligent labor towards largely useless endeavours. By becoming an opaque intermediary to an increasing fraction of all social interactions.

Y_Y 5y ago

What you describe reminds me of the (phenomenally successful) work of Douglas Englebart. He described his motivation as something similar to what you have, but of course with a more optimistic perspective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart#Guiding_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart#Guiding_phil...

Shorel 5y ago

Except: Law is code. And we run these programs. We are the processors. And I mean real laws, the ones written in congress. Whatever we are doing, in a sense, is trying to sidestep these laws.

mavhc 5y ago
Real laws are maths, slightly real laws are physics. Lawyer laws are just written to cause you to have to hire lawyers

darawk 5y ago

I think a better framing would be that the way to force society to fix itself is to use software to demonstrate how things could be different. DeFi and crypto have already forced major changes to TradFi by exactly this mechanism, and they will continue to do so, even if DeFi doesn't succeed on its own terms.

bb88 5y ago

That reminds me of an old joke: Q: How does an engineer cure constipation? A: He works it out with a pencil. Of course in neither sense of the connotation of the punchline, can the engineer cure his constipation. No, he'd need to see a medical professional to do that. I'm old enough to remember that the great promise of the internet in China was as a backdoor to free speech. That was until China contracted companies, many of them American, to help construct The Great Firewall. It was just this year that DuckDuckGo stopped giving results for "Tank Man" in the Free US because Bing didn't want to offend China. Facebook is being used as platform for misinformation, both for political and vaccine related. Facebook was supposed to connect us together, instead it's driven us apart. And now it's blockchain/crytpo/defi which will save us all. So in 2021 the joke is: Q: How does a crypto fanatic cure constipation? A: He offers shitcoins and convinces other people to mine for them.

theduder99 5y ago
haha nice modern version! I originally heard the first version as a mathemetician instead of an engineer.

posix86 5y ago

But can't the argument br made that programming, or computing generally, is the process of automating information processing - automating thought? Any many public offices and servants, as well as many regulatory processes and management positions are nothing but menial mental tasks? What decentralization provides is a platform on which these things can be automated and implemented much, much more easily than with traditional methods - because the issue of trust falls away. And, they are implemented in a way that is transparent to everyone.

munificent 5y ago
Computing doesn't automate thought. It only automates processing data. In order to process anything, data has to be deliberately loaded from the real world into a computer. And in order for that processing to accomplish anything, a human has to take the results and take action on them. If you think most social problems stem from people simply not knowing the right thing to do, then, sure, crunching some numbers might help. But my belief is that most social problems come from understanding the people around us, and having the right social structures and psychology to do the right thing. Computers will help with neither of those. It's like having a nonfunctioning trackpad or display. No amount of software is going to fix that.
- posix86 5y ago
  Processing data IS what thinking is. This literally what Turing intended to do: Find a way to automate thinking. And a lot of what governmental positions today are doing is processing files, basically mapping files to files. A lot of corruption stems from the fact that this mapping can be done outside of the law with nobody noticing. This can be fixed.
WJW 5y ago
Transparent to everyone able to read the code, perhaps. Those poor souls who have not learned to program in whatever defi language is hip this month will just have to accept that they will have no say in governance, nor even be able to discern what is happening and why. Bureaucracy is bad enough when it's made out of humans, let alone when you have unfeeling machines executing a (possibly buggy) script.

selfhoster11 5y ago

> That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large Consider that as a coder/IT person, computers are just about the only lever I have at my disposal that has any chance of working. My voice gets lost in the noise floor of a democratic election, politics is dirty and more likely to turn you into a corrupt politician than into a corruption-resistant sane voice, and volunteering only has a limited impact. If I got gold by sheer blind luck of trying to solve problems with coding, then at least I had a ticket for that lottery.