5 ms·
Do All Problems Have Technical Fixes?
- airstrike 2y agoTo quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: "No."
- Juliate 2y agoSometimes what is needed is not to solve or explain, but to acknowledge a problem. To name it. And to have the restraint and patience and trust that its understanding, alone, will take care of most of it.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- xyzzy123 2y agoI feel like the framing in the article is wrong. Tech startups are desperately searching for solutions that will generate value. When a "new hammer" is developed or discovered (lets say, radiation) there's a natural inflection point. People will try marketing radioactive medicines, radioactive soft drinks, radioactive toys, radioactive jewelry.... etc etc. Everything will be thrown at the wall to see what sticks. There's no broader intellectual movement in play. This process is more like "product darwinism" than technological determinism.
- croes 2y agoYou mean Tech startups are desperately searching for buzz words that will generate profit.
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y agoTech startups are desperately searching for buzz words that will generate a VC payday. Actual profit is optional.
- steveBK123 2y agoExactly - buzzwords are new opportunities for fundraising first and foremost. Actual products which provide actual solutions to actual customers.. are for the product market fit phase.
- dredmorbius 2y agos/profit/increase in valuation/ For most of the startup ecosystem, profits are less a goal than liquidity event. Often that comes in the form of an acqui-hire, monopoly buying out competition, or a technology transfer. Profits are a distant focus, though remaining ahead of run rate has merits.
- bryanrasmussen 2y agothis makes sense if tech startups just existed, but they are brought into existence, by people who perhaps think "you know what would be neat, and also make money because people would totally want that, is radioactive soda pop!" I guess in the end the effect is pretty much indistinguishable.
- boingydoingy 2y agoYeah and this worked for quite a while as the prior generation was less STEM savvy than the younger generation who grew up on it and as such have had two decades to realize web app startups are just a generational Ponzi scheme that’s not going to literally take them to Mars or do much of anything but hand more of our agency to a bunch of patronizing elders who don’t contribute except in the form of political pageantry.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> When a "new hammer" is developed or discovered (lets say, radiation) there's a natural inflection point. People will try marketing radioactive medicines, radioactive soft drinks, radioactive toys, radioactive jewelry.... etc etc. Have you read anything from the early 20th century? This is a noticeable theme in e.g. stories set in the mythos of Conan the Barbarian or the Wizard of Oz. "Radium" is treated as essentially a form of magic.
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y agoI don't think "read Conan the Barbarian" is the main takeaway of that, though I'm sure "rays" was a trope in fiction. Quack "radioactive medicines" actually happened to people. Product darwinism and actual customer darwinism. See, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_quackery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_quackery https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/radioactive-quack-cures/index.html https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/radioa... https://histmed.collegeofphysicians.org/for-students/radium/ https://histmed.collegeofphysicians.org/for-students/radium/ https://www.dannydutch.com/post/the-strange-story-of-eben-byers-the-man-that-drank-radium-until-his-jaw-fell-off# https://www.dannydutch.com/post/the-strange-story-of-eben-by... https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/the-lethal-legacy-of-early-20th-century-radiation-quackery/2020/02/14/ed1fd724-37c9-11ea-bf30-ad313e4ec754_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/the-lethal-legacy-of-e...
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> though I'm sure "rays" was a trope in fiction No, seriously, "radium".
- lukan 2y agoAnd before that, it was "magnetism".
- feoren 2y agoAnd today it's quantum mechanics and/or dark matter.
- consf 2y ago[dead]
- saturn8601 2y agoThat sounds like the what I am seeing in the consumer packaged goods industry. In desperation of growth they are throwing everything at the wall. ex: that 'flamin hot' thing took off and post pandemic they put it in everything including soda and ice cream. Lets not forget every merchandising opportunity under the sun.
- fuzzfactor 2y agoThere's only so many people who can figure out what will really sell, or be able to really sell it. And way more people who wish they could do the former, but know in their heart they never will, while having a leg up in the latter, often built from a fortunate upwardly-mobile sales career where their customers never did get their money's worth. You know the kind I'm talking about. Which can guide their actions toward a slightly deceptive form of marketing, or things even more unsavory. OTOH, sometimes quite benign, but also less creative. And it shows. Otherwise you wouldn't know the kind I'm talking about :\
- saturn8601 2y agoA lot of these things that I describe are built on the back of a successful product. 'Flamin hot' was a successful product, every subsequent variation was not original thinking. What steps were taken to get to the original success? Seems like in the 80s-90s there was an avalanche of unique products, now in this post pandemic decade its just nonstop rehashing of the oldies. Ex. Cinnamon toast crunch vs cinnamon toast crunch hazelnut spread alternative.
- nitwit005 2y agoFunding, both from governments and investors, also tends to chase after trends, so people's proposals will reflect that. I wish there was some deeper thought or philosophy behind it, but that clearly isn't always the case.
- vismit2000 2y agoReminds of hammer factory: https://factoryfactoryfactory.net/ https://factoryfactoryfactory.net/
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoIt sort of bugs me when people who claim that a problem cannot be solved with technology act like that problem was caused by technology. You get both or neither, you can't have just one.
- _cenw 2y agoOf course you can. Technology can irreversibly change societies. Do you have a technical solution to the potential for mutually assured destruction through nuclear weapons?
- jjk166 2y agoMutually assured destruction is a technical solution - when it is suicidal for either side to attack each other (because of a large and robust nuclear arsenal), both can be confident the other won't attack. There are potentially other technical solutions. Anti-ballistic missile systems could make nuclear strikes non viable, as could more advanced defenses. One could imagine weapons designed to remotely pre-detonate nuclear weapons making them more dangerous to possess than to use. You could by subterfuge render your adversary's nuclear capabilities inoperable. You could find technical solutions to the issues that make the countries adversaries in the first place, for example eliminating dependence on a resource you compete over. You could spread propaganda to install a friendly government. There could be and almost certainly are even better technical solutions that I don't know, and perhaps no one currently knows. Every problem ever solved was at some point unsolved.
- _cenw 2y agoYou are misunderstanding me bringing up mutually assured destruction. Sure, it prevents preemptive strikes, but it doesn't prevent accidental launches, broken early warning systems and bad communication. Do you think the fact that we haven't done any of these other measures to a degree that the danger is no longer substantial in 70 or so years is a matter of technology or priority? If it's priority, how do we prioritize? Is that, perhaps, a non-technical problem? If it's a tech advancement problem, how do not constantly have a rolling window of uncontrolled potentially civilization-ending technology?
- Terr_ 2y agoI suspect there's a correlation between how likely someone is to answer "yes" and how recently they entered the software engineering workforce. At any rate, it's definitely changed for me since starting out.
- msla 2y agoIf nothing else, getting people to accept a technical fix is a social problem. On the other hand, yes, some social problems have had technical solutions. Remember when “You just can’t get good help these days!” was a truism? It isn’t said as much anymore because the underlying problem was obviated: Time was, middle-class households were becoming unmanageable due to young women no longer wanting to be servants, such as maids; not even the Great Depression could shift the problem. Ultimately, the whole thing was rendered obsolete by the rise of home conveniences such as dishwashers and vacuum cleaners, allowing middle-class women to do their own housework. Those technical solutions still required a social shift away from expecting maids to be part of any well-run middle-class household, but the technical and the social went hand-in-hand. https://daily.jstor.org/how-america-tried-and-failed-to-solve-its-servant-problem/ https://daily.jstor.org/how-america-tried-and-failed-to-solv... Side note: > the Naturalisitic Fallacy that “ought” can be derived from “is.” What's the name for the fallacy that “is” can be derived from “ought”?
- thaumasiotes 2y ago"Wishful thinking". Maybe Panglossianism.
- Planktonne 2y ago> What's the name for the fallacy that “is” can be derived from “ought”? Any deliberate action makes clear that this is only sometimes a fallacy.
- kindkang2024 2y ago[dead]
- kindkang2024 2y agoWithout True Authority and beliefs in Love, any technical achievements is just make us easy to destroy ourselves. Think nuclear bombs and ww3. Do we still want achieve more advanced science advances and use it build more powerful weapons to kill the “aliens”that Our Will feels.
- tomjen3 2y agoPrecision guided bombs would have made short work of the nazies, so that’s one quick counter to your argument.
- rbanffy 2y agoIn their hands they’d have been equally effective for a completely opposite objective. All vectors add up to zero.
- its_bbq 2y agoAnd the not asked often enough corollary: just because there exists a technical solution to a problem, does that mean it's the right solution?
- pfdietz 2y agoI often see objections to technical solutions because they have the gall to actually solve a problem, but do so in a way that the objector doesn't want. If a problem is seen as a way to force a particular solution someone wants for other reasons, alternative solutions are threats.
- jillesvangurp 2y agoA lot of problems do. But sometimes the problem is people related. You can work around those problems with technology but you can't fix them. In terms of real world problems: climate change, food scarcity, poverty, water quality and access, health care, etc. a lot of the solutions are technical. And a lot of those solutions are directly or indirectly about making energy cheaper and cleaner. With cheap clean energy, you can address climate change. You can desalinate water (at scale). If you have clean water, you can address food scarcity (e.g. irrigate desserts). You can also address sanitation. Cheap energy also enables transport, having light in people's home (education). so that addresses poverty. And so on. All that comes from just a handful of technical solutions that make energy cheap and clean. Anyone working on those things is accomplishing more than decades worth of well intentioned but not very effective activism, charity, diplomacy, etc. I'm sure AI has a role to play here as well. The point is moot anyway. We're not going to turn into Luddites and competition continuously drives us to do better. Which means people keep on figuring out technical solutions to challenges around them. Technology isn't inherently good or evil. But it can be very effective sometimes. And of course there is a lot of not so effective or misguided stuff as well. Part of the journey.
- psychoslave 2y ago> A lot of problems do. But sometimes the problem is people related. You can work around those problems with technology but you can't fix them. It depends a lot on what is encompassed in the considered definition of technology. Education and language can certainly be taken as technologies, under certain perspectives at least. And addressing individual behaviors with undesirable social consequences is something that definitely can be solved with appropriate educational "technologies". In my current perspective, the most weighted factor between a technology and an innate individual trait is how transferable it is. >We're not going to turn into Luddites and competition continuously drives us to do better. It all depends on which values we endorse and thus how we deem something "better". On global scale, there was probably never so much passive aggressive competition within humankind (we also never been so numerous to be fair), and its results on global biosphere are to say the least completely disastrous. >But it can be very effective sometimes. Sure but working on improving effectiveness means nothing. If we try to enhance efficiency of gaz chambers, we are clearly bringing only more evil to the world. Efficacy is meaningless without a kind and generous purpose. I could almost say "science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme", but Rabelais actually wasn’t willing to say what it is generally thought it means nowadays. https://theconversation.com/science-sans-conscience-nest-que-ruine-de-lame-que-nous-dit-cette-maxime-aujourdhui-175184 https://theconversation.com/science-sans-conscience-nest-que...
- rw_panic0_0 2y agono
- Simon_ORourke 2y agoNo, say you're on a team of five with two consistently poor performers that not only fail to achieve limited tasks, but constantly draw off support from the rest of the team. There's no technical fix for that. The nuclear option of getting them sacked and replaced dents team morale and probably wouldn't let the team back up to speed for three or four months with all the onboarding required. Coaching in areas where they should be self-learning consumes the focus of others on the team or in the business. Ignoring them and ploughing ahead without assigning them work drastically reduces team effectiveness. Not much in the way of a technical fix in sight - unless copilot suddenly becomes really really good.
- gonzo41 2y agoIDK about coaching. If you've ever been seriously coached for performance (think sports) an effective coach will look you dead in the eye and tell you you're terrible. At work, in technical fields, everyone likes to be liked and shy's away from being a bastard to their peers and reports. Especially if the conditions aren't that great and killing yourself for your current gig isn't giving you windfall returns. Giving people the tools to succeed or at least being clear to them that they and need to do better is a managers job.
- immibis 2y agoPutting them on gardening leave is a technical fix to that.
- trilbyglens 2y agoOur proclivity to believing that all problems have technical solutions is what has largely lead us into out current cultural cul-de-sac. Namely the idea that AI will somehow "save us". I can't think of anything more patently stupid. As stated here in another comment, technology is neutral, but is also a multiplier of force. Many of our technologies simply multiply the force of the already powerful, against the power of the powerless.
- mettamage 2y agoMy gripe with titles like this is that problems as a class are much bigger than technical problems. For example: Many people on HN seems to have dating problems. Whenever an article on dating is in the front page, I see those issues in the comments. In most cases, that class of problem requires people to work on themselves. Online dating for sure as hell isn’t solving it. Some of my comments outlined how to solve dating problems for cis heterosexual males. Most of the partial solutions are non-technical in nature. Some are technical if it concerns online dating.
- consf 2y ago[dead]
- jansan 2y agoOnline dating could probably help a lot if it was optimized for actually providing a solution instead of maximizing profit. If these services actually manage to find a matching long-term partner, they will lose two customers.
- mettamage 2y agoThere’s a Dutch app that’s pretty good (it’s called Breeze). Many tech orgs do find a good solution but they are usually not blitz scaling
- lesuorac 2y agoPerhaps you'd lose two customers but uh people are a renewable resource. If your service actually worked well you'd have an endless supply of future customers as your previous customers reproduced. But its definitely a problem that actually doing matchmaking isn't as profitable as a chat app. Well for a publicly traded company in today's environment of short-term thinking; perhaps if it was a dividend company it would be feasible.
- HPsquared 2y agoDating falls under the sales and marketing department, which a lot of technical people neglect to their detriment.
- crvdgc 2y agoPerhaps the title should be "why do tech leaders believe all problems have technical fixes?" To that question, isn't the author analyzing too much into a salesman's pitch? They profit from selling technical solutions, so of course they'll say everyone can use one.
- croes 2y agoYou can deal with those scammers, because in the end they know it's not true. The real problem are the true believers
- dartos 2y agoAll problems except the problem of too much abstraction
- Artzain 2y agoOne way or another, there must be solutions. I always think about companies sending rockets to Mars. So what's stopping us from fixing a few bugs
- unnouinceput 2y agoProblems in this world are of 2 types. Technical and political. Do all "technical" problems have technical fixes. A very sound YES! What about political problems? Sometime they can be fixed with a technical fix but ALL of them can be fixed with assassination.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jjk166 2y agoNot all problems have technical fixes, but all fixes are technical. Technology is the application of knowledge to solve problems. Some technologies fall outside of what typically comes to mind when the word is brought up, for example languages and currency and tax codes are all technologies. Anything that actually fixes a problem is going to wind up being technical. There is a long and ever growing list of problems solved by technology. It is arguably the hallmark of our species to look for technical solutions to problems, and we will continue to do so until we go extinct. There are problems that don't have solutions. Some people want to do A, some people want to do B, you can not do both, and doing neither will piss off everyone - no matter what someone is going to be unhappy. You might find better "solutions" or solve adjacent problems, like "we'll do A today and B tomorrow" but the core issue is intractable. It is the human condition that we will always have some such problems, but they are few and generally affect the upper levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. For the lower level stuff - typically anything involving material needs - technical solutions exist. The problem with this article and the many others like it is that it fails to distinguish between the search for genuine technical solutions to problems and tech bros proposing bad technical solutions to problems. That a problem theoretically has a technical solution obviously does not mean your slight twist on a note taking app is such a solution. Why these narratives are pushed is reasonably easy to understand - it boosts the ego of the person who developed the proposed "solution" and asserts a value of the product to both potential customers and investors. In particular, the phenomenon is heavily fueled by entrepreneurs with little understanding of the underlying problem pitching solutions to investors who have equally little understanding of the underlying problem. I'm fine with calling out dumb ideas, but going further to this narrative of "some proposed technical fixes wouldn't work therefore technical fixes don't work and anyone looking for a technical fix is delusional" leads to a defeatist attitude. For every solvable problem a technical solution does exist, it's just really unlikely you'll stumble upon such a solution after watching a few hours of videos on the latest tech fad.
- jmull 2y agoObviously, no. But it's simpler than all the things the article goes in to. Tech "leaders" get rich(er) if they can convince a bunch of people they have the solutions to their problems. There are various ways to accomplish this and any specific tech and even tech itself is practically incidental. Each hype wave is just another opportunity to do so. I think tech is generally popular among the people trying to get rich(er) because it's changing pretty fast which provides a regular series of hype waves with regular opportunities to convince people you have the solution they need. (You even get fresh opportunities to convince people they have brand new kinds of problems, which, of course, you have the solution to. Tech is very flexible.)
- InDubioProRubio 2y agoNo, there are problems that are societal loadcaring and can not be fixed in the short term without widespread chaos and lawlessness ensuing. There can be local optima of minimal suffering approached, but every flower throws a shade and kills another flower.
- bwestergard 2y agoDid you mean "societally load-bearing"?
- rbanffy 2y agoIt all hinges on how far you are wiling to go. If you are OK with being a supervillain, you could use a radiotherapy machine and FMRI to nuke the specific neural paths that are creating your pesky people-related problems. The patients will object, of course, but that part of their brains can also be nuked.
- arminiusreturns 2y agoAs the sysadmin/ops dude who has always been on the practical end of things, most problems are leadership and not technical imho.
- fuzzfactor 2y agoExactly, there are tonnes of technical problems that don't have viable technical solutions for that reason. Or where solutions are simply standing by in readiness until there is a landscape free of leadership deficiencies and their accompanying obstacles, before deployment can commence.
- tonetegeatinst 2y agoSounds like a question for discrete math professors.
- javier_e06 2y agoI strong recommend the book The Wizard and The Prophet. We are all here enjoying over abundance of food thanks the third agricultural revolution. Technology defeated COVID. Our technology wizards keep scoring big points. The prophets claim that our wizards no only are not averting the global collapse of civilization, they are accelerating it. Nobody needs a microwave oven but who can wait a few minutes to warm up their food?
- sflefties 2y ago[dead]