5 ms·
Technological solutions to social problems only tend to work when the problems are of the type "I wish it were easier to rid people of their money".
by Sharlin 4mo ago
Technological solutions to social problems only tend to work when the problems are of the type "I wish it were easier to rid people of their money".
- akoboldfrying 4mo agoAgriculture. Plumbing. The printing press. Electricity. Vaccines. Fiat money itself, which is a technology that is better than the technology of barter, which is better than each person having to grow or make every material thing they need.
- jakelazaroff 4mo ago"How do we remove feces from our living spaces" and "how do we stop dying from pathogens" are not social problems.
- dghlsakjg 4mo agoI can’t think of many better examples of social problems than sanitation and public health.
- jakelazaroff 4mo agoIn that case, what are examples of non-social problems you can think of?
- dghlsakjg 4mo agoA broken TV. If my neighbour has a "removing raw sewage from living spaces" problem, it is very much a concern for me. If my neighbour can't watch TV, I don't care.
- pixl97 4mo agoEven a broken TV can be a social problem in some circumstances. TV breaks because entropy doesn't like you = personal problem. TV breaks because manufacture designed it to fail 3 months after warranty = social problem.
- jerf 4mo agoI think it would be a reasonable definition of "social problem" that it requires two people to have it, and that they must have it in relation to each other, which is to say, some sort of social interaction or communication must be involved as well. Sanitation is a problem for one person as well, as is health. Social problems arise specifically with the interaction of two people. You can't have a scam without two people, for instance. Definitions that collapse the entire space under discussion into one category are useless. If sanitation is a "social problem" then everything is a social problem, and the reason why that is useless is just that a definition that does not distinguish has no utility. In mathematical terms, to say that something conforms to that definition yields zero bits of information. "Public health" is its own category. In the real world no two categories can ever be fully separated from each other but just because plausible scenarios can be spun out in which sanitation becomes involved in a social problem doesn't mean that on the whole it is much better understood and talked about as a separate category. Crypto has social problems. If one person sits in a basement and "does crypto" by themselves who cares? They can declare they own as many basement-coin as they like. It takes a second person to have a problem.
- bee_rider 4mo agoThe original post said plumbing, not sanitation in general. Plumbing mostly solves a problem that arises when you have large groups of people. An individual or a small tribe can keep the waste and drinking waters separate by walking downstream a bit.
- akoboldfrying 4mo agoI agree with you on the uselessness of definitions that don't distinguish anything, and I think your conceptualisation of a social problem as being something that requires multiple people to interact (like a scam) is useful, admits a very clean boundary, and deserves a name. I would call such a problem a purely social problem. But I think there is a broader concept of "social problem" that makes sense too, even though it lacks such sharp edges. I think it's reasonable to say that a problem is a social problem to the degree that its severity as experienced by one person depends on other people's behaviour. If I accidentally drop a rock on my own foot, this seems to be obviously not a social problem. But if I am more likely to be carrying a rock in the first place, or less likely to be wearing protective shoes, because of how society is organised, then to that extent I claim that it is a social problem. This is not an abstract example: Over time, changes in society's attitudes to dangerous kinds of work have directly, and indirectly through health and safety legislation, led to massive reductions in workplace harm since the Industrial Revolution. Under this rubric, all it takes for a problem to be social is for it to be possible to imagine that society being organised differently would lead to a different level of suffering. Does this lead to nearly all problems being classified as social problems? Yes -- but that is not a problem in itself, that is just an accurate picture of reality! It is still useful -- indeed much more useful -- to place problems on a spectrum of social-ness; nothing "collapses" unless we are determined to make a black-and-white distinction.
- mrhottakes 4mo agoThose are perhaps the biggest social problems that humanity has ever faced.
- fragmede 4mo agoToilet technology helped with the social aspects. There's a fascinating museum in India about the history of toilets.
- john_strinlai 4mo agoif you do not consider public health a social issue, what do you consider to be one?
- jakelazaroff 4mo agoYou're putting words in my mouth. "Public health" deals with social problems regarding health, but it's a subset of "health" which also includes problems that are not social in nature. There are absolutely social issues around vaccines — how do we fund their development? how do we distribute them? how do we convince people to use them? — but as a technology I would say they solve a problem that is mostly independent of human relationships.* * Obviously, you could say that vaccines actually do solve a social problem because pathogens are often passed between humans, but I think then the definition of "social problems" becomes so broad as to be meaningless.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- john_strinlai 4mo ago>You're putting words in my mouth. "how do we stop dying from pathogens" is like, the textbook public health problem. it's pretty much the question which the entire concept of public health spawned from. so, if you specifically wanted to talk about the technology of vaccines or whatever instead of general pathogen prevention, you should just say that instead. i cant read your mind.
- jakelazaroff 4mo agoMaybe read a couple ancestor comments up to figure out the context of what I'm responding to?
- Ar-Curunir 4mo agoHow do we maintain large urban communities is a squarely social problems, and parts of it are amenable to technical solutions such as wastewater management, supply chains, large scale agriculture, etc.
- neonstatic 4mo agoI think the point that is missed is all of these solved real problems that needed solving. I feel over the last decade we have exhausted the obvious benefits of the Internet revolution and more often than not we were seeing clever technology being developed, that wouldn't solve any problems. Then long and painful search for applications of that technology would ensue. Cases in point: crypto, llms.
- api 4mo agoYou’re comparing crypto and LLMs?
- neonstatic 4mo agoYes. In fact, crypto is ahead, because it does have a legitimate use case. Two, actually - money laundering and sanctions evasion.
- dghlsakjg 4mo agoI'm not sure I agree on your definition of legitimate... If we want to say that any value generating - including crime - is inbounds, then LLMs are FANTASTIC scam machines. There are incredible uses for LLMs in a lot of stealing money spaces.
- neonstatic 4mo agoI'll admit I was being a bit provocative with wording there ;)
- api 4mo agoI just had an LLM synthesize a complete app UI from spec. It did a decent job.
- Sharlin 4mo agoAll problems are social problems in that sense, but that's not what I meant. And if fiat money (as in, a type of social contract) is a technology, then anything is a technology.
- munksbeer 4mo agoWhat did you mean? I can't really understand your first comment, and this one doesn't explain it any further.
- Ar-Curunir 4mo agoThere are plenty of technological solutions to social problems. This is a tired trope.