Ask HN: How do I change the world?
From a very young age, I've always known I wanted to have a positive impact on society. I know I want to start a business that solves problems with technology. I just don't know what societal problem I am going to solve yet.
I'm looking to gather some valuable insight from the community to help improve my decision-making.
More specifically, I want to hear what HN has to say on the following questions: - How can I find a problem I want to solve, and what are the indicators it's even worth pursuing? I don't want to waste years of my life on something that isn't required, or isn't effective. - Are there specific industries that you think need innovation through software? - How can I balance solving a genuine need and providing a valuable business opportunity? - Do you have any stories from running your business? - What advice do you have when it comes to staying motivated?
51 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadHere's an exercise I use for prioritization amidst dozens of journals that are filled with scribbles of ideas:
Imagine you're on your death bed, and you've been supremely lazy, and didn't do anything with your life. You've had ideas, but you did nothing with them. What are the things that you would have liked to know whether they would have been successful or not?
"Photography was interesting, and I was good at it...but success or failure wouldn't have meant that much to me. But my piano compositions...man, I would have liked to know how that would have turned out!"
This tells me "Double down on your piano. Photography is cool too, but it shouldn't be the priority."
What pisses you off? X or Y exists...or maybe doesn't exist. "Why the hell is it 2024 and I'm still doing X?" "Why the hell is it 2024 and there isn't a way to do Y?" Questions like these could be a good start to finding a problem that you're passionate about and motivated to solve.
> ...and what are the indicators it's even worth pursuing?
Would fixing that problem save people time? Maximize people's comfort? Minimize people's labor? Someone might pay for such a solution.
The core value humanity needs right now is a significant change in culture where opposition to normalization and mainstream is promoted, and nonsense is actively fought against.
Even Hackernews is slighly more mainstream than I would prefer with wordy nonsensical articles constantly showing up.
And I don't know what to do about it, nobody does. All the good content is extremely hard to find. It took me years to realize the Indie Web existed and even it is slightly tilted to the mainstream.
Humans just don't care about the stuff that matters. It was all figured out many years ago, but is now burried behind mountains of "innovations."
I am sorry if that seems harsh, but you asked.
From my experiences, positive impacts have never been top-down, or from a place of "addressing societal problems".
Innovation (and motivation) comes from laziness, need, and greed. Instead of solving society's problems, in this regard, just look to your own. Then, the question of "worth" is self evident.
agreed
do you have any bookmarked/favorite indie websites? I'm always on a hunt for them so if you don't mind sharing, please.
My only "new" observation is that websites hosted by universities have PDFs better than $200 dollar textbooks. But I don't know how to search for them at scale yet.
I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation.
When I found I couldn’t change the nation, I began to focus on my town.
I couldn’t change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.
Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself,
and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself,
I could have made an impact on my family.
My family and I could have made an impact on our town.
Their impact could have changed the nation and
I could indeed have changed the world."
Source unknown
Take therapy as an example. You can help people learn how to cope with challenges in life without spreading their pain. So, you could become a therapist, to help your patients make the world a better place. But what's the first step to being a clinical counselor? Extensive therapy! You've gotta learn the skill, walk the walk, before you can hope to help others.
Then the town…
https://uia.org/encyclopedia
Good luck in your journey.
There are actions to help that I can personally do at a poor or mediocre level at best.
Alternately, I can put some of my FAANG level wages to help fund others who are far better at doing that, but may not be making FAANG level wages.
I think the essence of problem solving is not wanting your peers to have to experience the same bullshit that you do.
2. Delete all packages that depend on GTK and Gnome.
3. Make a DE that feels like Windows 7
4. Make apps for basic system settings that come with windows, like font list, mouse settings, control panel, etc.
5. Make a notepad and a MS paint equivalent.
6. Single-handedly topple the world's most used operating system in under 5 years time.
I suppose the reason why it's so hard to change the world is that the easiest ways to make a difference are not very profitable. There are countless niche markets that could use better niche software, but because they're niche the profitability is limited.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys
What I found is if you start looking for societal potholes there are a whole lot of them from climate, immigration, healthcare, etc. However, don’t go into these alone. Find other people and organizations who are already charting the path and figure out how to help them.
If you go solo, you will need to find a mission that you are ready to die for, and put all your energy and savings into it.
I started doing that 3 years ago, and I am struggling financially, but I feel better looking myself in the mirror.
A lot of people in the general tech/startup world believe that’s a totally normal order in which to approach things, and it probably works for some people, but if nothing is screaming at you to solve it, IMO you are better off building experience in a domain or skill and then revisiting this later. You probably don’t have enough experience or context to know what’s worth solving (and a viable problem to solve for a for profit company). Note that advice from VCs is from their perspective, not yours - they may be willing to take a bet on you being able to eg disrupt podiatry with at-home laser wart treatment, but do you really want to just be someone’s 100:1 bet?
I worked for 5-6 years as a software engineer before recently starting my company, even though I’ve always known that I wanted to try founding a tech startup. And now I’m really glad I didn’t just immediately dive into entrepreneurship out of college. What I learned as an employee gave me experience in industries, technical problems, organizational practices/techniques/antipatterns, and soft skills that would have been major obstacles to starting a business. I have plenty of ideas for how to start a tech business now, because I know how I’d build the products and can identify a lot of problems/opportunities in the areas that I’m familiar with.
So IMO it can actually help a lot to simply work as an employee in some area that interests you - marketing, sales, AI, cloud, webdev, robotics, whatever - with the long term goal of starting a company once you figure things out. That’ll help you identify real problems beyond just “X for Y”.
1) what is "the world"? Is it the planet? (Your change needs to apply to different ideologies, languages, cultures - like, say, a medical advance.)
Is it national (affecting just your country), like say translating media into your local language, reforming politics, or education.
Perhaps it's niche, like improving accessibility for the disabled, perhaps it's building a local free-upcycle site so those with stuff to get rid of connect with those who need (like say a Facebook group.)
How many people do you need to touch to consider your effort a success? 10? A million? A billion?
Question 2 - why?
Are you after fame? Fortune? Penance? Legacy? Understanding your root motivation here will be very useful to you. Does it matter if you change the world, but die poor and young? Does it matter if you're anonymous? Does it matter that the world knows it has changed?
Are you prepared to sacrifice your life to change the world for others? Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison, but became the inspiration for a nation.
Is it better to improve one life at a time, by say installing solar panels or attempt to solve climate change (and likely fail?) In others words is it more important to aim high, and fail, or aim lower and succeed.
Figuring out your root motivations will help you understand what it really is you want to do, and at what cost. Defining parameters for success, and failure, will help you evaluate ideas.
Good luck.
It would help if you relaxed your (radically American-elite centric) set of requirements and instead focused on the following few questions:
- What could make you happy/fulfilled on a very personal level (very few people make any impact when unhappy)
- What could make your family/community happier? (very few people manage to persevere without associates or without a support system)
- What is a project you could grow to do within a year or so that would have a positive impact on the greater good you have in mind? ("the world" is a large place).
Having done a few startups, including one that may change how humanity treats cancer (via computational immunology; very few problems are SW alone or even mostly SW), there bulk of impact is gradient ascent: baby steps and finding people to collaborate with. Also, adopting a bit of perspective outside of my community definitely gave a boost.
One of the things that has frustrated me is that there are many ideas that are worth pursuing that could make a big difference to the world, but can't be done in a way that is likely to be commercial viable -- and so can't be solved by starting a business.
If I had to provide guidance, I'd say "pursue a niche". Find something small that's obviously wrong and do something about that. You're more likely to have an impact than if you try to tackle some big headline problem. There will always be someone else more qualified and capable of handling that big problem: but there will always be too few people looking at all the small problems of the world -- and in aggregate, the small problems add up to more than any big problem.
Most people want to solve big problems to make their mark, but those same people are at a fundamental disadvantage because they were taught in ways that coddle their thinking, that prevent them from seeing or getting an objective view of the problem, and thus their perceptual biases mislead them to solutions which only contribute to the problem.
They look at a narrow time-horizon and don't realize outside that time horizon their solution is no solution at all. Most within our lifetime has been a nice summer day as it goes towards fall, but winter is coming.
Some problems are so incredibly difficult that there is no good solution (i.e. an impossible problem), the general economic calculation problem in socialism is one of a few, previous solutions didn't work out because the flaws were not paid attention to.
Societal problems as a general rule fall into these groups of problems, because if they were simple someone would have solved them about 100 years ago, and they would be non-issues today (which they aren't).
Also, with regards to making a business of it, most of society is going in the wrong direction today, the incentives (subsidies) dictate that, and so you'll be fighting an uphill battle where all your competitors may have free money and opportunities that you don't have.
They in the end will make more money (normalized in purchasing power), crowd you out, and buy you up in bankruptcy from free debt they are given from their good banking friends (and the market will shrink/sieve/concentrate). Parasites infest the money system, and are killing the host.
That unfortunately is the nature of inflationary economies, we are well past the peak and so you will also be fighting losses from the underlying economy as well, and a strong understanding of economics that properly models these environments is a mandatory necessity.
Mises wrote a series of papers back in the 1930s that rationally lays out the structural issues with central hierarchies (i.e. the structures we have adopted).
He did so more generically (economics/socialism), but everyone important ignored what he had to say (not refuting it).
Keynes (TGT) is still taught, but has been somewhat refuted now (Rallo), which also explains why it doesn't model outlier events (and we are in outlier territory).
It certainly looks like inflationary economics with respect to the currency pool is a limited n-body problem (naturally and progressively more chaotic until exit or boundary conditions are hit).
For business to work, you need to have a stable store of value that is a medium of exchange (liquid). No such thing exists now. You either have illiquid exchange for stable store, or liquid cash without stable store, and manipulation has been ongoing for years in many markets through the use of double legged options contracts at the primary dealer level (COMEX).
The best thing you can do is study history, and economics and identify where things went wrong, and why they went wrong. Until you know that you won't be able to propose any solution to the societal cascade that's going to hit us in the next generation. Malthus law is pretty clear what we can look forward to during reversion to the mean (back to agrarian).
The study is not straight forward because irrational thought, deceit, and lies plays a large part in that why, there are groups that speak falsehood more than they do truth and they are, through their actions directly supporting the destruction that is inevitable without a course correction.
This path, you'll at the very least develop a very discerning eye which will only benefit you long term.
History and Economics, and don't speed-read the communist/pro-socialist history unless you want to find ...
The more general liquidity preference theory is still mandatory if you want to model an economy where decisions are made in the absence of perfect information and ability to predict the future. Time preference sounds obvious until you understand that you need to know what the future looks like, before you can make a tradeoff between now and a discounted future.
Worse, you aren't following the bare bones rational rules needed to discern truth from falsehood. There can be no rational discussion without following these rules.
This necessarily means that in a 4 state system, you would be wrong at least 75% of the time. This expands for each additional factor exponentially with the complexity to above 6 sigma in that system (with each additional factor, close to 100% false), very rapidly.
For money to be money it must have 3 elements that cannot be violated. Those elements are well known and documented (by the general consensus of experts). There is no point debating this.
Value is not an impossible concept, its subjective, but that by no means makes it impossible in the same way that quantum physics isn't impossible. I'd suggest you acquaint yourself with the concept of superposition, what an observer is, and what the collapse of a wavefunction does with regards to quantum systems. There are equivalencies in economics that have gone unaddressed.
Neoclassical economics has a very ambiguous definition, unless you define what you mean more clearly (such that there can be only one generally understood meaning), we can't refute what you say or even discuss it, it must be discarded as a matter of course.
The classical definition I'm familiar with relies heavily on Keynes errors, but other definitions were contradictory in more than a few different ways (contradictions show rational premises and suppositions are false).
I'm not going to allow any discussion to get bogged down in baseless drivel, where you claim the exact opposite based on my response (in deceitful hegelian fashion which the ambiguity allows), just for the sake of argument. Please clarify what you mean.
Socialism in general fails given a wide enough time horizon, its fundamentally unstable. This was fully dissected in the 1930s-1950s by Mises from a structural view (in all its forms).
Even the market types of socialism fail because its based on a Ponzi, where the underlying life of the currency isn't taken into account in the dynamics, it falls back to violence/feudalism with about an equal chance at collapse when the social contract and by extension elements of money/property are no longer upheld.
It also neglects the fundamental requirements needed by individuals in an economy to function, but its failures are indirect (as are ponzi's in general). Adam Smith had a number of boundary conditions where the economic system stalls (and fails). Indirect though it is, they still cascade, and once wound up can't be diffused (because system deflation has been made impossible).
Mises documented the 4 intractable problems with Socialism, and properly observed that Socialism cannot exist without some free market to discover pricing. Without that free market, distortions occur as printing (subsidies) are used, eventually culminating in failure if they warp enough.
Virtual good manipulation (i.e. naked options), prevent a market from functioning properly.
Keynes makes many assumptions, one is that general liquidity is preferenced and all that is needed is to adjust the rates accordingly, but that is rationally false. In outlier conditions this can be false when there can be no credibility in the currency (its no longer considered a store of value, or its expected that any value will be negated), value in the form of purchasing power, as in what happened with Weimar Germany prior to WW2.
Your arguments are specious and neglect the common predictable failures in such systems, thus directly promoting a failed design in a safety-critical system, the outcome of which is first slavery, then destruction (as Malthus reversion takes hold, dependent interconnected systems with single points of failure are brittle; and central heirachy guarantees that at a structural level).