How to fix most problems in the world

The creator of Hacker News wrote about the 'Fluff Principle': content that's easy to judge gets more widely shared. http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

Let's look at news from a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-12-26
"OnlyKey: Open-Source Alternative to YubiKey"
This definitely exists. It is not called, lowercase, "yet another alternative to YubiKey"; it is uniquely named, and it definitely does something useful.

"Kaboom: an unusual Minesweeper"
Same.

"Show HN: Eschersket.ch – a symmetry drawing app to design custom wrapping paper"
Again, unique and easy to verify that it is what it says it is.

"Nim vs. Crystal"
A verifiable analysis of two options. One of them is faster and takes less memory, but is worse for language interoperability. Someone can have very high confidence that the article's conclusions are correct.

"I only use an iFrame to crawl and scrape content"
Again, verifiable usefulness to people doing certain tasks.


Hopefully, Hacker News readers do read these articles before voting on them. But it isn't necessary. You can tell immediately what they're about and usually what you will learn by reading them. If a reasonable number of people have voted on something, it's unlikely the article is grossly deficient.

This is because their topics are of relatively small scope. You analyze a particular problem and find a solution. 99.9% of people in the world do not need to know the solution or even that the problem existed.

This argument does not have a small scope. Its dataset is the entire world. It would be easy to get something wrong. Even if 10 people, or 30 people supported this, there's a significant chance it's wrong and would not work. For a typical article, that chance might be less than 1% with 30 people supporting it; with this, it might be 20%. It is hard to judge.

Hard-to-judge things get less support. The ranking algorithm (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) "divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted". If this takes 10 minutes to judge and 10% support it, while 90% are unsure, while other stories take 1 minute to judge and 30% support them, then this will not be shared or seen.

Read fast, I guess, and approve of this if you think it's better than any other solution you've seen for fixing most problems in the world.


Original title: Why problems that people want fixed haven't been fixed

Don't know how long this will be. I only noticed one submission without a url in three pages, but putting this on Pastebin wouldn't change the content.

First, we have evidence that people want problems to be fixed:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf_jl7C9kC0mvbvGhqkz1TrCU3zTWPi9nwONH7CZJekoG_MTw/viewanalytics

(You can take the survey, if you want, by changing last part of url to viewform.)

We look at one of the few unanimous results: given two options, harvesting fewer fish from the oceans now or harvesting fewer fish in the future after fishing stocks have been further depleted, everyone who answered that question chose harvesting fewer fish now.

Yet overfishing continues. Fishing is a serious business: there were the Cod Wars in the North Atlantic, and many poor people rely on fishing, like 'slaves' on Thai fishing boats or people in Gaza. In these last two cases, fish have become depleted, yet they continue fishing.

It doesn't take much to conclude that there wouldn't be overfishing if people had better jobs and nations agreed to protect fishing grounds. It's just that if you asked someone to list the top five problems in the world, overfishing would probably not be one of them.

The questions in that survey are based around the effects of a different way of calculating compensation from work. Summarized, "Work up to 24 hours each week is paid at 1.2 times the normal rate. Work after 24 hours is paid at 0.7 times the normal rate."

Compared against the major systems currently in use, overtime and salary, here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdaNFsis2_s65aMU3aFUWKBYeXD00JjTfUiXlcAPz09Z9g3Dg/viewform

1/3 of people chose this method over the others.

Requirements for people who use, and work less, it could vary: it could increase "work done per unit of money spent on wages", if they complete a given amount of work in less time than expected, or it could increase wage spending, if the increase in hourly wage is more than the increase in efficiency. Macroeconomically, wages increase.

This is accompanied by things like gasoline/petrol prices going up, the different questions in the first survey.

I should link this explanation of how rich people working less helps poor people, in case it isn't clear: https://pastebin.com/1UN45Und

The cultural effects are at least as complicated as the economic ones. The first survey asked, "war or no war", because the other negative effects of no war should be mitigated. Those possible effects are described here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeW6aSJbDNIY7h4nlZq6S4OKroDDQr3bxZt8dCo74TCZ7wXqw/viewanalytics

I hope those reading this understand statistics. The data only represent(s) the populations surveyed, but standard deviation for p=0.5 and n=30 is just 2.7 samples, or 95% chance of being ±18%.

The data does not conclusively show that someone who wants war to end should try to end unemployment. I guess, as the survey creator, I could look at the raw data and see if people from the US answered differently, but we can just look at the protests against the Iraq war in 2003. 6~10 million people protested and did not stop the war. Majority may not be enough to prevent war.

Note that this survey, which says "There is a 0.0000075% chance you'll be in a passenger plane that gets shot down over a war zone.", was made several days before a passenger plane was lost over Iran.

Can only summarize here: "immorality" with no war is due to people not feeling like they're part of a group, where playing "cooperate" in a prisoner's dilemma is best for the group and will somehow help people you care about. You can also look at the benefit of grouping up, including hidden groups, in a competition involving multiple entities, and how the benefits of grouping up can diminish as the group size becomes too large.

The solution, without war, requires addressing both smart and stupid thinking. You eliminate prisoner's dilemmas where you can, and you convince people who act based on whether other people are 'nice' that people are worth helping. The economically well-off in the world may sometimes convince themselves that they are helping the poor and disadvantaged, but problems remain. The best way to show that you care about fixing problems is to fix them.

The third question references "depression". You may have guessed that both answers are supposed to describe Japan, which like many countries with developed economies like Germany and Singapore, has low birth rates. The problem here is supposed to be "lack of challenge and affirmation of abilities from overcoming important challenges." People find challenging things to do, but it's hard to find things that benefit society when you do them. Japan has a word for "death from overworking"; Korea may as well. But all that hard work just led to a "lost decade" or even "Lost 20 Years" and the rise of terms like "hikikomori", "freeter", and "NEET".

The economic system described leads to two conflicting goals, which lead to challenge: 1) make lots of money 2) have high earnings per hour. To increase the first, you must decrease the second, and the tendency will be for people who make lots of money to choose to work less time. This is in contrast to the current situation, where people with greater educational attainment work more hours per week.

There are challenges, of course. It's harder for someone living in the mountains in the middle of a continent to interact with the world economy than someone living next to the coast.

The title says this is why problems haven't been fixed yet. That's up to you. Is it because the solution is hard to understand?