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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

I find it rather ironic that many of the problems she claims the rest of the world should address aren't even real problems at all.

Her problems: Many Americans can’t afford medical care....many parts of our public school system suck....

The real problems: Many Americans are unhealthy, many Americans lack the skills necessary to get a job. When you prematurely narrow the problem, you can't identify all solutions.

Jolie's premature narrowing of the problem makes it impossible to think of some solutions. If you think the problem is affordability of health care, you'll never think of a healthier lifestyle. If you think the problem is that public schools suck, you'll never think of scrapping them and replacing them with some alternative.

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High cost of medical care is an orthogonal problem to a healthiness level of Americans. Even if Americans were the most healthy nation in the world, medical care and health care insurance would still be expensive.

As to the school example: if dissatisfaction with schools system won't lead to improvement or replacement, then what will? Certainly not satisfaction.

I don't see anything ironic in that post. Both the high cost of health care and (objectively measured) low quality of school system are real problems that affect almost all americans. The fact that there are other problems that affect them as well doesn't make them any less problematic.

To show that high cost of health care is not a problem, consider the following thought experiment: if you never visited the doctor but were healthy, would you be unhappy? Similarly, if we had no school system, but every person developed useful skills, would we be worse off?

Premature narrowing of the problem also leads you to solutions that might be counterproductive. For example, to reduce the cost of health care (or at least prevent further increases), we could deliberately stifle innovation. This would reduce costs because instead of spending $250,000/person on the (to be invented) Alzheimers cure, we just spend $10k/year warehousing them and waiting for them to die.

This is a partial solution to the stated problem of high costs. It isn't a solution to the real problem of poor health.

Those were just example problems. A way to represent a class of problem. The real problem might not even be that Americans need a healthier lifestyle, it might be that it's really difficult to live that healthier lifestyle in the face of a food system designed to make you live the unhealthy one.

The real problem might not even be that Americans need a healthier lifestyle...

You just did the exact same thing Jolie O'Dell did - you picked an action, identified a problem that the action solves, and declared that new problem to be the original problem.

Not at all. Dbingham identified a possible root cause that is more specific and actionable than the originally stated problem. You took a qualified hypothesis and claimed it was stated as the totality of the situation.

More importantly, the possible root cause could conceivably be mitigated by a variety of solutions we know how to build - webapps for improved meal planning, recipes, health information, and so on.

Eliminate corn subsidies?

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