Comment by austinz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by austinz | Hacker News Reader

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How do we know which problems are fake problems and which ones are real problems, though? Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it might not be as clear.

Twitter probably seemed like a fake problem at its inception (post 140 characters to a personal blog from your phone), and yet it's been adopted and used daily by many, many people outside the Valley. Google's founders weren't thinking about ads when they first built their search engine, but apparently the ads they serve are considered lucrative enough by their customers to turn the company huge. (Of course there are the data privacy issues, but on a more cynical note someone's needs are being served.)

On the other hand, Better Place seemed like a useful idea. EVs presumably aren't more widely adopted because of range anxiety and charge times, so why not create a business model and technology to swap out batteries and make recharging as painless as filling up at a gas station? But Better Place is dead now and Tesla is building out its fast charger network and selling more and more cars.

Does the problem directly cause death, injury, or disability? If so, real problem. Everything else is just a matter of optimizing your level of comfort in the absence of real problems.

We can then talk about grading problem importance by its distance from death, injury, or disability (e.g. it's a problem in the solution to a problem in the solution to a real problem), and the probabilities and amounts of death, injury, or disability it does, can, or might in the future cause.

I would consider improving education a 'real problem,' and that doesn't directly cause death, injury or disability (unless you want to call those uneducated 'disabled').

Under that definition ... there's hardly anyone working on "real" problems. Even Nasa.

Let's take education and NASA: It's fairly obvious that bad education, on a mass scale, eventually, causes death and/or disability on a mass scale. It just takes time.

It takes more time for an existential crisis to emerge because we paid no attention to getting off this rock. But it will surely come.

NASA Earth-observing satellites address a range of very "real" problems affecting people's lives: hurricanes, severe weather, fire, earthquakes. In the longer term, climate change and the many variables that affect it.

Space travel can be viewed as a very abstract indirect approach to "real" problems, for a variety of reasons, depending on your views of NASA's role in technological advance and the future of our planet.

Just to be a devils advocate, perhaps it is important to let NASA know that you will be 5 minutes late for a meeting. No, the single instance may not present a life or death situation, but maybe at some point the cumulative effect of solving these first world type problems can have a trickle down effect on making the world a better place for everyone.

I saw this as someone that doesn't use uber, twitter, twist or any of the other referenced products.

Exactly. It's something to think about when looking at the world that is and the world that might be.

No such thing as a fake problem. Just make something people want, and as long as you're able to extract enough value from your users to continue making that thing, you're likely creating more value than you're capturing, making the world an incrementally better place (excluding gross negative externalities).

Ditto AirBnB spun as "renting out air bed during large conferences and other events" is solving a big city problem. Spin it as "renting rooms and houses to visitors", and all of a sudden it's applicable to a large market.

Maybe it'd be helpful for founders to spend some time in other areas of the country, especially the interior.

> How do we know which problems are fake problems and which ones are real problems, though?

Which ones will people work on? Which ones will they spend the fruits of their labour (their wages) on? There's your answer.

Twitter and Google search are presumably very good for their customers (the advertisers).

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