Hello everyone, my name is Alex and this is my first submission on LessWrong, so each answer to these questions is highly appreciated.
I would like to validate the following hypothesis:
Many valuable problems go unsolved not because of lack of talent, but because talented people can’t find each other or the right problems to work on and they lack the tools to do so effectively.
Questions:
Have you experienced this? Tell me about the last time you wanted to contribute to a hard problem but coordination failed, or you couldn’t figure out how to contribute effectively.
How do you currently discover which problems are most important to work on?
In the past 6 months, how many times have you discovered someone else was working on the same problem as you, but you found out too late?
What platforms have you tried for finding collaborators? What worked and what failed?
If coordination was perfect, what would you be working on right now that you’re not?
What do you think is the biggest barrier to collaborative problem-solving on global challenges?
Is coordination a real bottleneck for working on global challenges in your opinion?
I am really looking forward to read your answers and am very thankful for everyone that takes the time to provide their insights.
The obvious problem in this question is that people can be wrong in estimating how talented they are, how important is a problem, how capable they are to contribute to the problem, and how much time would it take.
From my perspective, my problem seems to be that I am bad at communicating my ideas convincingly. A typical pattern is that I describe my vision to others, others say “that’s stupid” (sometimes they provide a more sophisticated argument, such as “if this was actually a good idea, someone else would have already done it long ago”), and then… I mostly don’t do anything about it, either because I do not have the necessary skills to do it alone, or because I am busy doing other activities that pay my bills. Sometimes, a few years later, someone else does it, and it is a great success. Very rarely, I do it myself, and it is a success (but not sufficiently large for people to trust me the next time, or to make enough money that I do not need a daily job anymore). This is further complicated by my problem figuring out how to monetize the solution, e.g. if the goal is public education, putting the project behind a paywall would destroy most of its potential value. Some of my ideas are illegal, e.g. involve violating copyright.
From the perspective of the Less Wrong community, my ideas are probably meh, because I have no experience with LLMs (other than as a user), many ideas are related to education, some involve translating stuff to Slovak language. Here are some that come quickly to my mind:
Substack, a blogging platform, seems like a great solution for helping bloggers generate some income. But from technical perspective, it is the bare minimum to publish text with some bold and italic words, insert big pictures and videos, and dozen annoying buttons telling people to subscribe now. After a few years, you still can’t center a paragraph, use an inline image, and dozen other features that you could find in free web forum software decades ago. If a comment section has more than hundred comments, it is slow like a snail. Writing a comment is annoying because the page keeps jumping. All of these seem like things that could be relatively simply fixed, but I don’t think it will ever become a priority. -- So the first idea is to make a website like Substack, but made by technically competent developers. (The people behind the Less Wrong web forum could probably do that in a year, but they probably have better priorities.) A problem of this idea, from the business perspective, is that the new website wouldn’t make a fraction of Substack money, because for most people, “it kinda sucks, but my audience is already there” would be more important. That said, a fraction of Substack money could still be a lot for a small team of developers. I don’t have the skills to do this alone.
An organization to promote use of free software at school. Choose some good projects suitable for schools (e.g. graphic editors such as Tux Paint, Paint.NET, Pencil2D, Krita, Blender). Make simple textbooks and other resources for teachers, both on paper and for free download. Send flyers to schools, go there and demonstrate the software to teachers, install the software on school computers. I think this could dramatically increase the education of computer science. The obvious problem is how to get paid.
Translate the Czech mathematical textbooks that use the “Hejný method” to English. Has a chance to revolutionize math education at elementary schools. Unfortunately the authors are great educators, but seem to have little business sense, and there is virtually nothing written about their method in English. In Czech Republic the textbooks are already used for more than a decade (at randomly selected schools!), and the students seem to have better results at independent testing (this is somewhat controversial).
Put the entire elementary school curriculum on a teaching website such as Udemy and make it available for free. Here I believe most of the value would from having everything covered, at least for one subject. This would allow students and parents to use the website as a reliable resource (not just: if I am lucky, the topic I am looking for will be covered here). This would be useful for both homeschoolers and the kids who have some problem at school, such as bad teachers, or that they were sick and missed the lessons.
There are great fictionalized popular science books for children that were never translated to English (example), so it’s time to translate them and publish as ePub. Maybe make a curated pirate edition “educational books for smart kids”, and distribute on USB memory sticks to kids that seem smart.
I admit that I didn’t systematically try to get funding for my ideas or something like that. Unfortunately, I am not good at things like navigating bureaucracy, which would almost certainly be required. (Even using something like Kickstarter would require figuring out how to process foreign income in my tax reports, which sounds like a nightmare. Last time I tried to find a local accountant who would understand that, I couldn’t.) So all I have is my free time, but after my daily job I am generally too exhausted to do anything meaningful. Plus I have small kids.
I am not specifically looking for the most important problems. I am noticing problems that annoy me, and sometimes I think there are probably many others in similar situation.
For me the problem is money. If someone gave me some kind of unconditional basic income, I would probably start working on something from the list above. Until then, I need to do the stupid things that bring food to my family.
Hello everyone, my name is Alex and this is my first submission on LessWrong, so each answer to these questions is highly appreciated.
I would like to validate the following hypothesis:
Many valuable problems go unsolved not because of lack of talent, but because talented people can’t find each other or the right problems to work on and they lack the tools to do so effectively.
Questions:
Have you experienced this? Tell me about the last time you wanted to contribute to a hard problem but coordination failed, or you couldn’t figure out how to contribute effectively.
How do you currently discover which problems are most important to work on?
In the past 6 months, how many times have you discovered someone else was working on the same problem as you, but you found out too late?
What platforms have you tried for finding collaborators? What worked and what failed?
If coordination was perfect, what would you be working on right now that you’re not?
What do you think is the biggest barrier to collaborative problem-solving on global challenges?
Is coordination a real bottleneck for working on global challenges in your opinion?
I am really looking forward to read your answers and am very thankful for everyone that takes the time to provide their insights.
The obvious problem in this question is that people can be wrong in estimating how talented they are, how important is a problem, how capable they are to contribute to the problem, and how much time would it take.
From my perspective, my problem seems to be that I am bad at communicating my ideas convincingly. A typical pattern is that I describe my vision to others, others say “that’s stupid” (sometimes they provide a more sophisticated argument, such as “if this was actually a good idea, someone else would have already done it long ago”), and then… I mostly don’t do anything about it, either because I do not have the necessary skills to do it alone, or because I am busy doing other activities that pay my bills. Sometimes, a few years later, someone else does it, and it is a great success. Very rarely, I do it myself, and it is a success (but not sufficiently large for people to trust me the next time, or to make enough money that I do not need a daily job anymore). This is further complicated by my problem figuring out how to monetize the solution, e.g. if the goal is public education, putting the project behind a paywall would destroy most of its potential value. Some of my ideas are illegal, e.g. involve violating copyright.
From the perspective of the Less Wrong community, my ideas are probably meh, because I have no experience with LLMs (other than as a user), many ideas are related to education, some involve translating stuff to Slovak language. Here are some that come quickly to my mind:
Substack, a blogging platform, seems like a great solution for helping bloggers generate some income. But from technical perspective, it is the bare minimum to publish text with some bold and italic words, insert big pictures and videos, and dozen annoying buttons telling people to subscribe now. After a few years, you still can’t center a paragraph, use an inline image, and dozen other features that you could find in free web forum software decades ago. If a comment section has more than hundred comments, it is slow like a snail. Writing a comment is annoying because the page keeps jumping. All of these seem like things that could be relatively simply fixed, but I don’t think it will ever become a priority. -- So the first idea is to make a website like Substack, but made by technically competent developers. (The people behind the Less Wrong web forum could probably do that in a year, but they probably have better priorities.) A problem of this idea, from the business perspective, is that the new website wouldn’t make a fraction of Substack money, because for most people, “it kinda sucks, but my audience is already there” would be more important. That said, a fraction of Substack money could still be a lot for a small team of developers. I don’t have the skills to do this alone.
An organization to promote use of free software at school. Choose some good projects suitable for schools (e.g. graphic editors such as Tux Paint, Paint.NET, Pencil2D, Krita, Blender). Make simple textbooks and other resources for teachers, both on paper and for free download. Send flyers to schools, go there and demonstrate the software to teachers, install the software on school computers. I think this could dramatically increase the education of computer science. The obvious problem is how to get paid.
Translate the Czech mathematical textbooks that use the “Hejný method” to English. Has a chance to revolutionize math education at elementary schools. Unfortunately the authors are great educators, but seem to have little business sense, and there is virtually nothing written about their method in English. In Czech Republic the textbooks are already used for more than a decade (at randomly selected schools!), and the students seem to have better results at independent testing (this is somewhat controversial).
Put the entire elementary school curriculum on a teaching website such as Udemy and make it available for free. Here I believe most of the value would from having everything covered, at least for one subject. This would allow students and parents to use the website as a reliable resource (not just: if I am lucky, the topic I am looking for will be covered here). This would be useful for both homeschoolers and the kids who have some problem at school, such as bad teachers, or that they were sick and missed the lessons.
There are great fictionalized popular science books for children that were never translated to English (example), so it’s time to translate them and publish as ePub. Maybe make a curated pirate edition “educational books for smart kids”, and distribute on USB memory sticks to kids that seem smart.
I admit that I didn’t systematically try to get funding for my ideas or something like that. Unfortunately, I am not good at things like navigating bureaucracy, which would almost certainly be required. (Even using something like Kickstarter would require figuring out how to process foreign income in my tax reports, which sounds like a nightmare. Last time I tried to find a local accountant who would understand that, I couldn’t.) So all I have is my free time, but after my daily job I am generally too exhausted to do anything meaningful. Plus I have small kids.
I am not specifically looking for the most important problems. I am noticing problems that annoy me, and sometimes I think there are probably many others in similar situation.
For me the problem is money. If someone gave me some kind of unconditional basic income, I would probably start working on something from the list above. Until then, I need to do the stupid things that bring food to my family.