Ask HN: How do I change the world?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40549751

by _hnxq • 2 years ago

35 50 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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?

tithe2• 2 years ago

I don't want to waste years of my life...

Here'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."

firebaze• 2 years ago

Start by not reading news. Convince others to do so as well. Instead, ask them to read sources. Inform them about disinformation, and if they are intellectually challenged, guide them to the least damaging news outlets. Remind yourself that all humans are not inherently bad, and that we all strive for a better life, and that noone really wants war.

tithe2• 2 years ago

How can I find a problem I want to solve...

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.

andrei-akopian3• 2 years ago

Humanity is driving itself into the ground in a wheel of greed and ignorance.

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."

sbstnxyz2• 2 years ago

This is a really great reply. I wonder if that's a direction I should look into - helping people sort information, and find what really matters.

underscoremark• 2 years ago

You'll waste your life chasing dreams of changing the world. You have presented yourself as a solution looking for a problem.

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.

sujayk_332• 2 years ago

All the good content is extremely hard to find.

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.

andrei-akopian3• 2 years ago

A am an amatur, so most of the stuff I have is from carefully filtering the HN feed (hence I assume you have it too)

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.

neochief• 2 years ago

https://refactoring.guru

orionblastar• 2 years ago

Whatever you do, make it popular by going with your customers and filling their needs instead of telling them what they want. Have a mission statement and business plan before you start. If you make a mistake, apologize and work towards not repeating that mistake.

hasbot• 2 years ago

What about starting small and locally and see where that takes you? Start by volunteering somewhere in your community and talk to people about what problems aren't being addressed.

TheAlchemist• 2 years ago

"When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world.

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

sbstnxyz2• 2 years ago

That was nice to read, but I feel like most people need a purpose beyond self-improvement. Maybe I misunderstood it. How do you interpret that?

klyrs• 2 years ago

I guess I'm approaching middle age, and the quote resonates with me. If you read that and don't see the purpose of self-improvement, how do you expect to change the world?

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.

rapfaria• 2 years ago

From a young age We wanna reach for the stars (perhaps mother saying I'm just great?) but the cosmos inside your home is plenty.

nanomonkey• 2 years ago

One of the most effective ways to lead others is to be a working example of the behavior you are trying to promote. If you think people should garden more, then you damn well better be out gardening, and showing people how it improves your life.

paipa• 2 years ago

That took a corny ending compared to the "Now, as an old man I realize the only thing I can change is my underwear. On a good day" punchline that I expected.

tempie20244• 2 years ago

Then my family changed my underwear.

Then the town…

xprn• 2 years ago

Be the change you want to see in the world. Those that feel the same will follow, and even moreso if they see they’re not alone.

jschveibinz• 2 years ago

I have posted this many times over the past several years:

https://uia.org/encyclopedia

Good luck in your journey.

decafninja• 2 years ago

Making a positive impact with money is looked down upon for some reason.

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.

anbardoi• 2 years ago

It has already been said, but a good start to finding problems you want to solve is by looking at problems you experience. Say, for example, you get annoyed with navigating different unique web pages trying to look for one piece of information(e.g. a contact phone number) buried in directories that have different names. You could try to solve that problem by creating a web crawler whose purpose is to find that piece of information on unique web pages that are in the same industry to create for people who don't want to experience that same navigational hell that you did.

I think the essence of problem solving is not wanting your peers to have to experience the same bullshit that you do.

AlienRobot• 2 years ago

1. Fork a Linux distro.

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.

owenpalmer• 2 years ago

Read "Mastery" by Robert Greene.

andrei-akopian3• 2 years ago

Once you find a problem, remember to ask the "5 whys" to get to the root cause.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys

MaysonL• 2 years ago

Talk to Amory Lovins, Stewart Brand, Bill Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs, or at least listen to what they’ve already said, and examine what they’ve done.

abhiyerra• 2 years ago

There is Linus Torvalds quote I really like which goes, “There are people who point at the moon and say I want to go there. I look at the pothole on the road and I want to fix that before I fall in.”

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.

falcor84• 2 years ago

I had a related thought recently as I was trying to set up a new staging environment for $MEANINGLESS_PROJECT at $CORP and was struggling with various packaging errors - wouldn't it be much nicer if instead of working on the project, I could use spend my time on fixing these open source tools to actually work out of the box?

antony_pond• 2 years ago

It is hard,

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.

weitendorf• 2 years ago

In my opinion, you’re thinking about things in reverse: deciding you want to make a big impact through starting a business, and then looking for specific problems to solve that might lead to a business.

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”.

tempie20244• 2 years ago

I think almost all business people earned their stripes as employee. SV and furthermore SV stereotypes are very unusual in their young founders. Nothing against young founders though! Just saying it ain’t common. Family business being the exception (but that quacks like employment then business ownership later)

keernan• 2 years ago

If you live in the USA, an event as catastrophic as an asteroid the size of the moon striking the earth is potentially happening on Tuesday, November 5, 2024. Do something about it.

bruce511• 2 years ago

I think you want to start by answering two questions?

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.

YouWhy• 2 years ago

To answer your question: there are no answers satisfying your set of requirements. An extremely small minority of individuals will end up achieving notable outcomes fulfilling more than one of the requirements above, but even among those, very few will have been as a consequence of following abstract criteria, as opposed to focusing on opportunities appropriate to the individuals' strengths and taking up appropriate challenges as they come along.

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.

solresol• 2 years ago

I've got a list of 200+ things that I've accumulated since 2019 that the world seems to need, or that someone has said that they needed. It's a very raw list with ideas that range from the trivial and unresearched "why doesn't (thing) exist?" through to ideas that I've worked on for some period of time before I've realised that I need to hand it over to someone else and haven't yet met that someone. (My email is in my profile if anyone wants a copy.)

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.

trod1232• 2 years ago

Before you can master others, as a cohort or larger groups, you must first learn to master yourself, and do so from a place of rational methodical reasoning with a relatively reasonable amount of risk management built-in to the things you cannot control (diversification).

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 yourself adopting destructive habits, and false justification. Keep an objective view, and identify whether the writer is rationally credible.

imtringued2• 2 years ago

Money isn't a store of value. The concept of a store of value is impossible. Also, money isn't a medium of exchange, because there is no rule that says that delivery schedules have to align with payment schedules. In a hypothetical universe with premonition, all payments until the end of the universe can be settled by the first born human before the second human was born, long before there was an economy to speak of. Neoclassical economics is really weird. It predicts the absence of money, because all delivery schedules have already been planned. The organisation process has finished. It is centrally planned socialism in the mantle of a market economy.

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.

trod1232• 2 years ago

You are naively mistaken, and wrong on almost every supposition you made.

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).

sujayk_332• 2 years ago

well, you're part of the society, in fact, you are the society. Just build what you want and make others feel left out for that, make them feel that "want".

bdcravens2• 2 years ago

Pick a basic problem, like hunger, unwanted animals, religious misunderstanding, etc. For example, here's an idea I once had: Many don't finish their portion at the restaurant. Instead of a to-go container, half of their meal is then portioned out to feed the homeless every night. Call it "To Go For Good" or something like that.

tempie20244• 2 years ago

I like the intent but homeless people deserve better. Just make them meals from scratch like everyone else eats. And keep taking your doggy bag home. A $1 doggie bag “corkage” that goes to a homeless food operation would be better IMO.

heavenlyblue• 2 years ago

Amazing that you just created another problem instead of actually solving one.

specproc• 2 years ago

In my middle age, I've been involved in some pretty grand world saving endeavors in my time. Multimillion dollar humanitarian programmes, that sort of thing.

The things I've done I've been most proud of and happy with have typically had nothing to do with all that.

It's amazing how awry attempts to "help" go. Ever been involved in delivering non-potable water to a school? I have. Or covering up fraud? Or sat in a meeting thinking of the most expensive way to solve a problem because you need to spend that cash in the next three months?

Most projects are just shit and would probably have been more effective being delivered by a helicopter lobbing cash out over the target area.

I'm most proud of where I've been able to help people I know in simple, practical ways. Helping friends practice for interviews, checking their CVs, helping people get the confidence to do cool stuff themselves.

Honestly, looking back on it all though, it's been creative stuff that's made me happiest.

I'm with the folks in the thread that encourage less grand goals.

chomskyole• 2 years ago

Perhaps a bit controversial in the first instance, but the purpose of business is not to have a positive impact on society. Businesses are vehicles to make money and with that comes a logic and a set of tendencies that has nothing to do with anything else than making money.

Please note that making money is the stated goal of businesses and has been from the time first businesses emerged, so what I'm saying above isn't really controversial.

Perhaps consider first:

- Where in society do you want to make a positive impact?

- Why do you want to make a positive impact?

- Why do you want to start a business?

- Why do you think a business is a good vehicle to achieve your where/why of social impact.

imtringued2• 2 years ago

If you want to change the world, you must first acquire skills that almost no one else has. You need to become a specialist in two core skills and a generalist in everything else. When you discover something new but cannot act upon it, because your resources are limited or they lie out of your two specialities, you must share it with those are specialists or those who wish to become specialists as a result of your idea. You must be humble enough to let others finish your work and take credit and not insist on being the hero in the spotlight. Of course, if you can do it yourself, all you have to do is make sure that it is the right thing to do and spend decades working on it.

amai• 2 years ago

Start small. Answer a question on Stackoverflow. Or if you can’t, ask a question. Open issues on Github. Solve issues on Github. Create pull requests. Create your own open source project for selfish reasons on Github and maintain it. Rinse and repeat and don’t give up.

E.g. I created a scraper for a real estate website that found me the apartment I‘m living in now. Other people noticed that and started to use my software. In the end my software was mentioned in the local newspaper and the real estate website introduced captchas to prevent more scraping. The local real estate market became more fair, because scraping doesn’t work anymore. So I guess I changed the world to the better by my selfish actions.

tim333• 2 years ago

There's always the Paul Graham essays that may have some ideas eg. https://www.paulgraham.com/greatwork.html

Quinzel• 2 years ago

My suggestion would be to look into the United Nationals sustainable development goals 1 through to 17. These basically cover all the foundational issues facing society right now.

The next thing I would suggest you do is to look into social enterprises. Social enterprises are good at balancing commercial goals against positive social impact goals. They’re good for respecting the cultures of the societies they serve. They’re also provide people with decent wages (usually) and often provide vulnerable people with career opportunities they otherwise would not have. Social enterprises are often quite successful, and end up providing a buffer in economic downturns within the communities they serve.

If you were to start a social enterprise, you would have already gone some way towards achieving SDG-8 (decent work and economic growth). However, social enterprises also achieve SDG-17 by working in partnership with local communities, governments, and other businesses. They also often tackle things like poverty (SDG-1), zero hunger (SDG-2), etc (the list literally goes on).

If you’re serious about wanting to do social good, look at the SDG’s and pick a cause, then from there think about ways you can take the skills you have to build a business that tackles one or more of these issues. There’s no doubt in my mind that the technology that exists today can help solve many of these goals, and there is still so much more work to be done so plenty of opportunities here.

Ask HN: How do I change the world?

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