Overweight individuals know that if they eat less, they will eventually lose weight; it’s just often frustratingly beyond them, for one reason or another. Same with alcoholics and drink.
Collective action problems have been studied in economics for decades, and by this point a lot of them have clever approaches we could use to at least partway ameliorate them.
‘Appear’ is important here. Ken Thompson’s advice to “when in doubt use brute force” is very good advice because so much resistance can and will crumble to sustained effort. But this requires a somewhat different kind of optimism to the optimism I think you’re describing of inventing a fundamentally new solution—it’s the optimism to get back up after you fall down and run straight at the wall again until it does.
I like the energy, but I have to register a note of dissent here.
Quite a few of our hardest problems do have known solutions—it’s just that those known solutions are, or appear, too hard to implement.
Brute force algorithms exist for almost everything we care about, up to and including AGI.
Overweight individuals know that if they eat less, they will eventually lose weight; it’s just often frustratingly beyond them, for one reason or another. Same with alcoholics and drink.
Collective action problems have been studied in economics for decades, and by this point a lot of them have clever approaches we could use to at least partway ameliorate them.
‘Appear’ is important here. Ken Thompson’s advice to “when in doubt use brute force” is very good advice because so much resistance can and will crumble to sustained effort. But this requires a somewhat different kind of optimism to the optimism I think you’re describing of inventing a fundamentally new solution—it’s the optimism to get back up after you fall down and run straight at the wall again until it does.
It’s not really a solution if it can’t be implemented: if it doesn’t work, or is unaffordable, or otherwise isn’t practical.