I think the hardest thing about contributing to society is NOT in the doing-of-the-work, it’s in the finding-of-the-work to do. — Making software by “cosmic pizza order”
I think this is true. I experienced this first when maintaining an open source library. There were a ton of capable volunteers willing to help out. The bottleneck was in (1) what we should do and (2) what is the best way to implement it & test it.
Then I kept hearing this being true of academia/research. The most valuable thing is a well-scoped problem. You want to find an open problem that (1) no one else has solved yet, AND (2) you can solve with the resources you have.
There’s a weird paradox here where:
- as a student, I had a ton of time & energy, but had no idea what I could work on that would be useful
- as a professional, I had a ton of ideas about useful work. I could see, inside my company, that if tool XYZ existed, we would definitely pay for it/use it/build on it
I’ve lived with this paradox a lot. How can the world be so broken, in so many ways, and yet I am struggling to find meaningful ways to contribute to making it better?
The answer is simple:
it’s because finding work is work.
It’s not really rewarded by itself. You are rewarded for completing useful work, not for finding it. The other problem is this work goes “stale”. If someone shared a list of their useful work because they are retiring, it would be useful for a short while. The list is most useful when (1) no one has solved the thing yet (2) it is solvable with current resources, and ideally (3) there’s a community/market that can support it & needs it.
What if there was another way?
I’ve been trying to take a leap of faith and share my ideas more openly. I keep seeing opportunities for valuable contribution that (1) no one has done yet and (2) might take off if I do them.
Honestly, if I could just do it, I would do it. But (1) I have way more ideas than I will ever get to (2) I don’t really want to do all the work to do it. I can think of tons of people, especially younger engineers, who are fully capable and would learn a lot doing it. I’d rather they do it, y’know?
This is exactly the same feeling I had maintaining an open source library. This is why we have “good first issues”. There are easy, useful tasks that the maintainers intentionally avoid doing, to leave work opportunities for new contributors.
My substack-proxy was an example of this, very simple idea, I knew a lot of people would want it, and no one had done it yet. I just did it in a couple hours. I’m not tracking how many people are using it, but last I checked there were ~500 articles proxied through it, and the most popular tweet using it had half a million views.
An idea I gave out freely here is zoomable books. A lot of people seemed to love that. A couple people tried to prototype it. No one has quite seen it through yet.
Twitter radio is another example. This one is a better example in that, I outline exactly how I would go about building it. I think this is often the harder thing for younger people to do. You might have big ideas but it never gets there because you get stuck down some rabbithole or another. Breaking down a big complex idea into (1) steps to making an MVP (2) how to distribute it/how to reach the market is often the most valuable missing thing for young, ambitious, skilled people.
It’s okay if my ideas are stolen
It’s okay because, look, why am I doing the thing in the first place? It’s because:
- I see a problem in society, and I want to fix it
- I want to make lots of money & be famous
If someone steals my idea, that accomplishes (1), but it does not accomplish (2). I want (2) because, well, I don’t know, I wanna travel and feed my family etc. But also because I think I could use that capital to solve more important problems in society (maybe).
Ok, that’s fine. If there are things that I think are going to be really big hits AND I’m confident that I can do it, I should just do it. If I can’t, due to lack of time, motivation, or skill, I think I’d rather someone else just solve the problem.
The problems I notice in society are often problems that I have. You hear this all the time with startup founders right? They were trying to do X, they realized it’s impossibly because of ABC, so they dedicate their life to solving A. This is great, it lays the groundwork for solving a real problem that others can then build on, maybe someone else solves B, and C. And finally we get the almighty X.
But this isn’t the only way it can be. What if startup founder goes off to try and do X, and they just explain how they would solve A, and B, and C. Maybe their ideas work for A & C, but not for B. People steal it, try it, figure it out. Someone else fixes those problems, you can go back to working on X.
I think this is always true. Even for X. If someone else does X, consider this: why were you trying to do it? It’s probably because you yearned for it, and it didn’t exist. What would you have done if you found out it DID exist? You’d use it and keep going, right?
All of our work is building blocks. If we zoom out, we’re really not in competition. I mean, there is competition, there are limited resources, and if I don’t know what I’m doing, someone is going to beat me to market with a better product. But I love this competition. I love playing this game. Without this game I end up with shitty products that don’t work, AND i’m not allowed to make a better product to replace it. I want the competition.
But the people who beat me to market are really more like coworkers who are more competent at specific things. They care about finding the best solution. They care about solving the problem. We all do.
Related threads
books are where knowledge goes to die human minds are currently the only thing that can reincarnate dead knowledge
Do you see what I mean? We’re not competing. There is plenty of work to do. The smart people who create beautiful content need you & me. They can’t fix these problems alone, the problems are way way too big.