The only approach I know of that I think has a meaningful shot to help solve such huge problems, which you might call “Scientific Entrepreneurship,” combines two methods into one:

(1) Rigorous science to deeply understand the causal structures of the problem and how strong an effect each cause has (which often will begin with a qualitative approach to understand the outlines of the problem and then move to analysis of carefully conducted measurements).   

(2) A “lean startup” approach, where you try things (guided by your current understanding of the causal relationships), see what happens, and then rapidly course-correct based on the results (and sometimes take large pivots) to iterate towards better and better approaches.

When dealing with these highly complex problems, I think that a “lean startup” approach without rigorous science ends up leading to lots of random attempts that have almost no chance of ultimate success (and sometimes even converge to self-propagating but useless approaches, such as charities that perpetually absorb money without genuinely helping the cause).  

On the other hand, a purely scientific approach without the lean startup iterative mindset often ends up missing critical contextual details that are actually essential for the project to work. You’ll inevitably encounter many specific barriers that the scientific theory doesn’t address. In summary, I think our best bet for solving highly complex world problems is Scientific Entrepreneurship: developing a deep understanding of the high-level causal structures through scientific rigor and then combining that with an entrepreneurial form of rapid iteration.

This piece was first written on May 5, 2024, and first appeared on my website on June 5, 2024.

Oddly, I couldn’t find this anywhere, so I calculated it.

The winners:

1. Singapore
2. Israel
3. the United States
4. Estonia
5. Ireland

Here’s the full chart I created:

Interestingly, the top of the table pretty closely follows the amount of startup investment per capita according to this chart from Crunchbase:

Four types of “designers” for software start-ups:

1) Artist Designers (a.k.a., Graphic Designers)

They usually know Adobe Illustrator, can draw by hand beautifully (and perhaps also animate), and often have gone to art school. If you want custom art, logos, or illustrations, they are the right choice.

2) Programmer Designers (a.k.a., Frontend Engineers)

They know CSS and HTML (and sometimes JavaScript, which is especially likely when they are called a “frontend engineer”). If you want a basic website created or you want the HTML/CSS of a web interface coded (that can then be passed to an engineering team to integrate into a product), they are the right choice.

3) Interface Designers (a.k.a., UI/UX Designers)

They usually know prototyping tools like Figma and are good at making mockups/designs for beautiful interfaces. They think about button placement, spacing, colors, fonts, etc. If you’re planning what your iOS app should look like, they’re the right choice.

4) Experience Designers (a.k.a., Product Designers)

They’re skilled at interviewing users and thinking about user stories/psychology/the problems a product is trying to solve. They produce suggestions for UI layout and features. If you need to find ways to improve a product, they’re the right choice.

As mentioned, it’s rare to find one person skilled in all four of these “design” domains (most good designers are good at just one or two of these, or in really rare cases, they’ll have three of the four skills). So if you think you need a designer, it’s really helpful to think more about what you REALLY mean by “designer” so that you hire the right person.

Thanks to Vaidehi for suggesting an alternative, fairly common name for each of these types of designers!

This piece was first written on May 17, 2023, and first appeared on this site on May 21, 2023.

I like entrepreneurship a great deal and think on net it has added huge amounts of benefit to the world. In fact, I’m an entrepreneur myself. But I don’t like flawed arguments that make it sound automatically beneficial when it’s not.

To help put the above flawed argument to rest, here’s a list of 13 situations where a product that doesn’t add net value to the world may still get bought in large quantities:

IMPERFECT INFORMATION

(1) a product doesn’t actually provide the benefit that it claims to, yet the marketing is persuasive (and it’s difficult to tell after whether or not you got that promised value)

Think: numerous supplement companies today whose products don’t do what is claimed. People buy not because they get value but because they think they will (and they keep using it because it can be hard to tell if the benefit is occurring – for instance, whether it’s really reducing your chance of serious illness).

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(2) the product benefits most users, but it harms a small number of users so much that it nets out as negative

Think: a slightly effective treatment for a mild disease that occasionally produces deadly allergic reactions. People buy because they want the slightly effective treatment, but the harm for those who are allergic is so great that in total the impact is highly negative.

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(3) the product adds value to the purchaser, but less value than its competitors would have offered, yet its marketing is more successful than its competitors

Think: accounting software that is well below average in usefulness, but it has a much more effective marketing team than other accounting software companies. People buy it because they recognize the brand but they would have been better off if they hadn’t heard of this brand because then they would have used one of the better competitor products.

EXPLOITING IRRATIONALITY

(4) the product is addictive, and while users get pleasure out of it, many vastly over consume it (relative to their own preferences), making the experience net negative overall.

Think: video games that have been optimized purely for addictiveness (rather than for fun), for instance making you feel bad when you stop playing. People keep playing and paying even though they are doing it more than they themselves would choose.

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(5) the product takes advantage of our tendencies to overweight small probabilities of very large benefit

Think: lotteries that are specifically targeted to extremely poor people who really shouldn’t be spending that much money on lotteries. The consumer buys because of their hope that one day they will win (which is an exaggerated hope because we humans struggle to deal with tiny probabilities) in combination with the direct enjoyment of playing (which is potentially real enjoyment, but not enough alone to make buying the tickets worth it).

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(6) the product gives us appealing but harmful false information

Think: a self-help book that paints an appealing vision of the world that people WISH was true (e.g. “you can get anything you want and you don’t even have to try! It will come to you automatically if you just believe!”), but the book is actually filled with terrible advice that will cause your life to be worse on average (e.g. the advice actually demotivates you from taking actions to achieve things, and the book claims that if its advice isn’t working for you then you aren’t following it properly so it’s your own fault).

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(7) the product gives consumers benefits immediately, but then causes harm in the future to those same consumers that more than makes up for the initial benefit

Think: a loan product that gives cash immediately, but which has sky rocketing interest rates years from now (the details of which are complex and hard to fully appreciate). People buy it because they are over emphasizing the immediate benefit relative to the greater long term future cost.

ZERO SUM OR NEGATIVE SUM GAMES

(8) the product does create value for THAT consumer, but it does so by making it easier for that consumer to take advantage of or harm other people

Think: software that makes it easier for you to spam people. People buy it because they benefit selfishly by spamming people, but at a direct cost to those other people.

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(9) the product provides value to you as long as you can convince others to become buyers of it too, but ultimately this is unsustainable so in the end someone pays the price

Think: various multi-level marketing companies that turned out to be pyramid schemes, where most of the value a consumer derives is not from using the product, but rather from convincing other consumers to convince other consumers to convince other consumers to sell the product etc. and eventually the whole thing collapses because there isn’t enough real demand. Consumers still buy it though because they see all the (real) success stories of people getting rich from it and because their friends have a monetary incentive to convince them to, and people don’t catch on right away to the unsustainability of the whole system.

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(10) the product helps the buyer get more of a resource that only exists in limited quantities, so it necessarily comes at the expense of someone else getting less

Think: a product that trains you how to do better on a specific entrance exam for a highly prestigious institution that has only a fixed number of open slots each year.

NEGATIVE EXTERNALITIES AS SIDE EFFECTS

(11) the product has negative environmental externalities that are greater than the value it provides to the purchaser

Think: a toy company that dumps their factory waste in a river, slowly and subtly poisons people living nearby. People buy because they like the toys, but the consequence is causing other people to be poisoned.

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(12) the product causes a large transfer of wealth from poorer people to richer people, leading to greater inequality

Think: an automation technology for private companies in a not very competitive industry that makes the service those companies provide WORSE for consumers, but it is still in the interest of companies in that industry to buy it because it allows them to fire many employees. So even though consumers are less happy and buy less overall (and a lot of people lose their jobs) the companies save so much money that they still make more profit. And furthermore, because the industry is not very competitive, the companies don’t subsequently fight each other on price and so are able to hang on to this extra profit (that they used to pay to their employees) for a long time.

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(13) the product gives some people a little value, but a huge amount of time from a huge number of people went into developing that product, and it was not an effective use of that massive amount of labor (or, even worse, the employees are treated terribly there).

Think: a bloated and poorly managed startup that raised way too much VC money and hired way too many employees, yet its product is only slightly useful.