Making a better world, how important is that to you?

From an entrepreneurial lens, I was often tempted to think that computer science would be the best lever which could resolve some of the environmental issues close to home for me. As an example, I spent a long time trying to invent sampling tools which could help pinpoint the broken pipes which I imagined were contributing to the contamination of a major waterway near me.

While the solution was interesting, the background research revealed that not only was the river I was concerned about significantly less polluted than nearby ones, the source of the pollution was actually known- agricultural runoff from hundreds of farms. This would become a somewhat depressing theme- the problems were actually well understood, the solutions long available, but the actors with agency over the problem have chosen not to act. Through this lens, the sad revelation was that these issues which appeared to be technical were actually purely political.

It's kicked off a broader fascination with perverse incentives. I can recommend David Graeber's 'Bullshit Jobs' to speak to another aspect of this problem. In terms of the high-wire act of political influence around ecological decisions within major engineering projects, I'd suggest 'The making of an expert engineer'.

I do still think there's a significant amount for engineers to contribute. I'm often surprised to see and hear of solutions built by software engineers with little or no regard to operational cost, and I suspect the same is true of energy efficiency. Nowadays, I try to bias towards lightweight, shared cloud resources to deliver my projects. I think that Stripe's goal of shaving off some percentage points off the world of e-commerce to kickstart a market for atmospheric carbon removal is absolutely worth a go. And I'm still fascinated by engineering megaprojects for cleaner energy distribution, such as the Sun Cable.

As someone from Egypt, my goal when I was young was to change the world to a better place, but as I was growing up I realized that the country that I'm living in doesn't care about all of this, and the people that I'm living with also don't care about "making the world a better place", at least 90% of people focus more on social media trends, they are too lazy to make some effort, they are also not aware enough with the big problems around them.

So I'm 22 now and I decided to focus on leaving the country after graduating, will I have the same motivation/drive to change the world after leaving? or will I be too tired to try?

The road to hell is paved with good intentions – and plenty of people use 'make a better world' to justify atrocities. How many violations has Google committed under the guise of 'don't be evil'? How much human exploitation has Apple concealed behind good design and a strong brand?

I stopped caring about 'making the world better' a decade or so ago when I realized this, and that any sacrifices I made to do so could be callously erased in seconds thanks to having the wrong opinions, changing public opinions/politics, the whims of investors and partners, etc.

I'm not a pessimist or anything – more of a NAP-loving hedonist at this point. I won't exploit anyone to pursue my own pleasures, but it is my singular focus. My theory is that if more people adopted that philosophy, probably the would would be incrementally better, and so I try and live by example, showing those around me the way to be a good man, a good father, diligent, but also happy and content with my own life and the pleasures therein.

Sorry if that seems like a downer, but the answer to your question is: It's not. What's important to me is that I make my world better.

If you want to do some serious thinking about how to improve the world with your career, it might be worth checking out the 80,000 Hours career guide:

https://80000hours.org/career-guide/

They're a career guidance nonprofit that went through Y Combinator in 2015 https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/80-000-hours-yc-s15-helps-t...

I volunteer most of my day to helping youth - primarily in the low income area I live - for the past ~20 years.

It has become part of who I am, an integral part of my family life. I can proudly add that my married children all have similar habits.

It has come at cost of salary, working hours, and other personal advancement, but is totally, 100% worth it. I love my life, and feel that every day I am changing the world and getting real stuff done.

I am sure that some of my proteges will totally improve the world's problems in ways that I cannot imagine.

(In addition, I work at a small place that tries to do what's right - no crusades, political donations or shaming, but internally; EG. We dropped GA when we felt they were being to invasive, no products that we feel are not good for the buyer. Little stuff, but it keeps the focus on being good.)

I do try to make a positive impact, but in the "leave things better than when you first encountered it" sense - I see no reason to worry about, or even be concerned with, "greater" things like "a better world", "a mass extinction event", or "humanity".

My "sphere of influence", and therefore my interest, is limited to the people and things I come across.

I may not be able to (nor care about) solve world hunger, but I can make sure my sister doesn't have to eat ramen and work three part-time jobs. I may not be able to solve the world's unending conflicts, but I can lend an ear to a friend who's undergoing some rough patch. I may not be able to solve climate change, but I can pick up the trash on the floor.

And, frankly, that's enough for me.

Scrolled and read every top level comment. I guess I’ll be the first to push back on the notion that “if only everyone everywhere can engage in a collective effort”. The people you’re speaking to don’t matter. Their efforts don’t matter. The idea that some critical mass will individually contribute to an imagined utopia is incorrect because that’s not how any society works (beyond, let’s say, a very small tribe). Given the current state it’s better to put pressure on the people that make laws and pressure on the people that run business to get out of the way of change that benefits society. Oil companies have known about pollution, cigarette companies knew about cancer. Best you can do is find or create an activist group and be the 1% with the loudest yell to make change happen. You’ll never get the bulk of society to search their city for non slavery chocolate, but you might be able to help a group get a bill passed preventing its import. Did you know most electronic waste ends up on the African coast where slave labor washes the boards in barrels out in an open field with no more protection than a bandana over their face? They burn the plastic off cables for the copper. There are fields where young men have travelled hundreds of miles to work and send money home, only to kill themselves from cancer or poisoning before they get in their 30’s. So…how is taking my phone or old laptop to a recycle center going to fix that? People can make every effort on the front end but if the back end is corrupt, it’s all just theater. It’s better to force/incentivize the good products into the daily lives of society than expecting society to alter their lives to fit the utopian paradigm.

I'm actually quite scared of clueless people that want to better the world. That really sounds arrogant and dangerous

I wish there was an easy way to have a good job and make a better world. However working at more ethical or environmentally friendly organizations often comes with a pay cut, because it's simply not as profitable to save the world.

It's very important to me because it's an instance of one of my values - keeping something borrowed in the same or a better condition. For example, we're "borrowing" the earth/environment from future generations.

Of course, we could have a lot of discussion over what "better" means and if making X better is worth it at the cost of Y and so on, and I understand that the criteria, definitions, and interpretations could vary between people. For me, the focus should be on sustainability.

I can't have much impact on the overall direction of things as an individual, but I still try to do my part.

Im not interested in a better world just that my neighborhood and ideally city continues to get better. Anything outside of that i have so little control over it’s just virtue signaling

It's really crazy how little attention animal welfare is getting these days among so many others causes that frankly aren't anywhere near the same level of severity! The numbers are so astronomical now. Every year 100s of BILLIONs of animals are killed as part of the industrial factory farming process. If only their death was the worst of the tragedy...what's far worse is how basically every minute of their existence on earth is tainted with suffering (as part of the process that is only optimized for maximum yield). These animals have the same pain mechanism as we do, there's no debate about that at all and it's increasingly being proven that they also have emotions, feelings, dreams, etc. just like we do. Anyone who's had any pet can attest to that as well. It never ceases to amaze how people happily stay ignorant to that inconvenient fact and get up in arms about political differences or "Social Justice" while the greatest atrocities are happening on a daily basis with what they indirectly support via their consumption.

I would love to make a better world, even if I sometimes feel powerless about it.

I used to think that being involved in research would help make a better world, but my research field is typically used to make programming languages or static analysis tools, and that doesn't look like it's making the world a better place.

I used to think that being involved in open-source would help make a better world, and I've worked on Firefox, on Matrix, on Rust, on dozens of smaller projects. While I don't regret it, it's hard to say whether the long-term impact of these projects on the world is positive or negative.

I believe that we can always make things worse, though. That's why I didn't join a web3 company despite salaries I was offered. And I believe that we have a responsibility working towards a smaller footprint.

For what it's worth, I wrote a piece about the topic a few days ago: https://yoric.github.io/post/coding-for-a-finite-world/ .

Making the world a better place is very important to me.

I once devised a test for people. It goes like this:

Ask them when they are clean and in a white-collar environment:

You can spend 5 mintues working hard and getting dirty to magically get some random human $1 million worth of stuff they want/need. Let's say you need to carry bags of dirt from one place to another. Beacuse this is magic, you will never know who got that stuff, but you will know that someone somewhere got it.

You can also spend 5 minutes carrying bags of drit the other way, and that will cause someone somewhere in the world to loose $1 million, or eveything they have if their net worth is lee than $1 million. Again, this does not affect inflation because magic.

Would you (A) work to help someone, (B) refuse to do anything because it does not help you or (C) work to hurt someone.

After they answer, ask What if you could work all day to help or hurt others. What would you do?

I've found an amazing number of peple would work all day to hurt many people. To me, this explains the businesses that create artificial scarcity.

It is important to me. For many years I thought that if I'll make it I will do such and such.... About 10 years ago I realized I didn't make any meaningful change so I decided to leave a very high salary in the AdTech business to the BioTech world, I make a lot less but my expertise really do make a change (small one, but it is something)

I think humanity has to be up to keep trying, has to have some exposure to a direct & personal spirit of adventure. Tech & computing is that for many, but alas it feels like it's slipping ever more into the esoteric as productization & industrialization of our connective systems advaces. We need humanity inspired to be on long voyages, to be iterating & trying & working anarchistically towards collective betterment; open possibility. We need to inspire each other to keep pushing, to finding better. Jaunty: adventure, wonder: what we can make, kind: how we should be disposed. It's all loose and a jumble of things, barely strung together, but my name is about this hope to keep the flame of hackeress burning.

In the end, I just want to see things going directionally the right direction, or at least sustaining. To me, tech has huge power, but it's trapped on the wrong side of an artificed & created interface rather than melding; few get a real peek at the soul of the machine or perch to dabble. I think we can and must do better. I think coexistence has had some interesting starts but has faded out of view, especially as the tech colossuses have grown to such titaneous size.

Trying to at least make it feel like humanity at large is in the loop with tech matters a lot to me. I want so much for a thriving hacker ethos to have some strong vital camps that seem like they can survive, go Forward in time. The future doesn't have to be this utopian system, it doesn't all have to be the good I believe in, but I believe this is the camp where dynamics & vitality & aliveness of our species future march has its core, and that spark needs to be cherished and kept alive.

There's a lot of worldly problems about. But having a communicative connectivity that is ours, that we can iterate on, that society can itself grow & bend: that's the newest biggest hope I see on the planet, and starting there seems like what we can do to let so many other great things be begot & accelerate.

It's all I care about. You should know though that your idea of a better world is not my idea of a better world.

It's in everything that I do. When I'm dead and all that's left of me is what I've done, I want that to be good. So everything I do, even down to taking a shit, I put thought into it's impact.

It really depends on your ecosystem. It depends on what kind of core values you hold. How you would like the next generation of kids, to become. I feel like it's a swimming pool. At the end of the humanity lineage, hangs on how people treated the last generation. People should be improving, in politics, in technology, in music, people should constantly be innovating, creating.

What's wrong with the world. What stagnates people? People who choose not to help clean after themselves, pick up their trash and/or recycle etc etc. I think we should follow consumerism that helps people be better counterparts for a better tomorrow.

Honestly FB meta has been in that direction of creating community, through technology. The government has been funding public programs. I think the easiest solution is just at its simplest- local activities, diversity, and just planting.

The current world is a result of technology. Read some Ted Kaczynski, especially his manifesto, to get a better, more complete and unfortunately uncommon understanding of why the world is currently the way it is.

It’s even more enlightening for us CS folks.

> By working on environmental issues

When we talk about making the world better off, this is not the only area where it can be done. A lot of the replies here take it in this direction, but this is only one way among many

For me personally, I care more about things like digital privacy and anonymity than I do about the environment. Not that I don't care about the environment, just that the thing that initially made me study CS was reading Snowden's autobiography

I think that as long as governments (e.g. the UK) are trying to limit/ban encryption, I'm going to prioritize digital privacy over other things like the environment

Important, but I am not terribly optimistic considering humanity in the aggregate. As I get older, I pour my time into loved ones, friends, and smaller opportunities for developing future talent, because life is short and we’re all dead eventually anyway. I won’t regret that time, but I’ll regret any time spent fighting people too simple or maliciously focused on keeping the world the way it is.

“As time, energy, and potential for enjoyment and meaningful work allows.”

Not important at all, simply because life on earth is and always has been a cruel competition for survival and the successful transmission of genes. There have been numerous extinction events along the way. Even if humanity were to acheive some kind of environmental homeostasis, eventually forces at the solar system level would drive the earth back into an ice age and mass extinction.

This is largely why I’m on disability and have not been a “functional” member of society for the better part of a decade. I have been unable to identify a role available to me which will not materially make things worse. This leaves the only viable options as living in abject poverty, or ceasing to exist, the latter frequently more attractive.

I think it's important to most people, but so is money; therefore, you're forced to care about money, too.

I only care for a better world for myself and those I care about.

I can easily make my little bit of the world nice and it is done far more easily by stepping on others or just ignoring them.

If something were better for everyone without trade offs, it would have already been done (technological discover aside).

Most people would like that, but usually not at the expense of their own quality of life. And most people already struggle just bringing or keeping their own life to a satisfying level.

I used to really care about making the world a better place; It might have even been my primary motivator.

The first major issue I encountered was that helping others could easily cross a line into enabling others... and it's a subtle point. However, enabling almost never actually helps people or "the betterment of the world." ie: Sometimes helping is not in the form of providing support... which, to the untrained eye, often looks like maleficence.

The next major issue I found was that many common problems require cooperation to solve where people instead view the world as competitive. Driving a car is one such perfect example that many people can see with time/experience. Being competitive in a massively busy system just creates more congestion but there will always be the minority that cares only about the space immediately surrounding their car and their position in an infinite line of cars.

There was a phrase which was popular for a time, "think globally, act locally." I liked it and tried to internalize it. The problem with it is that I don't have a clear global view. At best, I have access to scientific papers which I can barely comprehend. At worst, I have highly political news sources. The information we all work from is what we all react to. At the end of the day, we are all pretty similar. It's why billionaires want to own sources of information.

Given that the world is as complex as it is, the best thing I can figure to do is make the world around me better. If people in general want a better world and they all do this, then we will have a better world. ie: The world isn't my responsibility; It's everyone's responsibility... and I'll own my part.

I think I have unique insight on this. I used to prioritize "important" work especially things that improved the world (I didn't have a good metric though), and even more especially, something which was important for me specifically to do. The idea of Elon Musk starting SpaceX for instance, it really seems like something good which, if he didn't do it, wouldn't have happened. Thats what I wanted for myself.

However I think this is flawed. I have since realized that the world is too complex to control. It is not up to us to save it because there is no clear path to doing so and there never will be. Thinking there is usually leads to wasted time and opportunity cost of other actually important things you could be doing. The biggest thing you are missing out on is doing work that you love. Yes, love really is the most important option when deciding on what to work on, as opposed to value creation, unique skillsets, supply and demand, etc.

Remember that the world is nothing more than the sum of our experiences, the people we know, what we do every day when we wake up. Your choices every day create it, so by acting well you really are improving the world, every day! Doing what you love is improving the world - even if its working on ads. You have no idea what kinds of influence your actions really have so just do good work for yourself and your loved ones. Everything else takes care of itself and if it didn't, you wouldn't be smart or capable enough to do something about that anyways.

The challenge is overcoming evolutionary hardwired survival instincts.

It’s easy to want “a better world” when you’re in good conditions. When you’re in a war zone, you’ll lie, cheat, steal, pollute, backstab, and whatever else it takes, to survive.

And the problem is, even if that’s not you, it’s someone. And you’ll never convince everyone to do the right thing. And whoever is willing to cut corners will outcompete you.

The only way to make the world better is through the rare games that, even when people act in the most self-interested way possible, things still improve.

Take capitalism, technology, bitcoin. Even a bad actor whose only goal is hookers and blow on their yacht, will unknowingly produce something of value through a business, making some technology, or enabling a decentralized currency.

Very important.

Elon Musk once said that there are too many talented people in finance and law. I transitioned from finance to make battery management systems, low- and high-level firmware. It’s just another programming domain, and there is a ton of hardware-related pitfalls, but I think that if we can reach a high grid-scale battery solution using post-lithium batteries (no criticism of LFP), the biggest problem with renewables can be handled at scale. It’s a lot of fun to aim for the stars and make something useful that is still only on the brink of existence.

I wonder if perhaps it's enough to focus on making your family - and maybe even your community a better place. Local efforts are more likely to have observable results - and are far easier to correct if gone astray.

After all, nearly every atrocity committed by history's most notorious tyrants can be traced to them just wanting to make the world a better place.

The attempts to heal the world of it's perceived problems seems to have a very high correlation with genocidal levels of death.

It's important but at the end of the day our capitalist system requires me to find a way to convince somebody to give me their money in order to survive

Most societies are not capable of making a better world. People are either poor, not thoroughly enlighted to what "better" means and especially what "better" means to their own lives.

Because what is a better world ? I have one opinion. You have another perhaps.

Personally I don't believe in people doing good for the world by firstly doing good to themselves. That's not feasible imo.

Secondly the world would by default be a much better place by pretty much all means if we were not 8b humans all wanting pretty much the same things. We are simply to many.

Because we are too many we are curing symptoms not root problems. By using the earth resources to a degree that is not sustainable and then create technology around that fact is in my view not sustainable. We could easily live off the planets resources if we were half the population.

No one is willing to really cut down on their footprint on the planet. And pretty much every human believe its their right to do whatever they find best for themselves. That is a path to destruction for all and that path seems more and more set in stone.

The world is fucked. Proper fucked. And we are not going to solve it. Simple because we don't really want to.

You're welcome

When I was younger, this was super important to me. It was probably my top priority, and I tried to maximize sustainability... lowered my consumption, ate bulk organic vegan foods, minimized electricity and water usage, biked everywhere, got a vasectomy, bought solar power addons and carbon credits, whatever. I majored in environmental science and then worked in the sector for a decade.

Over time I realized how little people really cared about any of it, how little mindspace it occupied relative to their day to day, or even relative to other big issues like the culture wars, the homeless, Ukraine, the Middle East, etc. And the climate situation just kept getting worse, even as wildfires got more frequent and intense for the western US.

And then COVID hit and that was a real turning point for me. I'd never have expected such stupidity, between the anti vax and the anti masks movements, with people signing up to die and kill each other for no real reason at all aside from some misguided personal vendetta against community norms, as though keeping someone alive was an attack on their personal liberty. It was a real eye opener for me in terms of large scale crowd and population behaviors, seeing selfishness increase even as the death toll skyrocketed. And that was against a common enemy, easily witnessed, with acute and deadly effects.

If we can't even deal with an urgent crisis like that, what chance do we have? Climate, invisible and operating on a time scale of decades, doesn't stand a chance.

I've learned to accept that our species is pretty fucked, lol, and my sole remaining prayer is that AI will one day grow powerful enough to benevolently rule over us (heh, probably not the sentence you expected to read). I wouldn't bet on humans having some sort of overnight moral awakening.

Maybe slowly over centuries we can refine our ethics, but by and large I've come to believe we are fundamentally limited by our ape biology and primitive brains. We evolved to survive and thrive in small groups in hostile environments, not a hyperconnected overcrowded world of 8 billion all fighting over finite land, resources, wealth, and even water and atmosphere.

These days I've largely given up on the idea that the world will be meaningfully better in my lifetime. I think it will get much, much worse, and capitalist dystopias will become the norm. I still try to contribute (recently decided to go back to school to get an environmental engineering degree), but that's really more of a bandaid at this point than any sort of real solution.

Despite the pessimism, I think I'm generally pretty happy! As long as I get to go out once in a while, participate in community, etc., here in the rich first world it's still easy enough to compartmentalize all of this. I feel bad for anyone who wants kids or lives in a poorer country though. I think it's gonna get quite ugly...

First of all, I really appreciate your positivity. I believe in the possibility of a better world, and am also hopeful for one.

However, finding stable peace and improving the world in the ways that you describe is not so simple. Based on the way our current civilization is set up, we are subject to a so-far-insurmountable problem that continuously pulls us away from this ideal.

I would roughly summarize this problem as “the tragedy of the commons.” It is a unique category of coordination failure that undergirds many aspects of the world we might criticize right now, such as climate, disinformation, nuclear risk, and more. Scott Alexander[0] and Daniel Schmachtenberger[1] have written and spoken about this meta-level issue at length. I particularly like this quote from the Alexander piece:

> all these scenarios are in fact a race to the bottom. Once one agent learns how to become more competitive by sacrificing a common value, all its competitors must also sacrifice that value or be outcompeted and replaced by the less scrupulous. Therefore, the system is likely to end up with everyone once again equally competitive, but the sacrificed value is gone forever. From a god’s- eye-view, the competitors know they will all be worse off if they defect, but from within the system, given insufficient coordination it’s impossible to avoid.

To answer your question directly, I think it’s possible that this meta-problem might now be solvable because we have technologies that empower us to create net new incentives and coordination games[2].

I have a hypothesis that this is particularly relevant today because same coordination failure patterns are very likely to play out with AI alignment - and the tools are showing promise to be able to help with this.

I feel very lucky that this is what I get to spend all my time working on. Making the world a better place in this way is almost all I can think about. There’s a contingent of good people working on this problem in the context of the idea “DAOs.” If you feel called to try to address what might be the highest leverage problem of our time, definitely recommend you check it out.

[0]: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch

[1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4kBoLVvoqVY

[2]: https://medium.com/@virgilgr/ethereum-is-game-changing-techn...