Admiring the Problem
March 20, 2019·Politics
Theranos spent two hours debating the name of a cloud. The Electoral College will dominate political discourse for 18 months and change nothing. A wealth management firm discovers its smartest people spend years describing the same problems without solving them. What's happening is not failure to innovate. It's something more profitable: the systematic admiration of problems that everyone involved knows cannot be solved.
• Organizations develop elaborate expertise about permanent problems. They hire consultants, convene meetings, and devote resources to understanding every angle of something that cannot be fixed. The effort itself becomes the product.
• Both sides deploy the same unsolvable problem as a political weapon. The Electoral College is presented as something that urgently needs solving. Everyone knows the constitutional math makes it impossible. The narrative works anyway.
• When admiring a problem becomes profitable, the incentive structure flips. A person or institution benefits more from continually redefining the problem than from solving it. The problem becomes self-perpetuating.
• Expertise in describing an unsolvable problem gets mistaken for progress. Knowing everything about why something is broken is not the same as moving toward fixing it. The first feels productive. Only one actually is.
• The hardest question is distinguishing between visionaries taking impossible shots and rent-seekers manufacturing perpetual crisis. Both look similar from the outside. Both require sustained attention and resources. Only one leads somewhere.
The Why of Epsilon Theory
- Direct access to leading narrative-tracking technology across global news.
- Deep analysis of how narratives shape markets, politics, and society.
- An active online community of independent voters, investors and thinkers.
Looking for Deeper Insights?
Unlock exclusive market intelligence, trade ideas, and member-only events tailored for investment professionals and active investors with Perscient Pro.
VISIT PRO
Comments
Fantastic!
A few thoughts come to mind…
Are you sure nothing will happen?..https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/16/politics/colorado-presidential-vote-electoral-college-law/index.html
I’m thankful for those visionaries that look at seeming insurmountable odds and say “f*ck it, let’s give it a shot”. (cough, cough, Elon, cough)
The most expensive admiration of a problem going on today…https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/pentagon-budget-mystery-807276/
Thanks, David!
I had a boss who - as we took over more businesses internally and externally - always said, “let’s assume that really smart people, probably as smart as us, came before us and have looked at these new-to-us problems for a long time and came up with the solutions we see in front of us that we think we can improve upon.”
It didn’t mean we didn’t try to improve things, but it did humble us and, sometimes, prevented us from devoting massive effort trying to solve the insolvable. The hard thing - as you note - is that this is a balance not an all or none. Working really hard on really hard problems is how mankind advances, but some problems aren’t solvable at this time or with our current technology or in our current budget, etc.
And, as you note, keeping in check those who thrive on the “one more look,” or “let’s try this” view - who, for some reason, enjoy working on the insolvable or, worse, who have figured out how to personally profit (in money or advancement, etc.) by doing so - is a challenge.
Smart piece, Rusty, which is probably it reminded me of that very smart boss I had.
One bit of wisdom I was taught many decades ago, was that you not only needed to recognize that really smart people had recognized this problem before, but you have to come up with good explanations of why those smart people hadn’t been able to solve it. Lots of possible explanations (they defined it as an X problem when it was really a Y problem, they ignored interests that benefited from the problem, etc) but it forced you to take a broader look and eliminate those obstacles as a first step. One of the worst things about many modern Silicon Valley (and other) elite professionals is the rock-ribbed conviction that their approach to the world is so superior to everything that came before that that it is an insult to their dignity to have to consider how the problem came about, or why no one else had come up with the solution that they see as staggeringly brilliant.
I was having a tough time wrapping my head around the difference between admiring the problem and solving tough problems, but then I saw this article on ZH.
Now I understand.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-21/meet-harvard-dropout-who-has-cheatproof-test-dethrone-sats
LOL
Valuable piece Rusty - we can all cringe at how many meetings we have been stuck in with people gleefully “admiring the problem”.
An aside - are others having trouble liking comments which are more long form (like Mark Kahn below) where you have to click ‘Read More’. I keep getting error message something wrong happened.
Continue the discussion at the Epsilon Theory Forum...