>That's why not one startup has hacked healthcare in America, not one.
This post makes a lot of points, but in general I think they boil down to the above statement : the belief that large, complex systems are just run by stupid and/or malicious people and that a sufficiently clever 'hack' will fix all the problems. I think that is an attitude that is common on HN, but wrong.
Most big problems are not technology problems, they are People problems with a capital P. Technology problems can be fixed with 'one simple hack they don't want you to know about!!!' People problems are complex and messy and cause and effect can be intermingled vertically and horizontally with other seemingly unrelated factors as well as temporally with things that don't even exist yet or used to exist but don't anymore!
The way we fix these messy, complex People problems is by respecting that they are real problems, that the people acting on those systems are (mostly) reasonable people just doing what reasonable people do, and slogging through solutions a day at a time with the oldest technology around - political power. These problems resolve if you can get enough people to agree they need solved.
This post makes a lot of points, but in general I think they boil down to the above statement : the belief that large, complex systems are just run by stupid and/or malicious people and that a sufficiently clever 'hack' will fix all the problems. I think that is an attitude that is common on HN, but wrong.
Most big problems are not technology problems, they are People problems with a capital P. Technology problems can be fixed with 'one simple hack they don't want you to know about!!!' People problems are complex and messy and cause and effect can be intermingled vertically and horizontally with other seemingly unrelated factors as well as temporally with things that don't even exist yet or used to exist but don't anymore!
The way we fix these messy, complex People problems is by respecting that they are real problems, that the people acting on those systems are (mostly) reasonable people just doing what reasonable people do, and slogging through solutions a day at a time with the oldest technology around - political power. These problems resolve if you can get enough people to agree they need solved.