Final-ish state of problem statements and reactions Also, a final-ish personal visualization of the "star map of FoC". All the caveats and disclaimers from last time continue to apply. I'll post some even more personal comments and critiques of people's responses and the whole process in comments. I hope it provokes comments and reflection from others. I'm looking forward to putting this up on the FoC wiki in some form.

Fantastic project, Kartik. This has been fascinating to follow. Definitely will be good to re-run this survey (perhaps with some support tooling?) again in the future.

Some criticisms, mostly of my own failure to communicate what was in my mind with this exercise. Problem statements I think many problem statements were infected by the solution in the mind of the author. Phrases like "there oughta be" or "the world needs" are red flags of this failure mode. I think all my 6s were because of this. Either your problem is intensely personal, and you're doing art for art's sake (perfectly legitimate! see Jackson Pollock or Van Gogh!) or I think there's room here to make your problem less muddy, to give it a more separate existence from the solution you're working on. A lesser failure mode: Phrases like "because" and "due to" are red flags that you're over-specifying an approach to a problem. There seems some value in more focus. If problem A seems to have sub-problem B, do you care about B in isolation, or A as a whole? Pick one. If it's A, be open to other approaches. If it's B, then it should be able to stand alone as a resonant problem. (I made this mistake as well in an earlier thread, and even had a sub-sub-problem; the instinct to boil the ocean is very powerful but misguided.) @jonathoda: what are some examples of special-purpose technologies? A single editor window containing say some Lua code without any libraries seems to me to be "not shattered", but it's still certainly likely to contain friction and complexity, particularly to people inexperienced with programming. Perhaps what would help is stating the target demographic. Do you care about just programmers or just non-programmers or both or something else? Perhaps I should have asked everyone to mention that in problem statements.. Reactions to problem statements Konrad Hinsen read my levels 4 and 5 with a tacit "in the context of my work" to them. "There are problem statements here whose background and motivation I can perfectly well understand, but which I don't see as important in my own work." I would tend to categorize those as level 3, so it looks like my rubric is ambiguously worded. I'm curious how others interpreted my levels, and if they see other potential room for ambiguity. Special mention to @Ivan Reese for willfully stretching the rules of the game both in problem statements and reactions. My star map didn't know what to do with vectors, ranges like 0-5, negative numbers and complex numbers 😆 Thanks for playing sportingly, even though it seems clear that you don't really care about thinking in terms of problems, in the vein of Pollock and Van Gogh..

I have to say I approached this with wariness at the focus on "problems" and have been waiting for the right time to re-launch the poll with, well, not even "solutions", but what I recently saw Steve Jobs describe as "you want that?!" (holding up a page of laser printed text). So tangible examples, demos, physical manifestations of how the solution actually delivers value to a target demographic, in their face. "You want THAT?!" should be the metric, I humbly submit. No problems, nothing about how much you've sweated and innovated over the technical or philosophical solution. Just "here it is - it looks/works like this - so do you want THAT? or not?"

Depends on (sorry) what problem you're trying to solve. My goal is/was finding collaboration. Sounds like yours is interacting with potential audiences/customers?

well I want both techie collaborators (just one fan would be nice!) and bringing in non-techies to try it out. but that's tangential to our "problem" statements, isn't it?

@Kartik Agaram Yeah! That's what's foreign to me about this framework, and what makes it interesting to wrestle with: I don't want to solve problems, and this framework presupposes that I do. I don't want to fix what's broken. I just want people to have different kinds of experiences. I want them to create for creation's sake. To the extent that the status quo puts limits on that, well, sure, that might be a "problem", but... like.. it's a problem because it's immoral, not because it's wasteful or counterproductive or bad for stakeholders or knowledge transfer. So sure, lump me in with art, I'll gladly take that, but I think that's perhaps missing some plurality of motivations we could otherwise explore.

Ohh, that's a really good point. I didn't mean literally one sentence. But it's on me to be precise about that.

This is why it's lovely that we have a conversational medium within which we can hash out our thoughts and find loose consensus and cluster ourselves into cliques!

"Problem because it's immoral" seems totally copacetic with "problem", btw. But yeah, I seem to be implicitly assuming more of a scaffolding of cause and effect around "problem".

@Kartik Agaram I suggest that you apply Science to your methodology. Science is a fail-fast approach. Take a theory and drive - hard - towards finding ways to making the theory fail. I don’t know how to do this with your approach (which might mean that your approach ain’t Scientific), but, I think of Ptolemaic vs. Copernican cosmology. Galileo championed Copernican cosmology (which raises the question of why don’t we call it Galilean cosmology?). I suspect that the culture, the language, the words, didn’t exist to describe the necessary shift in thinking. Is it possible that phrases like “”there oughta be” and “the world needs” and “because”and “due to” are expressions of lack-of-linear-language, rather than actual failure-modes?

@guitarvydas I think I hazily understand where you're going with "lack of linear language" (similar to what I was getting at with "scaffolding of cause and effect"), but don't at all understand how it connects up with the rest of your comment about Science 😆 @Ivan Reese To elaborate on what at least I meant by "scaffolding of cause and effect", consider two purely hypothetical problem statements: • "the world needs more hot pink on computer screens" • "the world needs more chartreuse on computer screens" I think these are suboptimal given the goal of figuring out potential collaborators because I can't tell if they might find common cause or become arch nemeses, each thinking the other is totally missing the point. This is what I meant by "assuming the solution." I tend to think "problem" should hook to something self-evident to everyone. Even those who totally find the problem pointless should be able to understand why someone might want it, be able to argue against how it's actually counter-productive to chase after, etc. "Be careful what you wish for," or "that's too hard, have you considered..," etc.

Okay, you caught me — I was trying to recall the motivations of my ratings from memory. Here, instead, let me unpack a few examples of what I think I was thinking. This is long, sorry. Kartik Agaram: 1–5 > Adapting computers to ourselves is hard. What does it mean to "adapt a computer" to myself? Why is it hard? Is it a bad thing that it's hard (eg: escaping poverty) or a good thing (eg: playing the oboe)? When you "adapt" a computer, what changes? It seems like you could change anything about a computer, and it would have some effect on how one uses it. What adaptations might you (Kartik) have had in mind? Perhaps, being able to reshape the editors we use to do our writing and coding? If we made that easier to do, would that solve any of my problems? Would it help me solve my problems? What are my problems? Well, one of them is that I don't get any sensations in my body while I code, other than leg pain and headache. Whereas, for everything else I enjoy doing, I get all sorts of sensations. When I solve the problem "my family needs to eat this week" by making a big batch of pasta sauce, I get to smell the garlic and oregano cooking in butter and oil. When I play guitar and get a melodic idea, I get the sport-like feeling of trying to make my fingers (and the rest of my body) execute the melody, over and over, until I can play it easily… and then I get to react to the weird feelings my body produces while I play it, and have that push me toward different ways of playing it, or playing different things, which turn into new melodic ideas. There's an interplay between mind and body that the computer doesn't participate in. So when I say that my problem is "I've never seen an approach to programming that centers animation", it's a one sentence way of saying "bodies are amazing, and computers only suction-cup themselves around our eyeballs and finger tips, so at the very least they could do that a little more richly, and try to produce more sensations". That feels a ton like "adapting computers to ourselves". If that's what you were getting at, then on the scale of 1-6, that'd be a 0 — I realized something new about my problem by reading your problem. But if you mean, like, it should be easier for novice programmers to learn the field without being struck with vertigo when they first glimpse the size of the complexity tower they'll inherit, or, put another way, the computing environment we find ourselves in should be more human-scale, that's a 3. But if you mean, like, we need our technical foundations (like, ecosystems, platforms… x86 and UIKit and the web) to be more open for us to reshape, well, that's a 5. Konrad Hinsen: 6 (but ironic) > [...] Agency over information processing systems is too centralized. Too many people have to adapt to someone else's systems, rather than adapting their own system to their own wishes. [...] Given my problem as expressed above, I don't see how information processing centralization is even a problem of the same sort. Like, I can see how it exacerbates other problems, but I don't see it as a root cause. So that's the 6. But — this "problem statement" exercise is itself an information processing system, of a sort, and I am adapting it to my own wishes with my wacky scores, but that creates new problems. So it's ironic.

This helps me a lot understanding what @guitarvydas meant by "beliefs" in https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C01932BJGE8/p1723235778912009?thread_ts=1721870703.344739&cid=C01932BJGE8

I'd also love to repeat the exercise, but this time focus only on solutions, not on problems. Perhaps with a framing like: "please state your solution as generally as you can manage without introducing vagueness or ambiguity" (yeah, that's unavoidable, but it's the thought that counts)

Just to close the loop, I'd say I'm at 3 ("I care about this problem") relative to you. By "adaptation" I mean a smaller change than "creation". More like what gets called "tailoring" in some academic places (that Philip Tchernavskij's dissertation does a great job of surveying). Only tiny point interventions in a computer, nothing that would significantly improve the physical experience of using computers.

I would like to add that I don't come to the FoC community for agreement and collaboration. What I'm looking for is things I did not consider, my blind spots, inspiration. I love the non organized nature of FoC.

@Kartik Agaram oftentimes the solution and the problem go hand in hand. It is seeing a messy unsatisfactory situation from a new perspective that defines the problem and suggests solutions together. And it is the existence of the solution that validates the analysis of the problem. The opposite is also true: when there is widespread agreement on the existence of a problem that typically means it has resisted solution for a long time. That is often because the framing of the problem rules out solutions that could work. See most social problems.

There was some subtlety between the axis of (subjective) _importance_: "I care & wish this got solved" vs. the more focused axis of _personal impact_: "I am doing/aspire to do/know a solution for this problem".

to the extent that you think about the Future of Coding or have projects to try to improve things, what problem are you trying to attack?

OK, that sounds to me pretty clearly personal impact. And in case problem A having sub-problem B, it depends which scope you are personally taking on, right? But then voting scale was mixed: 0–2 are alignment with "my problem" (=personal impact if IIUC) yet 3–5 are importance. Was this entirely intentional? It does make sense, to fall back on importance when it's far from personal focus.

Nice way to lay it out! Yeah, I think that roughly maps to how I think about it. Basically I'm an organism in an environment, and at any point there are things in my environment that I'm actively working on, while I maintain peripheral awareness of other things I could be working on. The only difference between these two categories is an estimation of how important something is vs how hard it is. Changing estimates on either might cause me to switch what I work on. My goal was to look for opportunities for those kinds of switches. Difficulty might go down because I talked to someone and learned something, or just from awareness someone else cares about it so we're more likely to make progress together. Which might bump it up my priorities. So it made sense to my mind to focus on personal impact in the first phase where we're just writing up our own perspectives. (I'm often not even aware of other options on my radar.) But then broaden to importance when conversing among ourselves, because seeing each other's problems may have made us all more aware of our own radars and what we have been interested in without necessarily focusing on it.