What do you do when you realize you are addressing the wrong problem?

“…Too often, the stance of the designer is oriented almost solely towards problem-solving. Too often, that’s what they’re trained for. The issue here is something rarely considered at school: what do you do when you realize you are addressing the wrong problem, your bounded remit having been the outcome of the wrong question in the first place? This happens frequently in design work in practice, and yet stuck at the wrong end of the value-chain, simply problem solving, it is difficult to interrogate or alter the original question. you simply have to solve within the brief you’ve been set; you can’t challenge its premise.”
— Dan Hill, Dark Matter and Trojan Horses, a Strategic Design Vocabulary http://www.strelka.com/en/press/books/dark-matter-and-trojan-horses-a-strategic-design-vocabulary

"How is that possible?"

“The historian, although he talks about the past, can do it by talking about the future. When he says that the French Revolution was in 1789, he means that if you look in another book about the French Revolution you will find the same date. What he does is to make a kind of prediction about something that he has never looked at before, documents that have still to be found. He predicts that the documents in which there is something written about Napoleon will coincide with what is written in the other documents. The question is how that is possible…”
— Richard Fenyman, The Distinction of Past and Future, 1964. http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/feynman/past_and_future.html

The whole passage: "Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, ‘These are the conditions, now what happens next?’ But all our sister sciences have a completely different problem: in fact all the other things that are studied — history, geology, astronomical history — have a problem of this other kind. I find they are able to make predictions of a completely different type from those of a physicist. A physicist says, 'In this condition I’ll tell you what will happen next’. But a geologist will say something like this — 'I have dug in the ground and I have found certain kinds of bones. I predict that if you dig in the ground you will find a similar kind of bones’. The historian, although he talks about the past, can do it by talking about the future. When he says that the French Revolution was in 1789, he means that if you look in another book about the French Revolution you will find the same date. What he does is to make a kind of prediction about something that he has never looked at before, documents that have still to be found. He predicts that the documents in which there is something written about Napoleon will coincide with what is written in the other documents. The question is how that is possible…"

“Life generates energy from microscopic electrical motors that are embedded in cell membranes and run off electrical currents driven by pH gradients across the membranes. It is impossible for words to do justice to these amazing molecular machines.”
— Astrobiology: A Very Short Introduction by David C. Catling, Oxford University Press, 2013
“I heard an interview with the renowned evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson in which he addressed why, as a senior professor—and one of the most famous biologists in the world—he continued to teach non-majors biology at Harvard. Wilson explained that non-majors biology is the most important science class that one could teach. He felt many of the future leaders of this nation would take the class, and that this was the last chance to convey to them an appreciation for biology and science.”
— Defending Darwin by James Krupa, February 2015
https://orionmagazine.org/article/defending-darwin/

"People never stopped coming back"

“Facebook has tested the loyalty and patience of Android users by secretly introducing artificial errors that would automatically crash the app for hours at a time, says one person familiar with the one-time experiment. The purpose of the test, which happened several years ago, was to see at what threshold would a person ditch the Facebook app altogether. The company wasn’t able to reach the threshold. ‘People never stopped coming back.’”
— Facebook’s Android Contingency by Amir Efrati, January 4, 2016 https://www.theinformation.com/facebooks-android-contingency-planning

Millions called

“Dial-a-Poem began in 1968 when New York artist, actor, poet John Giorno linked up 15 connected telephones to reel-to-reel tape players and made it possible for anyone to call a telephone number and listen to a poem recited by an established, often radical, poet or author…Millions called.”
— Dial-A-Poem Poets: Radicalizing space with the telephone by James Barrette https://medium.com/@JimBarrett/dial-a-poem-poets-radicalizing-space-with-the-telephone-bfb50cd8f36c#.rk9wob8su
“Pundits may be asking if the Internet is bad for our children’s mental development, but the better question is whether the form of learning and knowledge-making we are instilling in our children is useful to their future.”
— Cathy N. Davidson, co-director, MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition, quoted in Education Needs a Digital Upgrade, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/education-needs-a-digital-age-upgrade/?_r=0

The Great Works of Software

“Computer people often talk about products. But each of these five have come to represent something else—an engagement with hard problems that are typically thought to be in the domain of philosophy, literature, or art, rather than programming.”
— The Great Works of Software, by Paul Ford; Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Pac-Man, Unix, Emacs.  https://medium.com/message/the-great-works-of-software-705b87339971#.rxp1usxsp

"More willing to help you…"

“A third advantage of mission oriented companies is that people outside the company are more willing to help you. You’ll get more support on a hard, important project, than a derivative one. When it comes to starting a startup, it’s easier to found a hard startup than an easy startup. This is one of those counter-intuitive things that takes people a long time to understand. It’s difficult to overstate how important being mission driven is, so I want to state it one last time: derivative companies, companies that copy an existing idea with very few new insights, don’t excite people and they don’t compel the teams to work hard enough to be successful.”
— Lecture 1: How to Start a Startup, Paul Altman, http://genius.com/Sam-altman-lecture-1-how-to-start-a-startup-annotated

Browsers are free to ignore…

“…The Web is a system that allows users to consume content in any combination and presentation that user-chosen software can achieve…Browsers are free to ignore, rearrange, mash-up and otherwise make use of any content from any source.”
— Brave Software, in response to a Newspaper Association of America complaint that its web browser is “blatantly illegal.”

Brave’s web browser replaces ads that use 3rd party tracking with ads that give users more privacy and security—and it it then returns up to 70% of ad revenue back to the publishers. https://brave.com/blogpost_4.html

The full quote:

"…The Web is a system that allows users to consume content in any combination and presentation that user-chosen software can achieve. 

Browsers do not just play back recorded pixels from the publishers’ sites. Browsers are rather the end-user agent that mediates and combines all the pieces of content, including third-party ads and first-party publisher news stories. Web content is published as HTML markup documents with the express intent of not specifying how that content is actually presented to the browser user. Browsers are free to ignore, rearrange, mash-up and otherwise make use of any content from any source.

If it were the case that Brave’s browsers perform “republication”, then so too does Safari’s Reader mode. The same goes for any browser with an ad-blocker extension installed, or the Links text-only browser, or screen readers for the visually impaired."

“The earth is 4.5 billion years old, but we are a young species, relatively speaking, with an average individual allotment of three score years and ten. The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.”
— The Really Big One—An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest, The question is when. Kathryn Schulz, New Yorker, July 20, 2015 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one–

The past and the future

“The Cascadia subduction [earthquake] zone remained hidden from us for so long because we could not see deep enough into the past. It poses a danger to us today because we have not thought deeply enough about the future. That is no longer a problem of information; we now understand very well what the Cascadia fault line will someday do. Nor is it a problem of imagination. If you are so inclined, you can watch an earthquake destroy much of the West Coast this summer in Brad Peyton’s “San Andreas,” while, in neighboring theatres, the world threatens to succumb to Armageddon by other means: viruses, robots, resource scarcity, zombies, aliens, plague. As those movies attest, we excel at imagining future scenarios, including awful ones. But such apocalyptic visions are a form of escapism, not a moral summons, and still less a plan of action. Where we stumble is in conjuring up grim futures in a way that helps to avert them.”
— The Really Big One—An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest, The question is when. Kathryn Schulz, New Yorker, July 20, 2015 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one–

Forever

“Once the very last remnants of the very last stars have finally decayed away to nothing, and everything reaches the same temperature, the story of the universe finally comes to an end. For the first time in its life, the universe will be permanent and unchanging. Entropy finally stops increasing because the cosmos cannot get any more disordered.

Nothing happens and it keeps not happening. Forever.”
— Physicist Brian Cox, on the heat death of the universe. From The Wonders of the Universe: The Cosmos Made Conscious