[davidivadavid]

When you're focused on immediate problems that are right under your nose, you tend to produce solutions that are band aid solutions.

When you're more farsighted, you tend to look at the root cause of problems and try to find solutions that cure problems once and for all.

They do tend to take longer to come about, for sure. But which approach produces the most utility is very hard to prove. Is it better to equip people with mosquito nets, or to create better malaria vaccines?

We probably need both approaches in the end, but only having the immediate problem approach is guaranteed to lead to local maxima.