[akoboldfrying]

Agriculture. Plumbing. The printing press. Electricity. Vaccines. Fiat money itself, which is a technology that is better than the technology of barter, which is better than each person having to grow or make every material thing they need.

[jakelazaroff]

"How do we remove feces from our living spaces" and "how do we stop dying from pathogens" are not social problems.

[mrhottakes]

Those are perhaps the biggest social problems that humanity has ever faced.

[fragmede]

Toilet technology helped with the social aspects. There's a fascinating museum in India about the history of toilets.

[dghlsakjg]

I can’t think of many better examples of social problems than sanitation and public health.

[jerf]

I think it would be a reasonable definition of "social problem" that it requires two people to have it, and that they must have it in relation to each other, which is to say, some sort of social interaction or communication must be involved as well.

Sanitation is a problem for one person as well, as is health. Social problems arise specifically with the interaction of two people. You can't have a scam without two people, for instance.

Definitions that collapse the entire space under discussion into one category are useless. If sanitation is a "social problem" then everything is a social problem, and the reason why that is useless is just that a definition that does not distinguish has no utility. In mathematical terms, to say that something conforms to that definition yields zero bits of information. "Public health" is its own category. In the real world no two categories can ever be fully separated from each other but just because plausible scenarios can be spun out in which sanitation becomes involved in a social problem doesn't mean that on the whole it is much better understood and talked about as a separate category.

Crypto has social problems. If one person sits in a basement and "does crypto" by themselves who cares? They can declare they own as many basement-coin as they like. It takes a second person to have a problem.

[bee_rider]

The original post said plumbing, not sanitation in general. Plumbing mostly solves a problem that arises when you have large groups of people. An individual or a small tribe can keep the waste and drinking waters separate by walking downstream a bit.

[akoboldfrying]

I agree with you on the uselessness of definitions that don't distinguish anything, and I think your conceptualisation of a social problem as being something that requires multiple people to interact (like a scam) is useful, admits a very clean boundary, and deserves a name. I would call such a problem a purely social problem. But I think there is a broader concept of "social problem" that makes sense too, even though it lacks such sharp edges.

I think it's reasonable to say that a problem is a social problem to the degree that its severity as experienced by one person depends on other people's behaviour.

If I accidentally drop a rock on my own foot, this seems to be obviously not a social problem. But if I am more likely to be carrying a rock in the first place, or less likely to be wearing protective shoes, because of how society is organised, then to that extent I claim that it is a social problem. This is not an abstract example: Over time, changes in society's attitudes to dangerous kinds of work have directly, and indirectly through health and safety legislation, led to massive reductions in workplace harm since the Industrial Revolution.

Under this rubric, all it takes for a problem to be social is for it to be possible to imagine that society being organised differently would lead to a different level of suffering. Does this lead to nearly all problems being classified as social problems? Yes -- but that is not a problem in itself, that is just an accurate picture of reality! It is still useful -- indeed much more useful -- to place problems on a spectrum of social-ness; nothing "collapses" unless we are determined to make a black-and-white distinction.

[jakelazaroff]

In that case, what are examples of non-social problems you can think of?

[john_strinlai]

if you do not consider public health a social issue, what do you consider to be one?

[jakelazaroff]

You're putting words in my mouth. "Public health" deals with social problems regarding health, but it's a subset of "health" which also includes problems that are not social in nature.

There are absolutely social issues around vaccines — how do we fund their development? how do we distribute them? how do we convince people to use them? — but as a technology I would say they solve a problem that is mostly independent of human relationships.*

* Obviously, you could say that vaccines actually do solve a social problem because pathogens are often passed between humans, but I think then the definition of "social problems" becomes so broad as to be meaningless.

[john_strinlai]

>You're putting words in my mouth.

"how do we stop dying from pathogens" is like, the textbook public health problem. it's pretty much the question which the entire concept of public health spawned from.

so, if you specifically wanted to talk about the technology of vaccines or whatever instead of general pathogen prevention, you should just say that instead. i cant read your mind.

[Sharlin]

All problems are social problems in that sense, but that's not what I meant. And if fiat money (as in, a type of social contract) is a technology, then anything is a technology.

[munksbeer]

What did you mean? I can't really understand your first comment, and this one doesn't explain it any further.

[neonstatic]

I think the point that is missed is all of these solved real problems that needed solving. I feel over the last decade we have exhausted the obvious benefits of the Internet revolution and more often than not we were seeing clever technology being developed, that wouldn't solve any problems. Then long and painful search for applications of that technology would ensue. Cases in point: crypto, llms.

[api]

You’re comparing crypto and LLMs?

[neonstatic]

Yes. In fact, crypto is ahead, because it does have a legitimate use case. Two, actually - money laundering and sanctions evasion.