Hello everyone, my name is Alex and this is my first submission on LessWrong, so each answer to these questions is highly appreciated.
I would like to validate the following hypothesis:
Many valuable problems go unsolved not because of lack of talent, but because talented people can't find each other or the right problems to work on and they lack the tools to do so effectively.
Questions:
I am really looking forward to read your answers and am very thankful for everyone that takes the time to provide their insights.
The obvious problem in this question is that people can be wrong in estimating how talented they are, how important is a problem, how capable they are to contribute to the problem, and how much time would it take.
From my perspective, my problem seems to be that I am bad at communicating my ideas convincingly. A typical pattern is that I describe my vision to others, others say "that's stupid" (sometimes they provide a more sophisticated argument, such as "if this was actually a good idea, someone else would have already done it long ago"), and then... I mostly don't do anything about it, either because I do not have the necessary skills to do it alone, or because I am busy doing other activities that pay my bills. Sometimes, a few years later, someone else does it, and it is a great success. Very rarely, I do it myself, and it is a success (but not sufficiently large for people to trust me the next time, or to make enough money that I do not need a daily job anymore). This is further complicated by my problem figuring out how to monetize the solution, e.g. if the goal is public education, putting the project behind a paywall would destroy most of its potential value. Some of my ideas are illegal, e.g. involve violating copyright.
From the perspective of the Less Wrong community, my ideas are probably meh, because I have no experience with LLMs (other than as a user), many ideas are related to education, some involve translating stuff to Slovak language. Here are some that come quickly to my mind:
I admit that I didn't systematically try to get funding for my ideas or something like that. Unfortunately, I am not good at things like navigating bureaucracy, which would almost certainly be required. (Even using something like Kickstarter would require figuring out how to process foreign income in my tax reports, which sounds like a nightmare. Last time I tried to find a local accountant who would understand that, I couldn't.) So all I have is my free time, but after my daily job I am generally too exhausted to do anything meaningful. Plus I have small kids.
I am not specifically looking for the most important problems. I am noticing problems that annoy me, and sometimes I think there are probably many others in similar situation.
For me the problem is money. If someone gave me some kind of unconditional basic income, I would probably start working on something from the list above. Until then, I need to do the stupid things that bring food to my family.