Do big problems have simple solutions?
John has said since 2010 that big problems have no easy fix, and from 2019 that long-term systemic problems demand long-term systemic solutions, repeating it in 2025. Hank agrees: in 2011 he called simple explanations flawed, and in 2021 and 2022 said simplicity is almost always a lie and big simple solutions are very rare.
Axis: clear fixes exist ... problems are complex; no magic bullet
Positions by date: 54 records in 54 videos. The position did not change in these records.
John
| date | how | position | video |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010-11-15 | first on record | John disagrees with anyone who says there is an easy solution to the deficit; balancing it means cuts and taxes nobody wants. | Hey! You! Fix the Budget! 00:01:57 |
| 2012-12-17 | restate | John says poverty is an incredibly complex problem with many interacting causes. | THE PROJECT FOR AWESOME 2012 IS HERE! Save the Children. 00:00:52 |
| 2013-08-20 | restate | John: US health care costs have no single cause and no simple solution - 'it is all of those things and more'. | Why Are American Health Care Costs So High? 00:07:15 |
| 2013-12-17 | restate | John says no aid organization will fix the disasters in Syria and the Central African Republic, because malnutrition and disease are also caused by war, politics and decaying infrastructure. | THE PROJECT FOR AWESOME 2013 IS UPON US! 00:02:05 |
| 2014-04-29 | restate | John praises Behind the Beautiful Forevers because everything in it is complicated: governments, non-profits, microfinance, religious organizations and people. | Influence, Airports, and the Nerdfighter Book Club 00:03:13 |
| 2014-06-10 (said on 2014-06-07, implied) | restate | John praises the book for complicating views of poverty, corruption, microfinance and charity and for resisting reductive readings of any ideology. | Our Old Friend Complexity: Behind the Beautiful Forevers 00:02:59 |
| 2014-07-22 | restate | John says the book offers no unambiguous victories and that we must embrace complexity or be lying to ourselves. | Ambiguous Victories and Real Progress: Behind the Beautiful Forevers 00:03:23 |
| 2014-08-26 | restate | John says easy narratives about poverty are overly simplistic: there is no magic bullet. | Food Is Weird: Understanding Agriculture in the Developing World 00:06:02 |
| 2014-12-02 | restate | John says delivering rehydration solution, like everything in global health and poverty, is fiendishly complicated, but complexity should not stop or intimidate us. | What You Eat Of Those You Love 00:02:09 |
| 2015-03-24 | restate | John says that instead of endless repeal-or-defend debate Americans should be frank about the choices, since, as Aaron Carroll told him, health care trade-offs are messy. | Is Obamacare Working? The Affordable Care Act Five Years Later 00:06:46 |
| 2015-11-24 | restate | John holds that drug-price hikes come not from one individual's asshattery but from a huge web of problems in US pharmaceutical markets. | Crime and Outrage 00:02:29 |
| 2016-10-18 | restate | John says US health care is a complicated, multifaceted problem and anyone selling simple solutions probably isn't telling the whole story, including himself. | Understanding Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton's Health Care Reform Proposals 00:08:46 |
| 2017-03-28 | restate | John says over-regulation, tort reform, marketplaces or competition are no magic bullet: there is no solution where everyone wins and no one loses. | Why Can't America Have a Grown-Up Healthcare Conversation? 00:06:30 |
| 2018-08-21 | restate | John says simply improving all the systems is, of course, not that easy. | SYSTEMS!!!! 00:01:56 |
| 2018-12-07 | restate | John says the problems are not simple but the solution is: the more humanity prioritizes the health of its most vulnerable children, the more likely they are to lead healthy lives. | BABIES! The 2018 Project for Awesome is here… 00:02:13 |
| 2019-10-01 | restate | John says corruption is a serious problem in poor countries, but the far bigger problem is how hard it is to build health, education and infrastructure systems in extraction-built communities. | Why Are Poor Countries Poor? 00:01:27 |
| 2019-10-22 | restate | John says the solution is not simple: not ambulances or clean water or electricity or more health workers, but all of them and much else; systemic long-term problems demand systemic long-term solutions. | Why We're Donating $6,500,000 00:03:03 |
| 2020-01-28 | restate | John says complex, systemic, long-term problems that demand complex, systemic, long-term solutions are easy to look away from, and thanks viewers for not looking away. | Looking Away (Again) 00:05:45 |
| 2022-01-04 | restate | John says the project taught from the start that long-term systemic problems demand long-term systemic solutions. | After 15 Years on YouTube, THIS IS THE MOST AMAZING THING 00:04:35 |
| 2022-02-01 | restate | John says the most important issues, from monetary policy to expanding healthcare access, cannot be boiled down to a lot of benefit at no cost; pennies are ridiculous but easy, important things are neither. | This Video Is Actually Three Videos 00:02:05 |
| 2022-09-30 | restate | Echoing Hank's video, John says simple solutions to complex problems are almost always inadequate: we want to be one flipped switch from a better life, but life doesn't work that way. | COMMIT TO THE BIT 00:00:24 |
| 2022-10-25 | restate | That framing is much easier with small issues like pennies than with big ones like the multifactorial injustice behind impoverished healthcare and education systems. | Instantly Debateable 00:02:26 |
| 2025-05-13 | restate | Repeating what he said in 2019, John says long-term systemic problems demand long-term systemic responses, so ongoing support is needed. → refers to Why We're Donating $6,500,000 | I Have the BEST News 00:04:32 |
| 2025-11-04 | restate | John says traveling with Doctors Without Borders to Tondo, a deeply impoverished community in Manila, reminded him that nothing about ending the TB crisis is easy. | The Real Question 00:02:26 |
| 2025-11-11 | restate | John calls the MCOE a statement of intent: the long-term, open-ended problems of maternal and child mortality in Kono are being met by long-term, open-ended support from the community. | John's Annual Psychophysical Decline 00:01:37 |
| 2026-10-08 | restate | Meeting so many nerdfighters on tour reminded John the internet is not merely bad; thinking it is fails to hold opposed truths, since the truth resists simplicity. | The Test of a First Rate Intelligence 00:04:23 |
| 2026-10-20 | restate | To bring about a world where tuberculosis is no longer the deadliest infection, John says, both biological and sociological problems must be solved. | Correcting a Mistake in Everything Is Tuberculosis · 50 x 50 Science 00:07:47 |
Hank
| date | how | position | video |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2011-01-19 | first on record | Hank holds that our simple explanations are flawed, sometimes dangerously, especially in political news analysis; accepting we lack answers is possibly the most important part. | YOU ARE WRONG! 00:03:30 |
| 2014-07-25 | restate | Hank says opinions on questions like ending the Syrian Civil War or creating US jobs are value-based guesses: no one knows the correct course of action, because there are too many options. | Towering Mountains of Ignorance 00:02:16 |
| 2017-11-17 | restate | Hank says nobody likes the complexity, but he worries about simplification because every change to the tax code has real impacts on real people; that is why it is complicated. | Why Are Taxes So Complicated? (The Musical?) 00:05:56 |
| 2017-12-15 | restate | Hank says the last mile problem is kind of why big ideas for fixing things often fail: at the last mile one overarching solution becomes tens or hundreds of thousands of hard-to-work-out solutions. | Why Big Solutions Fail 00:01:31 |
| 2018-01-05 | restate | Hank says communities, offline or online, are more complicated: they have many stakeholders with different needs and wants. | Making a Better YouTube 00:02:43 |
| 2018-07-27 | restate | Hank says the show looks like an intentional formation of a rift, teaching children that the problem is bad humans rather than hard problems, and that people who disagree are monsters. | Why Environmentalists Hate Captain Planet 00:03:32 |
| 2018-12-04 | restate | Hank says there are billions of variables, and we all get to affect them as we move through life. | When it All Seems Like Too Much 00:02:08 |
| 2019-05-03 | restate | There is a cost to leaving fossil fuels in the ground, smaller than fossil fuel companies and the politicians they pay claim, but real; there is no single enemy to defeat. | What Game of Thrones is Really About 00:03:42 |
| 2019-05-31 | restate | Hank says it is far too easy to create a villain standing in the way of some magical solution that isn't really there. | Uncomfortable Nuance: Natural Gas Edition 00:03:06 |
| 2021-02-12 | restate | Third and most accurate excuse: the systems are complicated and broken, with many stakeholders, and individuals have little power; Hank finds global health intimidating. | Doing Better 00:01:50 |
| 2021-04-30 | restate | Hank draws another implicit lesson: systemic problems are exactly the problems individuals are very bad at solving. | Are We the Baddies?? A Quick Look at a Discourse 00:02:26 |
| 2021-07-09 | restate | Hank says this is also normal: with big, hard problems, even a very successful solution will not be the best possible one, because there are too many ways to do it. | Wrong on the Internet 00:00:19 |
| 2021-07-16 | restate | Hank says it is easy to see only the problems of a large complicated system and want to throw it away, but usually you can't; the hard question is what actions make it better and how to do it differently. | Should You Abandon Social Media? 00:02:44 |
| 2021-08-13 | restate | Cap and trade has issues (free credits, cheap unproven offsets, lobbying for carve-outs), but it works and is used worldwide; it is just more complicated than it sounds, and it also raises revenue. | How We Fix the Climate 00:09:15 |
| 2021-08-27 | restate | Some of what we find will be complicated, but simplicity is almost always a lie. | Is it Better Not to Know? 00:03:46 |
| 2021-10-22 | restate | Hank's thesis: solving problems creates new problems. | A Tool with No Blood on It 00:01:56 |
| 2022-01-21 | restate | Big, hard problems are made of thousands of smaller problems, each with people working on it; if each of us focuses on one, we will be far more effective than all of us on all of them. | How to Be Hopeful About Doomsday 00:03:22 |
| 2022-04-15 | restate | Hank says it is also how internet communication works now: simple takes are easier to have and share, and clear problems are easier to spread than vague, uncertain solutions. | Are You Stuck in The Sad Gap 00:00:30 |
| 2022-08-12 | restate | The energy shift is unprecedented, perhaps except original electrification, and must happen much faster; it is more complex than anyone thinks and no one person understands all of it. | The Biggest Climate Bill of Your Life - But What does it DO!? 00:04:25 |
| 2022-09-16 | restate | Hank says this shows how complicated disease, epidemiology and public health are, and he is grateful to those figuring it out now and in the past. | Here's Why Younger People are Getting Shingles 00:03:13 |
| 2022-09-29 | restate | Hank says big simple solutions like solar roadways are very rare because everything is very complicated; soap may have been the last one. | The Kony 2012 of Roads - Solar Freakin' Roadways 00:02:26 |
| 2022-10-21 | restate | An unclear math problem is a poorly made one, but for almost any other problem unclarity is a good sign it is real; if the solution is clear, it is probably not big. | This 'Math Test' Changed How I See Humanity 00:01:27 |
| 2023-01-27 | restate | Hank wishes they could fix the whole system with one sweeping action, but since they can't, they must do what they can with what they have. | An Announcement 3 Years in the Making 00:03:28 |
| 2023-03-03 | restate | Hank doesn't think anybody has figured out a good and simple way to tease the bad parts of the many-to-many internet out from the good parts. | The Law That Made the Internet 00:03:33 |
| 2023-10-20 | restate | Hank says, though it sounds nihilistic, a cure for cancer cannot exist because there are at least hundreds of different cancers: we must cure cancers, which is more work. | My 'Injury' 00:03:35 |
| 2025-10-31 | restate | Hank says many problems are very big and actually solvable but have low visibility. | We Did It… 00:03:17 |
| 2026-04-24 | restate | Both cases share one problem: the people who need help or resources have no power over them; people who need housing have no sway in a community they don't live in. | The AI Question that No AI Person Asks 00:02:37 |
Dates are upload dates, which set the order. Where the speaker gives a different recording date in the video, it is added as "said on YYYY-MM-DD, implied" (derived from the date said in the video).