> dismissing only the most pressing problems is a silly way to judge ideas
You are correct, but if you don't judge ideas on this metric then you risk becoming irrelevant to the vast majority of people, and you are not taken seriously when you say things like "we are going to revolutionize the world"
And yes, it is easy to pick apart those ideas, but that's exactly why more people (especially those who consider themselves talented, fortunate and ambitious) should be tackling them head on - because all the simple, naive approaches don't work.
Whatever you think about Facebook, it is not irrelevant to the vast majority of people. What was the pressing issue it was solving? Even the personal computer was not solving a pressing issue at the time. New products create the demand for it and the influence of it only makes sense in retrospect. There are not many solutions that are both achievable and solve obviously huge problems. If there were clear ways to solve these problems, tons of people will have already done it. We solve huge problems by first solving small ones and laddering up.
You are correct, but if you don't judge ideas on this metric then you risk becoming irrelevant to the vast majority of people, and you are not taken seriously when you say things like "we are going to revolutionize the world"
And yes, it is easy to pick apart those ideas, but that's exactly why more people (especially those who consider themselves talented, fortunate and ambitious) should be tackling them head on - because all the simple, naive approaches don't work.