<story><title>The problem is we don&apos;t understand the problem</title><url>http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/the-wrong-problem/#</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>Its axiomatic that every proposal should start with a statement of the problem.&lt;p&gt;MacCready&apos;s insight was that building a human-powered aircraft was &apos;easy&apos; if you knew how to build such a craft. (And in fact today you can take his work and build your own Gossamer creation) So the challenge was this was a search for a new airplane design methodology to explore the airplane design space, and that this &apos;meta&apos; problem had a much different form of solution than the stated problem of &apos;build an airplane that does this.&apos;&lt;p&gt;The applicable insight for entrepreneurs is that if someone thinks solving problem &apos;x&apos; in a cost effective (i.e. monetizable way) is &quot;impossible&quot;, then the search is for new and different ways to solve &apos;x&apos; which are more efficient than the well known ways. Too meta I know, sorry.</text></comment>
<story><title>The problem is we don&apos;t understand the problem</title><url>http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/the-wrong-problem/#</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rvkennedy</author><text>This article summarizes my approach to just about every technical challenge I&apos;ve encountered since school. In grad school in particular, I could never get my head around the approach of uploading code to a Unix server and running it blind overnight. Instead, I would write it in Windows, but with a graphical display of results coming out in minutes rather than hours. The errors would then stand out glaringly. This is not to argue Windows v Unix as of course you can do it either way on both platforms. But calculations you can see working are priceless.</text></comment>