Problems have hidden, repeatable structures. Here's my attempt to name them:

1. Smashed Watch
There are so many issues at once that fixing one has no benefit unless you fix others too.

2. Leaky Pipe
Fixing one problem causes the others to intensify. If you plug up one leak in a pipe leaking in multiple places, that increases the water pressure causing the other spots to leak more.

3. Shark Laser
A proposed solution is not aiming at a meaningfully important problem, so it doesn’t matter how well you get it to work or how much you enhance it.

4. Oil Land
A big problem is so close to being solved that the benefits will accrue to whoever first bothers to put a little effort into it.

5. Lead to Gold
A problem is so hard that humans aren’t even close to being smart enough or technologically advanced enough to solve it. We toil away pointlessly at trying to solve it.

6. Booby Trapped Garden
A problem is really hard to solve for reasons that are not at all apparent from the outside, leading to lots of attempts to solve it, all of them miserable failures.

7. Feature Creep
[...]

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First published:
June 14th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cisy9STMoFYwboTsy/the-hidden-structures-of-problems

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“The Hidden Structures of Problems” by spencerg

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“The Hidden Structures of Problems” by spencerg