New problems and new solutions

 I noticed that most successful solutions, either solve an old problem with new technology ( car solves the old problem of transportation) or new problem with old technologies ( lithography was used for the new problem of circuit boards)

Usually if you use new technologies to new problems you fail because you don't understand either. 

I am wonder if covid is a new problem or old, and if we must use old technologies or new.

It was new virus so the old technology of quarantine worked.

Once the virus is known, the problem is old and we can use new vaccination technologies, or medicines.

But maybe the medical field is different? And for new diseases, new medicine should be tried?

In 18 century they have the old technology of blood letting, which they applied to every new disease. It was an old solution to an old problem.From our stand point it was better to try something else.

The problem with blood letting was that they didn't had data to see how effective it is. If they could see under 50% efficacy, they could have abandoned it.

The other problem was that they didn't know much of diseases. They could notice common symptoms like fever, but they could not know if it was a virus or bacteria.

They could guess the transmission pathway, like John Snow did with cholera, but nothing more.

What they could do was to see efficacy of treatments, but at the time the only exchange of information was through journal and post. If they had internet they could have progressed faster.

So my advice is to tack between knowing you problem, and searching for a solution.

Knowing your solutions is easier and can be done beforehand, track your results to see the limits of your solutions, to know when to give up to them. But don't be very attached to your solutions. I know mathematicians and engineers who call their solutions, their babies. Sometimes you have to throw you solution overboard. You don't do this with your baby, do you?

Knowing you problem is harder, because your information rate is limited by the number is experiments you can do and what you can measure. IT is privileged, you can make tausend of experiments in a day and measure everything, medicine is  worse because you can't do experimts easily, and you can't measure everything.

Also data is scattered, and you must collect it. Do keep in touch with many people from your field.

The best way of understanding a new problem was to model it mathematically and solved on the computer, and compare it with reality. To solve it in silicon.

So IT and mathematical literacy is a must.

During this pandemic a mathematical simulation has shown with 2 months before hand that corona virus produces blood cloths.