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Comment by jihoon796 | Hacker News Reader

Who I am to judge what innovations are useful or useless to society? In a sense, one could very well argue that the market cap or valuation of a company is at least a decent proxy for "usefulness".

With that said, however, my personal opinion is different. Although I think innovation of any kind is great for society, what I'm frustrated by is the relative mindshare of where we focus our attention on.

I like to use the term "farsighted" - many people in SV are able to see very far distances into the future, but ignore some of the immediate problems that are right under our noses. That's what I'm frustrated by.

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One thing I've always found useful is asking the people I think of as having mis-allocated their attention. Very often they have good reasons for their decisions. It's surprisingly rare that they're actually ignoring the immediate problems right under their noses. It is very common that they don't share my assessment of what the resources they command could do if applied elsewhere, and understanding why is educational for me.

The other tool I find useful is to remember that my perception of where our collective mindshare is going is necessarily going to be less than fully informed. It can easily be quite far off the mark, leaving me thinking that a major problem is going completely unaddressed when there are in fact vast resources being directed at it without any visibility to me.

When you're focused on immediate problems that are right under your nose, you tend to produce solutions that are band aid solutions.

When you're more farsighted, you tend to look at the root cause of problems and try to find solutions that cure problems once and for all.

They do tend to take longer to come about, for sure. But which approach produces the most utility is very hard to prove. Is it better to equip people with mosquito nets, or to create better malaria vaccines?

We probably need both approaches in the end, but only having the immediate problem approach is guaranteed to lead to local maxima.

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