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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

I think that this is only half of what PG was trying to say. It's not just that hard work can be unpleasant - it's that hard work can be unpleasant and this blinds people to working on problems with large impact, simply because they will hard. He's describing a very particular failure mode of potential startup founders that he sees.

If this weren't a real problem - why are so few people trying to tackle actual problems that make millions of people miserable? Like health & sanitation in the third world. Or fixing the political process in the U.S. (and everywhere) so that people with less than a million dollars actually have a voice? Or matching up the millions of job seekers with the millions of jobs that go unfilled because there's nobody suitably skilled for them? Or finding a sustainable energy source so that we can maintain our lifestyle when the oil dries up?

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Lots of people are trying to tackle these "actual problems". There's just no money in it, so it doesn't get funded.

Or if there is money in it, people criticize things. Oprah has practically become a saint, for opening a school that graduates ~100 students a year. Foxconn provides hundreds of thousands of migrant workers with the money they need to send their kids to school, and they are practically the devil incarnate. It's complicated.

"""Oprah has practically become a saint, for opening a school that graduates ~100 students a year. Foxconn provides hundreds of thousands of migrant workers with the money they need to send their kids to school, and they are practically the devil incarnate. It's complicated."""

How good of Foxconn. If only they didn't make ten times the money or more off of each migrant worker while forcing him to work in shitty conditions capitalizing on the fact that they are kind of the only game in town and/or have agreements with fellow factory owners to keep the wages down/conditions bad...

Foxconn - revenue $59.3 billion, profits $2.2 billion (2010). They can't really afford to raise their costs that much. OK, a large part of their revenue might be components, but even then, they aren't exactly rolling in cash.

There is a simpler explanation: the perception of risk / reward for those problems is too low.

Reward = how fun the work is + potential payoff (money, recognition, etc.)

I don't think anyone is blind to those problems. Bill Gates is trying to fix sanitation in poor countries. I believe that's awesome. Would I do it? No, the risk/reward ratio doesn't work for me.

I agree with you. Especially if you don't have FU money. Your first priority in your mind is to avoid working your entire life. That's first and foremost. After you achieve that, you can start worrying about problems with more risk.

There are plenty of people working on sustainable energy. You just don't see more because it is largely still in the R&D phase- the problem is not executing the solution & monetizing, it is finding the solution. Renewables cannot yet pay for their own R&D, so they are inherently limited in research scale right now.

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