"Instead of cures for cancer we got Angry Birds"
peternixey.com
peternixey.com
Meanwhile, your doctor in the hospital is stuck using some 1980's software, which drains the very life-force out of him by the amount of pain it inflicts with every use, but you'll never need a doctor anyway, not with this healthy-eating/exercising app, plus it's too hard to work on that with the regulations and all, and the carpeting in your apartment is moldy.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6106528
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guf0kNV7D1w
ps. On an honest note, I've been working both on apps of the "useless" type, and spend most of my time on working on "useful" medical apps, and fuck if it's not easy to see why no one thinks these areas "sexy", so bogged down in regulation and old entrenched players. But I still think, at least in the case of these super incubators, who have the connections, who have the access to the financing, the focus should be on something more than what it is right now.
Most of the problems with medical software is the doctors and medical administrators themselves. They get so used to be worshiped as Gods That Save Lives, they assume that they Know Everything About Everything. I've seen more software and business talent quit the medical software field than any other....
I quit the medical field because it's incredibly hard work and very difficult to succeed because of the additional hurdles (regulation, entrenched interests) unless you are a large corporation. And large corporations suck.
My friend tells the story of being in one meeting with the various doctors, and one of the elder ones made a snide comment about another doctor 'not being here long enough to understand how things are done in this place' - to which the reply was 'I've been here for 17 years'.
Myself personally, I worked as a neurology tech for four years, and the doctors I worked with were a broad mix. Some of them were the sweetest people you could hope to meet. Others were such money-grubbers they directly said to the pharmaceutical reps "don't give us 'gifts', just give us the money directly". In that broad mix were doctors so awesome that they write their own mouse drivers, to doctors that behaved just as xradionut mentioned.
Doctors are humans too, there are a lot of them, and they run the same kinds of personalities as other humans.
My doctor had to sell her private practice and join a medical business group, just to keep up with the new insurance/government regulations. Healthcare in the US is insane...
Seems like the perfect situation for making a software workflow and simply not permitting information to be input into Field X. Etc. Anyway, in this case, I think the software could be improved (modulo my slow learning).
Now, in general, I think that software can help us make the bureaucracy / regulation more tolerable by helping to convert medical intent into both medical action and medicolegal documentation.
Anyway, your point is very well taken.
Are you sure who was who? :)
I would bet that there is a gigantic initial market for the cure for cancer.
The objective requirement: in the success-case the project must have a large impact on the community (in Hamming's case, physicists; for strtups, an initial market / society at large)
The subjective requirement: the researcher must have "an attack" [0], i.e. a credible approach to a solution that others probably have not tried yet.
For the vast majority of SF Bay Area founders of tiny software companies, they have no "attack" on cancer.
This isn't exactly true but the truth that it hints at is largely about mass standardisation, accountability and global purchasing rules for large organisations.
The same applies at telcos, banks etc. You can turn an oil tanker around quickly.
Do what you love, and to heck with whatever anyone else thinks. I used to work on predicting baseball. And before that, even worse, performance management software!
Now I am lucky enough to work on "socially responsible" software, and enjoy it. But I don't delude myself into thinking I am curing cancer, and I don't think I ever could. But damn anyone else who thinks I should spend my time doing something to meet their own standards.
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When I was just over a year-and-a-half into my Ph.D. training, I had something of an epiphany. At the time, I was designing an experiment that would be part of a larger research course. As part of the work, I scaffolded out the entire research course to its eventual conclusion. Having finished this, I took a figurative step back...and realized that I would be long dead before the entire project could be finished.
I was 24 at the time.
Graduate school, and scientific research in general, has a way of slapping you upside the head with your own finite lifespan. The resulting problem, of course, is how do you convey to a non-scientist that the work you are doing is important, despite the fact that you will not live to see its conclusion?
I've often thought this is the great unsolved problem with capitalism. How do you convince shareholders to invest their money if you can only promise returns on a 100+ year schedule? I think the insurance industry might have some insights here, but I still haven't quite cracked this nut...
This is why it is scary that politics has degenerated to the point where even 4 year plans are becoming difficult.
- It does not guard against negative externalities: pollution, long term degrading employee health and safety, value extraction with no value creation (think stealing and other crimes). Here, laws and police/justice are needed to guarantee an even playing field.
- It does not guard against value capture by monopoly, be it natural or artificial monopoly. Here, state companies and anti-monopoly regulation are needed.
- It does not invest in positive externalities (think fundamental investigation in generic areas like math). Here, government funding of investigation is a good target.
- It does not guarantee its own persistence, when attacked by a different ideology (think national security). This is what justifies having the military.
Having the State intervene in the market to reduce these shortcomings should never be viewed as anti-capitalist, much to the contrary: it is essential to preserve capitalism.
For a very vivid example: large banks are capturing an exceedingly large added value from the market, and are creating negative externalities through risky behaviour. We have done nothing to contain this problem. Worse, we are generally failing to take the long view in planning government intervention in the areas government must operate, and are having the government act in areas where it shouldn't.
- Soviet Russia and Communist China had massive men-made environmental disasters.
- Most monopolies are created by the state sanctioned environment. Not all monopolies are bad. If anything that remotely resemble monopoly arise in relatively free market, it is because it serves the needs of the customers so well that it has out-competed all the other companies.
- If you dump hundreds of billions of dollars in something, sure, you might get some good out of it, but no one can quite measure if it was done efficiently or not. There's no good reason to assume to that such things would be have been only funded by government.
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Monopolies arising naturally do not imply that, for the society, the monopolistic status is the most efficient. It is the most efficient for the monopolist. Think of it as a local maximum. This is microeconomics 101.
If an investment in investigation produces mostly positive externalities, then the investor will not recoup his investment, even if the end result is better for the society as a whole. As such, these investments will not occur in free form capitalism, even though they would be positive for the society as a whole. I'm purposely removing risk from the analysis, as it does not affect the conclusion.
Genuinely curious: what specific returns do you promise on this schedule, if you could obtain all the resources you envision? If this question is unfair, could you be more specific on a 50- or 20-year schedule?
From the bit of science history I've read, it seems rare for any successful investigator to have a 100-year plan. They work on the problems that are of current interest, and later researchers do the same, and it's only in long hindsight that we see any sort of logical path.
Use the religion biz model. It works for stuff like that.
Another alternative is the non-profit model.
I always get a bit annoyed by people who claim to understand that life isn't some balanced chemical equation with swappable variables, but then display a contradictory logic. If you mention the "butterfly effect" they engage in a dissertation. Later you catch them off-guard and they're lamenting on brilliant minds being wasted on meaningless problems, or on people not eating organic food anymore, or music being too commercial nowadays, etc.
The thing that really gets me is not the lack of merit of such complaints, it's the refusal by people who emit them to extrapolate on the implications of their hypotheses. They somehow always assume that the alternate reality in their proposition is some sort of utopia.
Life is a huge mess, but as chaotic as it is, every little variation has an effect and a price. Just don't assume that you'll like what they are.
Case in point, Kinect. It should have been just a play accessory, but it's being used to help people with disabilities, like the wi-Go : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-17jRfX9Sw
And also aiding surgeons during operations as well as helping disabled children interact with their environment with more subtle gestures. http://kotaku.com/5950834/in-japan-the-kinect-may-soon-be-mo...
Just like cosmetics and other "vanity medicine" used in the West can have life-saving applications elsewhere, for now, we get Angry Birds. It may turn out to something else later on.
The point is, cumulative knowledge can lead to great things later on. It's the NASA trickle-down theory.
As a practical matter, it's more like "we got Angry Birds instead of some middling papers about some cellular pathways that are kind of interesting but ultimately not useful." Or more realistically, a bunch of smart kids got siphoned away from Wall Street and management consulting, and maybe big corporations like IBM or Oracle.
Research is hard and not everyone can do it. Progress on diseases will be slower than progress on new forms of entertainment (or productivity, as many startups are geared towards).
This all came to a halt in the '70s (just as the baby boomers were starting to be in charge - coincidence?). In the '80s, "greed is good" was practically a campaign slogan. The ideal of public service (make the world a better place, even at great personal cost) is still as strong as ever with many young men and women. But its proper outlets are sorely missing. You can e.g. join the Peace Corps and work to improve another country with hardly any resources allocated to you. Or, if you want to follow greed instead, you can join Wall Street and have discretion over millions of other people's money.
It's certainly not become impossible to improve the world in significant ways, but you just have to become very wealthy first; see Elon Musk, Bill Gates. So every young entrepreneur has to squeeze out some money at a low investment cost first. The route to great public service has thus become: 1. spend the most energetic and productive years of your life to build Angry Birds 2. make lots of money in subsequent financial and legal operations 3. balance family and retirement with building and running a foundation to cure cancer.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/04/capdevel.htm
Essentially, increasing competition drives down profit margins in existing market sectors. Companies respond by increasing automation so that they can generate arbitrage profits against the "average" price dictated by the cost of the generation of a unit of the good by their competitors. The other companies catch up, however, and this process itself is deleterious since profit is generated by accumulating the surplus value of the labor embodied in a unit of the commodity. As this process reaches it's nadir, the economic character of society is marked by speculation, increasing international tension, and market crashes. Once the fictitious capital that has outstripped the value in the real economy is destroyed, growth can begin anew. Based on Nikolai Kondratiev research, these growth and contraction cycles operate on approximately 30 to 40 year cycles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave
What's particularly fascinating (detailed in Trotsky's article) is how the growth / contraction cycles operate on human culture and thought. Thus 60 years ago, the United States could be a signatory to a Declaration on Universal Human Rights and today find itself denying that it's own citizens have a right to due process.
Anyways, I could go on, but I'd be rambling :)
Buffett offers some vague criticisms, intended I assume to mean something to his rivals in the trust-fund-gradual-diminution game. They mean little to someone outside that community. They seem especially unfair in response to a mention of Bill Gates. Gates is ending diseases. How is that kicking the can? How is that turning the world into "one vast market"?
You can cure a disease for the cost of a large video game development these days, and an election year of political donations in the US could be used to cure aging. Medical research in general is a sliver of the economic activity spent kicking leather balls around grassy fields.
This is the world. The only way to make it better is to do what you can to add to the sliver rather than to the circuses.
We do the beer and circuses because they're cheaper than large-scale human advancements. The Manhattan project was $30 billion. Apollo was about $135 billion. The interstate highway system was $400-500 billion. (Inflation adjusted).
Of the NIH budget, much less than 1% goes towards ways to intervene in aging I'm sorry to say. The NIA yearly budget is ~$1 billion, and of that very little has anything to do with actually altering the course of aging.
I do think aging based research is the future, I just worry that SENS is a boondoggle that could put us off aging research permanently.
Organ printing is getting sizable investment right now. That will do a good job at a lot of problems.
Being a scientist or engineer is fine, but is far from the only way to make the world better. Life would be very drab if all art and sport stopped tommorrow.
Shouldn't that say, "hero-worshiping wannabe-Elon-Musk entrepreneurship culture has to come to terms..."?
Because frankly, if someone handed me the kind of money Elon Musk has, I could work on ludicrously quixotic AwesomeCool stuff too.
No guarantees any of it would actually work or make money, of course, which is why the real business environment produces Angry Birds instead of "changing the world" (which is a lot harder than it sounds, since most changes aren't even that radical) every 6 months.
As the pitches to users and investors evolved, I realised I'd moved a long way from this and now mention just the numbers, just the personal benefits to the user.
No-one seems to care so much for any wider benefit... just the selfish* ones.
I haven't lost my faith, but I hope to build what I believe in as fait accompli rather than something needing individuals to think beyond themselves.
* Dictionary meaning, no offence intended or meant
And now: fuck off, downvoter Mafia.
People with good intentions ("attacking loneliness in cities and densely populated areas, and inspiring people to pursue their interests") are a dime a dozen, people who can actually deliver on their intentions are quite rarer.
The numbers and the benefits to the user are relevant, because if the numbers are 0 and the benefits are absent, you're not actually any closer to solving the problems you want to solve.
Cancer is so mind-boggingly complex that one person cannot even begin to look at ways to solve it on his own.
Think about web developers, for example. We can either develop some SaaS website in 6 months that will bring us something like $500/month, or we can attack the cancer problem for 30 years and pretty much guaranteed to get nowhere.
Granted, it won't cure cancer, but you'll save more lives at the margin than doing Zynga ads. (And, n.b., healthcare clients often have more than $500 available to spend.)
It's struck me that part of the reason people don't try to solve these types of problems because they just don't know the market at all. They solve problems they have exposure to.
Knowing what you know, do you think there's any scope for a "Meet the Market" mini-conference where people with actual problems (and budget) from, say, medecine come along and give a lecture on what problems they'd pay to have solved? Do you think that purchasers have enough knowledge about their own problems that they could verbalise them such that people could help solve them?
Is it annoying? Yes. Does it add cost and complexity? Yes. Are any of the requirements of dubious to nil security value in many cases? Yes. (+)
But HIPAA is not a barrier like "create a meaningful application from nothing" or "successfully navigate an enterprise sales purchasing process" is a barrier. After you've got a handle on what it asks you to do it is really anticlimactic.
+ I am required to have a document which explicitly states that I will discipline myself most severely for misuse of patient information. No joke.
Making software for government is like a two year bidding process. The barriers to entry are incredibly high when it should just be a case of, "Okay, you want X Y and Z as your most critical features, let's keep the initial product small, we can add features as we go along. It'll be done in two months and then we'll iterate."
Instead it's more like, "We're going to have bids for two years for the project and then we're going to want everything done in one pass."
The NHS tried to update their computer systems a while back, it cost them £12 billion and two contractors dropped out of the contract because they were being too difficult to work with. It's still not, I believe, fully deployed.
The BBC tried updating their media management system.... DMI, I believe it was called. And spent £98.5 million on it only to not get the product at the end of the day....
All for things that a reasonable software company could probably have done by iterating over features on a basic product fairly easily.
Then you have things like the Police computer system - which is laughable in its antiquity and difficulty to use. I think there was an article on here quite recently about the awful 911 system.
You know? Things need to change concerning regulation before I think we're going to be able to adequately address those sorts of problems. Otherwise you're going to get these monster projects that effectively have to be done all in one go, which seems like a recipe for disaster.
The not-so-subtle subtext was that "I, erm, actually sell software which does pretty much exactly this." The how, in relevant fashion: create software which does appointment reminding phone calls for, without loss of generality, HVAC contractors. Read up on HIPAA requirements and talk to people who've done it before. Do some very boring paperwork and not-all-that-impressive technical work for ticking off the boxes. Start landing hospital clients, through a combination of slackadaiscal meat-and-potatoes SEO and being a lot more hungry for their business at the low end than the competition is.
I don't typically compete in or win two year bid cycles. I go after smaller projects in the $X,000 to $X0,000 a year range. The sales process often involves convincing a single nurse or office manager that I'm not some slick sales guy from the big city who is going to sell her $10,000 of software where she needs $2,000 and then never be there for her if it breaks.
Your mileage (kilometerage?) may vary in the United Kingdom.
You can't just set up a service with a Facebook log in and have people connecting medical information, so it's not something that's going to end up getting viral or posted on blogs or TechCrunch, and the only people that are going to see your service are the ones that work for our clients.
I can't even put 99% of what I do on a regular basis into a portfolio or anything because of these regulations.
I guess my point is there _are_ companies doing things like this, while being successful and social conscious, they just won't be publicized like Angry Birds or the Find-Vegan-Bacon-In-SF-Apps.
The hard problems do have a few crazy people attempting them, but they get very little support -- as opposed to support and often funding for an app that lets you share your cat pictures.
And I think that's why we're in a lull. HN itself has become boring. (Have you noticed?) Without the crazy research kamikazes, we aren't going anywhere.
We have (essentially) cured certain types of cancer. Testicular for men, skin melanoma in general, Hodgkin's lymphoma in young people. We are making tons of progress in cancer research, and we are making tons of difference in both quality of life, length of life, and survivability. Heck, my mother died of cancer, one with bad statistics, but it was almost entirely painless, and the treatment was by and large not horrible. That wouldn't have been true just a few decades ago.
Sure, you could join such a team and possibly end up being a part of the cancer cure, if you're lucky.
That's quite different from what we see with solo projects and startups.
Instead of trying to build newer and bigger weapons of destruction, mankind should be thinking about getting more use out of the weapons we already have.
Let's explore this topic for three minutes, with Jack as our guide.
An effective way to prevent cancer is to stop causing it, and cigarette smoking causes cancer. Convincing smokers to quit is an unambiguous way to save lives. I used to wonder if the three years I spent as a cancer researcher would have been better spent wandering the streets like an end-times prophet, trying to convince people to put down their cigarettes.
(Don't get me started on the tanning booths.)
Unfortunately, cigarette smoking is a very strong habit and habits are hard to break. But part of the process can involve replacing one addictive habit with another. Angry Birds (plus, perhaps, a sequence of nicotine patches of decreasing strength) is a much healthier addiction than smoking.
Another effective way to prevent cancer is to take the safe and effective products of our expensive cancer research and actually deploy the damn things. We have an effective vaccine against HPV, which causes cervical cancer in women and throat cancer in men, but the vaccination rate lags terribly in, um, certain countries:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/health/hpv-vaccine-not-rea...
Curing HPV-based cancers is no longer a technical problem. It is a marketing problem. (And, if you haven't been vaccinated against HPV, go ask a doctor why not!)
Finally, we should be honest: Cancer is a very difficult problem, perhaps an intractable one, and for the foreseeable future we'll treat it as we've done for decades: With painful, disfiguring, debilitating, demoralizing surgical, chemical, and radiation procedures. I'm not looking forward to that, if and when the day arrives. But, if I go into treatment, I'm going armed with the best damned mobile entertainment I can find. Games, music, streaming movies, Twitter threads, YouTube kittens, you name it. And I will daily bless the people who took the time to make my existence just a little less miserable.
Many thousands of people are treated for cancer every day. Some of them survive significantly longer, or are significantly happier, as a result. None of the many, many people who work tirelessly to treat the sick are ever credited with "curing cancer," though that is what they do, every day, one person and one day at a time.
I worked as a cancer researcher for three years. It was kind of embarrassing. People tend to fawn over you. You get a lot of credit you don't deserve. I never cured any cancer that I know of. I gave cancer to a lot of mice. Few of them ever recovered.
Downstairs in the shop were some machinists. They didn't have Ph.D.s. They made custom radiation shields for patients undergoing radiotherapy. When a beam of cell-destroying radiation blasts the tumor inside, say, your head, you want to be sure it blasts as little of the rest of your head as possible. Your future depends, in part, on the quality work of the machinist who carefully builds your radiation shield, just for you, according to the plans drawn up by your friendly medical physicist.
These people cured cancer. For all I know they've been laid off by now, replaced by a terrifying molten-lead-extruding 3D printer or something. But they should be proud. People are alive today because of their work. People survived long enough to see graduations and weddings because of their work. People suffered less because of their work.
If we ever really do "cure cancer" in the grand-visionary sense of having a magical vaccine against all cancer, people will rapidly become bored of it. Every fifty years or so there will be a resurgence of cancer because folks will have forgotten what it was like, but the rest of the time nobody will care. There will be a small but crucial guild of people who guard the knowledge and procedures for keeping cancer at bay for all humanity, and nobody will know their names except at industry conferences.
But that's okay. This is how life really works. It's really big and you live your part of it. Only in the movies does a bright light shine down out of the sky when you do good things.
There is a dizzying array of diseases, cancers and traumas that were death sentences in 1960 that are completely curable today. If I were born in the late 40's instead of the late 70's, I would be an invalid living in a room somewhere due to a back injury. Instead, because of modern surgical techniques, I missed six weeks of work ten years ago and are 100% fine today.
So I'm not going to sneer at entrepreneurs who invent video games or make movies or start a laundromat or who sell t-shirts in a resort town. They find places where demands are unmet and fill them. If for you, the opportunity is curing cancer, good for you. If it's hocking t-shirts on a boardwalk, good for you.
I think games are something of a poor example, since they clearly do bring happiness to people at least, but the financial industry seems to spend inordinate amounts of energy and human capital shaving milliseconds and tenths of a percent off trading strategies.
Imagine if we had some of those people being paid $300k salary + $300k bonus instead working on vaccines, or new antibiotics? Clearly the skills aren't transferrable, but there's a brain drain to finance that is unfortunate, and I think startups suffer some of the same social-good-to-reward-ratio problems
When currencies were priced every second market makers had to set a spread that would protect them from market variance within that one-second period, as that time period shrunk the amount of risk dropped as did the spreads.
Think about the thousands of currency transactions that had to happen for your smartphone to exist. It makes a huge difference to international trade when you can pay a lower premium to exchange currencies.
Just because you don't understand the value something provides, it doesn't mean that it doesn't provide it.
My local grocery wants to sell bananas for $1.50 a pound, but I only want to pay $1.00. Why isn't there a market maker buying and selling these bananas thousands of times per second to reduce the spread between me and my grocer so we can meet in the middle?
oh right, it's because the market takes care of that for us. If others are happy paying $1.50 the grocer will stay at that price and I'll have to accept it or go without my bananas. If most buyers agree with me the grocer will have to lower their price if they want to sell the bananas. No market maker is needed.
One of the fundamental purpose of a market maker is ensuring that both the supply and demand sides are capable of transacting when they want to, even if the supply and demand side don't necessarily want to trade at the same time.
So say the farmer only wants to sell bananas on a Monday and you only want to buy them on Thursday, so you can never do the transaction. So your grocer by buying the bananas when they're available and selling to them when you want them is in fact taking on some of the role of a market maker.
The reason that bananas don't need high-speed market making however is that the underlying supply and demand for bananas is pretty stable (I'm just guessing here; I don't know anything about the banana market). With currencies the supply and demand is in constant shift, everything from news events to someone making an online purchase in a foreign currency contributes to the shift. So a large part of the premium you pay for currencies is to manage that risk of the underlying supply/demand shifting. So by reducing that risk you can have lower premiums.
Say your grocer bought their bananas at $1 and was selling them at $1.50, what percentage of that 50 cents do you think goes towards managing the risk that the demand for bananas will collapse and the bananas might not be worth $1 any more ? - I'm guessing none of it because the bananas will likely spoil before the price of bananas shifts that much. Hence reducing that risk is pointless in the banana market.
HTH
To the point that the word market is often used for small stores.
If you had to buy bananas off a truck when it happened to be in town, you'd get a lot less bananas and you'd pay more for them.
I can take this one step further, and actually go to many of the farms around here to buy produce right off the plants, by picking it myself. Even less convenient, but it makes for a nice weekend outing, and the prices are even cheaper.
Note that in both cases the prices drop for me and stay the same for the farmer by cutting out middle-men: the shippers, the grocer. By your terms, those are the market makers, and while they make produce commerce more convenient they're certainly not reducing costs for anyone. They're taking profits out of the parties on the two ends of the transaction.
I'll grant you that, in my example, the middle-men provide an essential service by giving me access to produce that is not produced locally, and by making that access more convenient. Neither of those apply to the financial markets though: as purely information-driven markets, they're accessible 24/7 from anyplace in the world. So again, what value are the market makers actually providing to the buyers and sellers of financial products?
As far as financial markets, reliable prices are worth something (even though a reliable price is 'just information'). I agree that in heavily traded instruments, providing liquidity becomes a fairly abstract value, but if you are a large institution, having someone that will readily purchase enormous amounts of shares is a valuable service. For a lightly traded instrument, being able to sell it is also a valuable service.
I don't see enormous value in having lots of people spending lots of money chasing pennies, but I have trouble getting worked up about it. I suppose what it comes down to is that I am skeptical that rules designating who gets the tiny bit of slop available in financial transactions will be any more fair than the present system (where various HFTs are competing for the slop, often by essentially offering some of it to the parties in the transaction...).
This would also curb the behavior of the large institution. They shouldn't be able to dump all of their holdings of a stock like that at a high price if there aren't real buyers at that price. The institution should be forced to chase the price down to pick up enough buyers for the whole position. If they still can't move it all, then they're holding a worthless stock. Sucks for them, but investing is a gamble and sometimes you lose your investment. You should've invested in a more valuable company.
The theme I'm getting at is that I think that market makers definitely alter the dynamics of the market, as they claim to, but contrary to their claims they do it in a way that benefits themselves and other financial institutions to the detriment of non-financial-industry investors and the companies and other real-value instruments (bond originators, mortgage borrowers, etc) being traded.
There are some issues with HFT that I don't like, where different players are getting different access to information. Beyond that, I have trouble with the argument that parties that aren't me should have to engage in transactions that I like the shape of (or the other way around, should be prevented from engaging in transactions that I don't like. I'm using transaction here in the sense that both parties are acting freely...).
That doesn't mean that market makers don't provide value, just that they are not necessary.
I don't think the argument is that these optimisations don't bring value; it's that they don't bring as much value to society as an effective cancer treatment, or a new technology that cheaply and cleanly purifies water, or [insert other breakthrough here].
People who dismiss the value of complex derivatives and HFT and other Wall Street shenanigans don't necessarily lack understanding, and it's obnoxious to say so. They just add perspective to that understanding. People who obsess over prices and ignore true value are sociopaths and should be dealt with as such.
I'm imagining it, and I'm imagining righteous populist anger about excessive salaries and profits in the pharmaceutical industry.
* The threat (and possible upside) of strong AI is too great to ignore.
* We should be spending as much effort on understanding and developing friendly strong AI as we can, to outcompete any efforts that will produce a malevolent strong AI (whether intentionally or not).
* Ergo, everyone should maximise their gross income by becoming a high-flying lawyer, derivatives trader, or similar, live off a minimal income and give the rest to a strong AI research group.
Which is fine, except that the economy is, by nature, a huge web of networked interactions. The ways in which those interactions are linked is probably very hard to discern.
Which is to say that I think the kind of redistribution of wealth to good causes that people are calling for is worthwhile, but only to an extent. It's the problem that utilitarianism has - it requires perfect knowledge of the outcomes of the various choices you could make.
As others have said, the thing you develop might prove useful in treating some disease. Or the skills you pick up while developing it might lead to down a more 'socially responsible' path. Or the thing you make might produce utility for someone else and lead them to contribute to an important cause (e.g. the entrepreneur who sets up a coffee shop in town isn't curing cancer, but the people who now have a place to gather and collaborate might).
At the same time, I'm happy Mitchell and Webb stayed in comedy rather than attempt to cure cancer.
If you feel a calling to a particular space or venture, follow it - even if its Angry Birds. On the other hand, if you think your calling is in medicine, think well before attempting a go at this "golden age of entrepreneurship", as chances are you'll regret not doing what you love.
Here are some ideas that would be great, if someone could figure out a clever way to implement them:
1.) an app that allows the discovery of important papers that have received no attention, perhaps because they were published in journals that have low prestige
2.) an app that can detect possible bias on the part of the researchers (perhaps a tool that combines data about grants received from Big Pharma to papers that seem to prove the effectiveness of Big Pharma's drugs). At the very least this might protect some researchers from wasting time doing follow-up research based on a paper that is false.
3.) apps that offer different color encodings to DNA information to reflect different theories of the how DNA works, and how DNA damage contributes to cancer. In the same way that in Emacs you can get different color schemes for looking at your Java code, it would be useful to be able to easily format and color DNA sequences, based on the various theories regarding how non-coding segments effect the overall functioning of DNA -- this would be especially useful now, when there is as yet no dominant theory about exactly what roles certain non-coding segments play in the life of our cells.
These are 3 apps that would be helpful to researchers and which face no regulatory hurdles.
I do not offer these examples to say "We should all be working to cure cancer", though the thought is not completely unreasonable given that close to 25% of all Americans die of cancer. But rather, I offer these 3 examples simply to challenge glib assertions that programmers can't work on a problem like cancer because it is too hard -- rather, there are a million small tasks that programmers could undertake that would help the overall effort.
The problem is that there is a big mismatch in expectations between developers and researchers: researchers are not accustomed to paying for software. Most developers in bioinformatics are other researchers, who are self-taught programmers paid by their grant funding or university, not by software sales. The quality of software is usually quite low, but it is at least free.
But I still think there is a large pool of developers out there who may work for BigCo during the day, but want to tinker on something meaningful in the evenings or weekends. Biologists and bioinformaticians need to get better at advertising needs and harnessing the kind of community involvement that has made Linux/Apache/etc so successful.
1. Entrenched interests protecting journals: journals are not all freely available nor indexable. This isn't a software problem, it's a business and access problem. Just ask Aaron Swartz! Oh wait ...
2. Detect possible bias? There is almost ALWAYS a possible bias in drug research. You need to detect actual bias, or, as the FDA calls it, a fraudulent drug study, which involves reading the papers and so very much more.
3. Have you written DNA software? I have ... it's not easy. Plus, there are DNA manipulation tools on the market, google "dna manipulation software" this isn't an unsolved problem.
Besides, is the Internet really an accomplishment by Silicon Valley and its startups? ARPA and BBN certainly don't fit the model.
Well, look at Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and reddit. These are "Silicon Valley startups". They are tools that empower minorities to do things. Here's a video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBeNfSoMqjY ) of someone who started @EverydaySexism on Twitter, talking about how that project has empowered her and lots of other women with compating low level sexism. A "trivial" website like twitter is fighting sexism (while also have lots of cat pics and memes).
The big game changer with the internet isn't so much the technology, but the fact that so many mundane average people are on it. For that we can thank Silicon Valley's push for "growth" and "user count", the end result is people (incl. marginalized groups) having access to the tool. It's not the technical superiority of the tools, but the widespread availability of the tools, that is the game changer.
None of those are Silicon Valley startups, and Facebook and Twitter never were Silicon Valley startups.
My conclusion is, that most people simply aren't bothered with cancer research until they get it (apparently in these areas, about 50% of the population do at some point in their lives).
This is part of the problem, coupled with the "immediate reward versus distant punishment" bias. Another is the obvious tragedy of the commons here. Once the research is successful it also benefits those who chose not to contribute so fund it please while I spend my $5 on a tasty cookie.
Personally, I want to do more than flashy games and entertainment that are essentially luxury products for the happy few that can afford a smartphone and a computer.
That being said, it's weird for a Sunday Times writer to be pointing fingers at game developers for what they are doing instead of, I don't know, curing cancer themselves.
"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."
The key word here is old. Society cannot conjure up a solution for cancer, that takes dedication which only a few people who are interested in the topic can provide.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=cuc...
"(Money) gives you a position in time when you're at that second level to be a good citizen of your community. To work on community projects. To be a good neighbour."
The selfish pursuit of money allows us all to make the world a better place once we have no need for it anymore. Don't let anyone fool you into thinking that trying to make money is immoral. It is the most moral thing you can do for society.
"A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure."
At a certain point, you don't get special treatment if you came up poor. I know a guy who has been to jail a couple of times, never finished university and still makes six figures.
Also, "anyone" != "everyone".
On another note, look at Bill Gates, made a fortune with software, now spending it on charity. Maybe that's a route that is more reasonable.
People have been curing cancer, admittedly at variable success rates, for decades. Medical industrial complex is much older. You're going to have to hold your nose pretty bad to eliminate cancer. Your triumphs will be via paying off political candidates to purchase laws, and patent warfare. Maybe something the "smart kids" do in the lab will matter, but probably not.
On the other hand mobile apps aren't as corrupt yet, therefore they're effective, therefore you can make money and businesses in them... for awhile, before they get tainted.
Weren't the first PCs mostly toys for hobbyists?
In addition...
Brain power is not a fungible resource. You cannot divert excess brain power to any task you choose. It's a highly specific, highly targeted resource which seems to me to be horribly capricious and (ironically?) irrational in its choice of target.
In other words, the answer for any app entrepreneur when asked "Why didn't you work on a cure for cancer?" is simply "Well, I didn't think of that. I thought of an app."
I like the apparent contradiction in the Telegraph article too:
"Hackers/entrepreneurs used to invent revolutionary things like the PC!"
"People are only using personal computing devices for trivialities!"
Either personal computing was a great idea or it's a platform for the trivial and banal, you can't have it both ways.
Well, you can. Cheap personal computers unleashed an amazing amount of creativity in all areas of human endeavor
and
they also enabled that power and creativity to be used for trivial, disposable things, as well as scams and harmful things.
Human life went online, with both the good and the bad.
>Either personal computing was a great idea or it's solely a platform for the trivial and banal, you can't have it both ways.
Even then I concede that this was a straw man for the Telegraph journalist's position. How embarrassing.
Obviously the PC is revolutionary given that people can now do things that were impossible/difficult before, like meeting people from disparate communities (see: HN), freely communicating with distant family/friends, becoming citizen journalists through blogging, finding their place in hard-to-find or sparsely-located communities, so on.
If there were no Angry Birds, or countless other "does it matter" products, the amount of money that would be available for charities or research of all kinds would be drastically reduced.
These "does it matter" products create wealth that did not previously exist. Yes, create wealth. They don't steal from research. They create economic value that did not exist before.
There is nothing systematically broken here. However, the system absolutely does break when some authoritarian power decides that they shall decide which products shall be produced, and how any existing wealth shall be apportioned. It has NEVER worked in the history of humanity. Call it unjust if you wish, but one's sense of social justice does not change the way economies function. An economy is based on human action. Humans act on fundamental needs. Sometimes they act irrationally. Nevertheless, on a scale, they act in ways that are predictable and consistent. The principles of human action cannot be changed. They can only be observed and exploited. Any economic system that is predicated upon changing human action will fail.
- Making Angry Birds is a whole lot easier than curing cancer, which is not even a single disease.
- People need to eat, want to enjoy themselves, all that stuff. To do this, you need money. What's the easier way to do so? Making Angry Birds.
- People want raised status. You'd get a lot more from curing cancer(s), but it would take so much longer, and you're not guaranteed it'll really work. Making Angry Birds is the much better option.
- You need piles of money to do research to cure cancers. You also need time. Short-termism (caused by the other side of accountability, transparency, and demands for ROI) means you may not get either of these. So where does the money come from, and is what you're getting enough? If it is, do you have time (and enough of the right type of skilled researchers) to do so? Modern medicine and research is not an individual endeavor; it requires teams, sometimes large ones.
Along these lines, if you believe a government's number one job is to protect people from harm (and you're inclined towards positive liberty), why is there virtually no government support for anti-aging research (in the first world, disesases of age of edged out many other killers), or life extension/immortality research? "Natural causes"/"dying is part of the natural cycle"/other excuse based on cultural beliefs/ideology are so ingrained our cultures/ideologies as just being something we have to put up with, that we haven't even gotten off the ground with this stuff.
Maybe the short version here is "we don't collectively care enough about things that kill us in a way tha matters or are even actively opposed to fixing them" to do anything about it. Change the culture, change the world.
No one will let me work on cancer. That door is closed. But for some reason people will pay me to write "useless" software. I'd imagine many of us are in this boat.
Add some new features or fix some bugs in IGV or other common projects and you'll be helping thousands of cancer researchers be slightly more productive.
Why is it so obvious that curing cancer is the right thing to do as opposed to engaging in economic and cultural activity, which has been the norm for mankind as long as we have been around? (and by the way provides the social stability that is the very basis for any kind of progress at all)
What's worse is the implication that there is a cure for cancer and all it would take is a few talented entrepreneurs to tackle the problem in an directed effort (which, to my knowledge, is happening anyway but with limited success while chemo therapy is still around, which was a by-product of war efforts)
That is why.
What it means to be diagnosed with various cancers today is not the same as what it meant 30 years ago.
There is a ton of money being thrown at "cancer", which is a large set of incredibly complex problems. I even believe that there is never going to be "a cure for cancer", while we will be able to manage and even "cure" most types of cancer during the next two decades (IMHO).
But it's a tough problem which doesn't lend itself to YC-style founder teams or extreme implementations of lean entrepreneurship.
I think an interesting way to frame this problem is to take the theory that entrepreneurs should solve problems close to them as fact.
If we do this then we have two related problems. Why aren't people close to big problems becoming entrepreneurs? Why aren't entrepreneurs closer to big problems?
A solution to the problem of "useless" apps might come from finding ways to bring big problems to entrepreneurs, or making it easier for those closer to big problems to become entrepreneurs.
Thoughts?
Ie. I hypothesize (2) >> (1)
Not that different being an entrepreneur from being a cancer researcher.
We slowly advance in all areas, whether that be beating cancer or boredom.
* Thanks to video gaming, we got super-high-powered but cheap graphics.
* Thanks to people's seemingly insatiable appetite for pornography, we got the VCR and eventually, home internet.
* Thanks to people's desire for conquest, we got natural selection and world exploration.
Nature is boundless. From every great evil, eventually, comes great good. This isn't an endorsement of evil, but of nature's resourcefulness. Humans using technology are no exception.
I don't like Zynga (not to lump Angry Birds in with Zyngarbage) and what they do, but it's not like one could, if given majority ownership of the company, walk into their office and say, "Okay, we're going to sequence oncogenes now". You can't really fault them for not curing cancer, because they aren't set up to do it.
All that said, I think there is truth in the argument that VC lends itself to frivolity. VCs are no longer investors, so much as detachable managers. The problem is that a non-expert can't evaluate cancer research. On the other hand, any moron can evaluate and run a "social" web app.
If you treat executive positions as political favors to be handed out to one's cronies, and you're running biotech companies, you'll destroy them, because one actually needs to know things to run biotech. On the other hand, with the hot "social" companies, no one will notice the change.
Just as reality TV survived the end of its hype cycle, because it was so much cheaper (no writers or professional actors) than scripted television, so it is with social media. Talent is the scarce resource, and the nice thing about the social world is that one doesn't need much of it. They're marketing experiments; they can back-fill with solid technology later on in the process.
The dark secret to this is that there are a lot of middle-aged MBA types who never learned to understand technology, and haven't actually worked in over a decade, but want something to manage. As investors in cancer research, they'd be passive philanthropists; as paratrooper managers they'd have no clue. On the other hand, social media they can take over and run because it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what those companies are doing.
It's not like anyone hasn't already thought of this, but what other choice does the inidividual have if they doesn't want to dedicate their whole time to fight very systemic and perhaps even an inherent human shortsightedness?