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Comment by maj0rhn | Hacker News Reader

The unstated assumption in this blog post is that any [ethical] idea that makes money is worthy.

I would hope that persons of talent aspire to higher goals. A better measuring cup is of trivial benefit to humanity. A new dessert is actually a detractor.

If all you can do is make new measuring cups and new desserts then, by all means, do it and support your family. But if you think you bring something special to the world, try to improve it in a significant way. If that means investing a few years of your life to go to nursing school (for example) and learn a profession of value, then make the investment. You will then find ample opportunities to innovate, and bring benefit to your fellow man.

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I find this post incredibly off.

You are basically saying that it is pointless to be a pastry chef, and that joy in food is not significant.

I would be very, very, careful about judging what is significant to humanity and what is not.

You be the judge, but be fair about it. Does the world need more pastry chefs, or does it need more nurses? Does it need more people trying to improve on fresh strawberries, or does it need more water engineers to keep millions of people from dying of water-borne diarrheal diseases every year?

It's an easy calculation if you think big (which is what people of talent should do). If you think small, then, indeed, you can get whatever answer you want.

You're assuming that people are interchangeable cogs.

They aren't.

Most pastry chefs would be incompetent and unhappy as nurses or engineers, and vice versa.

> Most pastry chefs would be incompetent and unhappy as nurses or engineers, and vice versa.

This, though, is a subjective judgement too—even if presented as fact. Not that I disagree with your point or something.

Edit: come to think of it, it seems unlikely that many chefs were given a chance and tried training and working as nurses or engineers. So yes, I disagree with your point as well, not just scorn at subjectivity of the argument.

There is also the simple fact that there aren't enough nurses, and there aren't going to be. Baby boomers just didn't have enough kids to ensure a decent level of human care. Look at the numbers.

One thing's for sure : one person cannot make a difference here.

I'd disagree. If someone figures out the principles underlying an effective anti-Alzheimer vaccine, or anti-sarcopenia vaccine, that will be a "difference" no matter what definition is applied.

And if those Water Engineers are consumed with their jobs - and constantly stressed and depressed by the poor standing of the world - and cannot seek little pleasures in things like pastries or a craft beer or a street performer, would you say they would perform to the best of their abilities?

Could Earth use more Water Engineers? Certainly. Should people with passion be forced into pursuing careers that utilize their talents better? No way.

>Should people with passion be forced into pursuing careers that utilize their talents better? No way.

I agree with that statement but what you're saying is Peter Parker should not be forced to be a Spider-Man or Bill Gates should waste his billions on parties because he likes to party.

I'm not trying to sound socialist it's just the world would be a much better place to live if people with power and talent really took responsibility and made a good choice.

Generally people with extreme gifts or talents (and specifically the 2 examples you mentioned) find passion in their skillsets so the argument that they should do that anyways is somewhat unnecessary. And the ones who don't most likely have legitimate mental issues that would prohibit them from contributing at a consistent level. Of course there are deviations, but physchological studies have more than adequately shown the large deviation of mental stability in truly gifted individuals.

My argument is made for "normal" people.

And I don't think your opinion falls in the realm of socialism, fyi.

> physchological studies have more than adequately shown > the large deviation of mental stability in truly gifted > individuals

This is a common misconception. If, for example, one looks at physicians as a group (the occupational class with the highest so-called IQ), they are in general more stable and mentally healthier than the rest of the population.

If one ventures into the realm of savants, then those people are, by definition, not normal, so anything goes. But they are small in number.

"A better measuring cup is of trivial benefit to humanity. A new dessert is actually a detractor."

Disagree in both cases. A "better" measuring cup would be one that either saved time (freeing it for other productive uses) or provided more accurate measurements (reducing the number of ruined recipes and food waste).

A new dessert provides pleasure. And no, pleasure is not bad. Gluttony can be.

This perfectly illustrates the difference in worldview between a capitalist and a socialist, and you so clearly see the problems with both.

The capitalist argument is essentially that anything that saves time/money/... is worth it, if people pay for it and it's self-sustaining. But the criticism of this position is valid too : what if caring for people is not worth it ? Will we simply not care for people ? How will this affect you ?

The socialist argument is that certain things are to be constant at any price, like nursing. Problem here of course is that the price has risen quite considerably, and people aren't willing to pay. So it's not self-sustaining, and therefore wouldn't normally be done. But the socialist would simply use (some form of) force to get it done anyway. From forcing people into professions, to shaming, ... Of course having a nurse that was denied what (s)he saw as a better career caring for me is unlikely to result in a good relationship.

But you see the problem too, right. I don't want to be subject to that socialism thing, but I do agree it sure would be nice if we cared for people better. And when I'm older, I'm sure I'll agree even more.

Here's what it comes down to : who determines what society's resources get spent on : people themselves (but of course they'll be forced to admit that there's no nursing because they haven't paid for it), or the "intellectuals" who want to protect people from themselves, make sure they don't die uncared for ?

It is this experimentation, however, that creates large improvements in the world. Creating a hobby operating system, for example, may seem like a waste of time. Why would CS students spend time creating something only for themselves, when they could be creating software to change the world? Aren't they wasting their talents by building something that they don't intend for anyone to use?

Of course, one of those hobby operating system grows into Linux, and suddenly that experimentation doesn't seem pointless anymore.

A contractor at CERN wants a faster way to share research papers. Isn't this outside the scope of his work, though? Isn't he wasting CERN's money with this project? People can just share papers via Usenet anyway. Who even needs the World Wide Web?

Most people don't set out to "bring benefit to your fellow man." Most people fool around with side projects or new ideas. These projects, which seemingly offer "trivial benefit to humanity," are the ones which make a difference in the world.

Experimentation or invention for any reason (including profit) is valuable, precisely because we don't know where this experimentation will go.

The reasonable upper bound of benefit when designing a new OS or a new information-sharing medium is, a priori, much higher than the upper bound of a new measuring cup or a new dessert. So, this means someone entering those quests can reasonably state that they are tackling something big, i.e. worthwhile.

I see your point. While breakthroughs (such as Penicillin) can still be a result of unrelated research, it is true that focused experimentation is more likely to make an impact.

The penicillin story is not what most people think.

Fleming discovered the mold and its anti-bacterial effect in 1928 by happenstance, but this knowledge languished until the outbreak of WW2 in Europe in 1939. At that point, the Oxford group realized the war was going to cause enormous numbers of gas gangrene cases (truly a terrible affliction), and they very deliberately set out to find a treatment. Their research was, therefore, incredibly directed, and, indeed, most of their work centered on culture and chemical preparation.

Fire, wheels, writing, and industrial production of penicillin -- greatest inventions ever.

Hello. Thanks for the feedback on the post! I definitely wasn't assuming that when I wrote it. In fact, what I was trying to show was a simple framework for looking at processes in the world and improving them. And if some folks can come up with innovative ideas for things already as simple and "old" as measuring cups and S'mores recipes, imagine what you can come up with when you look at more complicated processes in this world. This framework could very well inspire someone to trace out the steps of the job someone has of retrieving water or building wells in Africa and try to figure out which of those steps can be removed. That being said, I really try not to judge if people want to make a better dessert. Dessert makes people incredible happy.

Nurses use measuring cups too.

> A better measuring cup is of trivial benefit to humanity

Oh, so it is of benefit, is it? What, exactly, is the minimal amount of positive benefit to humanity I must exert in my work to be deemed worthy in your optics?

What, exactly, is it about nursing, as a whole, that makes the field universally superior to the measuring cup industry? Is all of nursing equally deserving? What if you, as a nurse, spend your entire career caring for the morbidly obese, extending their lives so then can eat more smores? Is it OK to care for the obese, but not to feed them better desserts?

Human development is a long, hard trudge of incremental improvements, with a few leaps here and there. If you insist on sitting around waiting to be part of a leap, resisting the temptation to incrementally bringing benefit to your fellow man, you're missing the forest for all the trees.

PS:

> A new dessert is actually a detractor

Bullshit.

EDIT: Try not to be provocative.

> What, exactly, is it about nursing, as a whole, that > makes the field universally superior to the measuring > cup industry?

You lose credibility when you ask a question like this.

You completely miss the impact of a better measuring cup. It saves time during a menial task - only a few seconds but this builds up.

http://xkcd.com/1205/

I would think that now that measuring cup has saved many times the time taken to design it, and the people whose time has been saved include (and is not limited to) doctors, nurses, various scientists, and your 'everyday' man. So I think it is quite obvious that the contribution of the angled measuring cup could indeed be much greater than any single nurse.

The marketplace disagrees strongly. Otherwise the cost of an angled measuring cup would approximate the cost of a nurse, which it does not -- the difference is at least 4 [decimal] orders of magnitude.

That's the wrong comparison: you have to combine the cost of ALL angled cup (possibly deduct the value of all non angled cup) and compare with the cost of one nurse, since the two scenarios are: angled cups vs no angled cup at all and one more nurse

Actually it's potentially worse still.

The marketplace won't necessarily value the angled measuring cup inventor as a nurse at all, indeed it may value them negatively (eg by reducing patients who attend a clinic because this person is a nurse there). That would mean that on a market based evaluation, for a person who makes a bad enough nurse, the availability of the cup "improvement" would have to be detrimental to measuring-cup users in order for the market to value the person as a nurse above them as a measuring-cup inventor.

As you note there's a big problem with working out how the market values the item in the first place. Just because something costs more doens't mean it's better value, of course. In a way if the cup costs less than the traditional measuring-cup it's a better product; in another way if it costs more but the same number buy it then it's a better product. You have to make a cost-benefit judgement.

If people say they wouldn't buy a new angled measuring-cup just for the USP, but that they would replace a broken traditional cup with the new style one, how then do you establish the value? You have to take in to account the person's value judgements on disposal of working items. I don't think you can genuinely make an objective market-based analysis here?

I do not understand this. It seems to be an argument that a measuring cup is more valuable than a nurse. All the words in the world won't convince. Ever been sick?

Yes. A measuring cup that aids 10 million people in saving 10c is more valuable to society than a specific person becoming a nurse [who makes you sick].

Obviously if you need a nurse then 10 million measuring cups won't make you better. But if you need a measuring cup, a nurse won't really be that helpful either.

The world needs both, but generally we don't need people who have inventive ideas to shun them in favouring of doing things they are ill-suited and unmotivated to do.

A measuring cup is not valuable than a nurse. Hundreds of millions of measuring cups serving hundreds of millions of people, on the other hand, IS more valuable than a nurse

> I'm guessing you're a lot of fun at parties.

Please don't address other users this way on Hacker News. (It's a bad way to respond to provocation because it degrades the discourse further and invites worse.)

Yeah, you're right. I got pretty worked up over the premise.

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