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Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

bbc.com

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Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#331

Post by jaggederest »

alsocasey wrote: post #233
jaggederest wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to more standard research funding which isn't as goal oriented. I assume they're looking for a "billion dollar exit" from their research funding.

Overemphasis on commercialization is a common complaint of the current funding situation in medical research, so I don't think we're failing for lack of interest in commercial exits. In fact, many scientist are serial entrepreneurs. Moreover, many discoveries that went on to make a lot of people a lot of money had no obvious commercial application when they were first being researched... Predicting future markets is…

No I don't mean "made money", that would just be standard venture capital.

I mean "achieves their targets by reducing the total burden of disease on humanity", which is a different radical exit.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#332

Post by bsder »

rory096 wrote: post #202
bsder wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only by turning almost 10% OF AN ENTIRE COUNTRY into doing nothing but producing an atomic bomb. That's not 2 billion dollars, that's 2 TRILLION dollars. So, basically, redirecting the US military budget. I approve.

Source? Estimates I see for the Manhattan Project from a quick google range from .25% to .41% of GDP. [0] https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34645.pdf [1] http://mitchellhowe.blogspot.com/2006/02/want-manhattan-proj... [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.09054.pdf

I'm also referring to the fact that estimates put in that almost 1 in 11 people in the US were involved in some facet of atomic bomb development.

The point being that atomic bomb development required a gigantic commitment.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#333

Post by throwaway729 »

jaggederest wrote: post #331
alsocasey wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overemphasis on commercialization is a common complaint of the current funding situation in medical research, so I don't think we're failing for lack of interest in commercial exits. In fact, many scientist are serial entrepreneurs. Moreover, many discoveries that went on to make a lot of people a lot of money had no obvious commercial application when they were first being researched... Predicting future markets is…

No I don't mean "made money", that would just be standard venture capital. I mean "achieves their targets by reducing the total burden of disease on humanity", which is a different radical exit.

I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you mean by "achieves their targets by reducing the total burden of disease on humanity". Or maybe I just don't understand the difference between this as merely "achieves their targets by selling useful treatments to people"?

Could to elaborate?

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#334

Post by jaggederest »

throwaway729 wrote: post #333
jaggederest wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I don't mean "made money", that would just be standard venture capital. I mean "achieves their targets by reducing the total burden of disease on humanity", which is a different radical exit.

I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you mean by "achieves their targets by reducing the total burden of disease on humanity". Or maybe I just don't understand the difference between this as merely "achieves their targets by selling useful treatments to people"? Could to elaborate?

A malaria vaccine would make no commercial sense but would be a huge reduction in the total burden of disease. That's what I mean.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#335

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway729 wrote: post #333
jaggederest wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I don't mean "made money", that would just be standard venture capital. I mean "achieves their targets by reducing the total burden of disease on humanity", which is a different radical exit.

I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you mean by "achieves their targets by reducing the total burden of disease on humanity". Or maybe I just don't understand the difference between this as merely "achieves their targets by selling useful treatments to people"? Could to elaborate?

[deleted]

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#336

Post by jamesrcole »

chii wrote: post #300
jamesrcole wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can look back on many innovations and say that they'd be impossible to imagine in the past I'd suspect that most innovations would have had plenty of experts and other people saying why they weren't possible.

There are lots of extraordinary claims being made everyday. It's the correct rule of thumb to be as skeptical possible, for there are many more outrageous claims than there are legitimate ones.

If you're interested in truth you should always be skeptical about everything.

But I think it needs stressing that being skeptical is not the same as being dismissive or ridiculing or having a hostile attitude towards things.

I think that the reason people tend to reject new ideas tends to be more on emotional terms rather than for truly skeptical reasons.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#337

Post by NicoJuicy »

projektir wrote: post #315
NicoJuicy wrote: post #282

I don't think it's a good thing to make us disease-free in terms of evolution. I think it's better to just cure the diseases that kill us ( long/short-term) eg. cancer, aids, ... or make us immoble for longer term ( parkinson, ..) Why? Because i think the best defense is a good immune system. You don't get a good immune system by staying inside and infection free and using medication all the time. Let people become s…

You're essentially advocating that a huge amount of people would die off, FYI.

I am not.

I am saying that getting sick is not a bad thing, a sickness that kills is.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#338

Post by brudgers »

nenadg wrote: post #26
stanleydrew wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your opinion is probably interesting and potentially valid, but your tone in the original comment is limiting your ability to communicate effectively. Less sarcasm would serve you well.

sarcasm is better part of life, it's not limiting it's enriching :) I fail to understand why people hate it?

Sarcasm has its places. Hacker News discussion threads are not so much among them.

So it's not so much that people here hate sarcasm as that they value the differences between Hacker News and other places on the internet where people type text in boxes.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#339

Post by dredmorbius »

afarrell wrote: post #273
segmondy wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People would have rolled their eyes, if someone said. I wanted to connect the world. I want to connect virutally everyone, where you can just reach anyone at anyplace at any time for cheap. 30 yrs ago, in a different part of the world. My father had to catch a bus from a village to the city, then catch a plane to a major city to make international phone call to the US to his business partners. Today, people in that s…

The whole world was connectable in 1950. The problem was just the cost of manufacturing all of the telephone/telegraph equipment and laying all the cable.

System configuration had a lot to do with it. Telephony was based on physical circuits. "Switchboard operators" literally plugged in cables to connect two phones together. Mechanical switches were just that -- mechanical systems which could join two lines. A telephone prefix (North American system) corresponded (generally) to a switch, which was a dedicated building, usually occupying much of a block, present in a given service area. If your town had a local phone-company building (or multiple buildings), that wasn't an office but the outer case around a large mechanical device. I was quite suprised the first time I was let inside one by the reality.

Virtual and digital switching, or better, packet-based networks, remove that problem. At the heart of most messaging systems now is the directory -- either of individual addresses, or of systems on which those addresses reside. Hence: DNS, MXs, and the like, for email.

(This makes me realise that one way around the Global Directory of Everyone problem of current messaging systems is to split up the address space again.)

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#340

Post by dredmorbius »

Thimothy wrote: post #289
nicklaf wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou... He quotes Eliezer Yudkowsky: Parapsychologists are constantly protesting that they are playing by all the standard scientific rules, and yet their results are being ignored – that they are unfairly being held to higher standards than everyone else. I’m willing to believe that. It just means that the standard statistical methods of science are so weak and…

That Slate Star Codex article is one of the most depressing things I've read for a while, thank you.

SSC is an underappreciated gem. There's much brilliance in't.
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