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"Instead of cures for cancer we got Angry Birds"

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Re: "Instead of cures for cancer we got Angry Birds"

#51

Post by jdminhbg »

jaggederest wrote: post #5

I just wish that societally we would put more of a financial emphasis on things that deliver the most social utility. That would solve the gradient problem, and still deliver efficiency since people would have different competitive advantage. 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 a…

> Imagine if we had some of those people being paid $300k salary + $300k bonus instead working on vaccines, or new antibiotics?

I'm imagining it, and I'm imagining righteous populist anger about excessive salaries and profits in the pharmaceutical industry.

Re: "Instead of cures for cancer we got Angry Birds"

#56

Post by geogra4 »

louwrentius wrote: post #14

I think that the return on investment on curing cancer does not impact the sale of Angry Birds much. At least not sufficiently to justify the investment. Sorry for being cynical. 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.

Elon Musk too. Remember he started with PayPal, not SpaceX and Tesla.

Re: "Instead of cures for cancer we got Angry Birds"

#57

Post by James_Duval »

theorique wrote: post #42
James_Duval wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much agreed. 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…

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.

I should have said:

>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.

Re: "Instead of cures for cancer we got Angry Birds"

#59

Post by rayiner »

Nobody who had the skills to seriously take a stab at curing cancer is instead coding up Angry Birds. All those kids from Stanford going to work at consumer technology shops are smart kids, but even at a place like Stanford the talent to really make fundamental breakthroughs in human knowledge is exceedingly rare. And it's not like there is any undersupply of smart people going into biology.

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.

Re: "Instead of cures for cancer we got Angry Birds"

#60

Post by mekoka »

If Bill Gates had gone to "cure cancer" or "feed Africa" instead of selling operating systems and word processors, is it guaranteed that he would have succeeded? I'm pretty certain that in that alternate reality someone else would have stepped up to create the equivalent of Windows and maybe become a billionaire, but do we have the assurance that they would also make the same altruistic use of their money?

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.

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