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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"

#101

Post by napoleoncomplex »

xradionut wrote: post #77
napoleoncomplex wrote: post #43

I don't think the people who work on these "useless" apps are to blame, rather it's the system in which they are brought up in and in case of start-ups, are taught entrepreneurship in. Paul Graham himself says he advises every start-up to "work on something for which they are the initial market"[0], so every YC cycle you get numerous companies which solve the problems of young San Francisco residents ([1] for comic r…

"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..." 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 busines…

Not to discredit your personal experience, but my experience is much closer to Ensorceled's post. All the obstacles I've encountered are on the regulation and/or cronyism of the institutions side. The doctors themselves are stuck in between, having to use shit software which never gets fixed.

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

#103

Post by Ensorceled »

lkrubner wrote: post #83
nicholassmith wrote: post #66

Don't forget as well, the barrier to entry for solving cancer is non-trivial compared to the barrier to entry for creating Angry Birds. It's significantly easier to develop an app than solving cancer in terms of the equipment, research and background you need. I haven't seen many 'Learn cellular analysis in a week' books floating around.

But big problems are usually solved as a series of small problems, yes? It's unlikely that one day some researcher will combine a few chemicals in a new way and shout "Eureka! I have found the drug that cures all cancer!" A problem as complex as cancer (and diverse too: meningiomas are very different from, say, basal cell skin cancer) is something that will probably be solved by a 1,000 small breakthroughs, rather th…

But all of those apps ARE difficult:

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.

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

#104

Post by xradionut »

Ensorceled wrote: post #91
xradionut wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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..." 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 busines…

I've developed for multiple medical companies and applications. This describes exactly 0 of the doctors, radiologists, surgeons, or researchers I worked with. 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.

Here's a colleagues blog post on the issues:

http://www.midnightdba.com/DBARant/?p=894

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

#105

Post by mechanical_fish »

Jack Handey:

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.

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

#106

Post by amerika_blog »

I don't want to endorse some of these behaviors, but:

* 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.

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

#107

Post by nsxwolf »

I got bad grades in high school because I was a kid and didn't yet know what was important in life. That shut me out of any possible avenue where I'd be able to contribute to "curing cancer".

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.

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

#108

Post by vacri »

Ensorceled wrote: post #91
xradionut wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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..." 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 busines…

I've developed for multiple medical companies and applications. This describes exactly 0 of the doctors, radiologists, surgeons, or researchers I worked with. 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.

A friend of mine was a QA engineer for a famous children's hospital. He could do absolutely nothing, because every doctor had their favourite vendor with their favourite sales rep that gave them goodies, and they all hated the idea of interoperating and making things more efficient. And once a doctor says "If you change this system, children will die!", that's it, conversation is over. It doesn't matter that everyone knows the doctor is covering themselves, the point is that the only people that can override the doctor are the higher-ups, of which there are few, and all of those are playing their own political game.

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.

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

#109

Post by Charos »

ahomescu1 wrote: post #100
ecopoesis wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't believe art and sport improve the human condition? I would argue that what you dismiss as circuses are actually what make life living. 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.

Arts and sports improve the present, science improves the future.

True and true, but what good is 'improving the future' if there's nothing to enjoy once we get there? A lot of modern technology revolves around content distribution and consumption. Someone has to make that content in the first place in order for consumer tech to improve our benefit from it. Both sides are important.

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

#110

Post by [deleted] »

Spooky23 wrote: post #69

We can have both. 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 en…

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