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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"

#141

Post by rdouble »

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.

Maybe it's a generational thing. It describes my dad and all his doctor friends to a T.

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

#142

Post by rdouble »

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…

Current doctors are stuck using 2010 software that drains the very life force out of them.

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

#143

Post by maxerickson »

DougWebb wrote: post #140
maxerickson wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your grocer is a market maker! 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 don't think that's true. It's certainly more convenient for me to go the grocer and know that, usually, they'll have bananas for sale. However, during the summer in my town there is a farmers market every week, where I actually can go and buy produce off the back of a truck. The prices are often cheaper and the products are often better. (Sometimes the prices are higher, but that's because the products are better:…

Fair enough, the words about cheaper are arguable. I wouldn't want to try to buy bananas in a world where there was no one willing to take them off the truck and hold them for a few days though.

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...).

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

#144

Post by rmc »

icebraining wrote: post #23
rmc wrote: post #10

This presumes there is no social benefit from the Internet. But there are loads of margalized groups who have been able to find a group and community thanks to quick and easy communication of the Internet. Just look at a lot of lesbian, gay, bi and trans people who wouldn't be able to find people like themselves in many places. I'd even think the more common acceptance of atheism is a result of this too.

I'm failing to find the original article, but from the quote, I don't think the author is arguing against the Internet, but small stuff like iPhone apps and other "small impact" startups. Besides, is the Internet really an accomplishment by Silicon Valley and its startups? ARPA and BBN certainly don't fit the model.

is the Internet really an accomplishment by Silicon Valley and its startups?

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.

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

#145

Post by dragonwriter »

rmc wrote: post #144
icebraining wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm failing to find the original article, but from the quote, I don't think the author is arguing against the Internet, but small stuff like iPhone apps and other "small impact" startups. Besides, is the Internet really an accomplishment by Silicon Valley and its startups? ARPA and BBN certainly don't fit the model.

is the Internet really an accomplishment by Silicon Valley and its startups? 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 c…

> Well, look at Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and reddit. These are "Silicon Valley startups".

None of those are Silicon Valley startups, and Facebook and Twitter never were Silicon Valley startups.

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

#146

Post by RogerL »

rorrr2 wrote: post #15
buro9 wrote: post #9

I mentioned on Twitter how my earlier pitches for what I'm working on focused a lot more on the reasons I'm doing it... attacking loneliness in cities and densely populated areas, and inspiring people to pursue their interests. 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…

It's not about selfishness, it's just that most easy problems got solved, and we're left with really really hard ones. 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…

Not picking you out specifically, just this post caught my eye.

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.

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

#147

Post by Futurebot »

Why is this?

- 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.

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

#148

Post by DougWebb »

maxerickson wrote: post #143
DougWebb wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's true. It's certainly more convenient for me to go the grocer and know that, usually, they'll have bananas for sale. However, during the summer in my town there is a farmers market every week, where I actually can go and buy produce off the back of a truck. The prices are often cheaper and the products are often better. (Sometimes the prices are higher, but that's because the products are better:…

Fair enough, the words about cheaper are arguable. I wouldn't want to try to buy bananas in a world where there was no one willing to take them off the truck and hold them for a few days though. 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 yo…

If you're a large institution, and you want to sell an enormous amount of shares in some stock, the price of that stock should plummet if there aren't buyers available at the price you want to sell. Having a market maker buy those shares is hiding the fact that a huge position in the stock was just dumped and no one wanted to buy. Sucks for the company, but if you're not attractive to buyers or to the seller, then your market valuation was already wrong.

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.

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

#149

Post by maxerickson »

DougWebb wrote: post #148
maxerickson wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, the words about cheaper are arguable. I wouldn't want to try to buy bananas in a world where there was no one willing to take them off the truck and hold them for a few days though. 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 yo…

If you're a large institution, and you want to sell an enormous amount of shares in some stock, the price of that stock should plummet if there aren't buyers available at the price you want to sell. Having a market maker buy those shares is hiding the fact that a huge position in the stock was just dumped and no one wanted to buy. Sucks for the company, but if you're not attractive to buyers or to the seller, then yo…

What is not real about the automated system? As far as I know, they pay real dollars. Is it the fact that the bet on the shares is short term?

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...).

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

#150

Post by cheez »

Everything is working as it should.

"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.

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