Seriously?
An article about "make meaning, not money".
Which lionizes Nathan Myhrvold, the world's largest patent troll.
Seriously?
Stop building dumb stuff
11–20 of 50 posts
Re: Stop building dumb stuff
#12What exactly is the point of this? That non humanitarian efforts are useless?
No, my point was to make meaning -- not trivial stuff.
There's lots of non-humanitarian efforts that create lots of meaning:
* Facebook, helps me stay connected to my friends
* Etsy & Kickstarter, empowers artists around the world
* Reddit & HackerNews, lets me find stuff about topics I like
There's also lots of humanitarian stuff that's just pretty pointless.
But folks can build some pretty amazing things and I wanted to poke the emperor on that.
Re: Stop building dumb stuff
#13Seems the website is down. Maybe obviouslywrong.org shouldn't have been built :| Does anyone have the article they can paste here?
Back up now.
Re: Stop building dumb stuff
#14The article about Doggyspace is from 2008 and their twitter account has been inactive for almost two years. So apparently they did stop building dumb stuff. It was probably the invisible hand that made them stop, not a blog post.
Re: Stop building dumb stuff
#15Seems the website is down. Maybe obviouslywrong.org shouldn't have been built :| Does anyone have the article they can paste here?
thanks!
Re: Stop building dumb stuff
#16Because the guys building Facebook for dogs, or working on faster games have the transferable skills required to work on a Malaria vaccine.
Re: Stop building dumb stuff
#17What exactly is the point of this? That non humanitarian efforts are useless?
No, my point was to make meaning -- not trivial stuff. There's lots of non-humanitarian efforts that create lots of meaning: * Facebook, helps me stay connected to my friends * Etsy & Kickstarter, empowers artists around the world * Reddit & HackerNews, lets me find stuff about topics I like There's also lots of humanitarian stuff that's just pretty pointless. But folks can build some pretty amazing things and I want…
"Meaning" is arbitrary and can be extrapolated out of pretty much anything.
A multiplayer video game where you shoot aliens (to quote the posted article) can be a way for some people to find a sense of community they wouldn't find in real life for whatever reason, or a way for some kids to protect themselves from the world around them (parents divorcing, illnesses, etc.).
You cite Facebook as a product that's not humanitarian but has "meaning". Facebook was essentially started as a way for privileged ivy-league kids to talk about their college life and hookup. It may have become something bigger, but by your metrics it probably didn't start as something with "meaning".
"Make meaning— not trivial stuff" is a superficial, empty sentence which only achieves the goal of sounding good and making its writer feel good about himself.
Re: Stop building dumb stuff
#18How can this guy get all the way through this article without mentioning that not only is Nathan Myhrvold "former CTO of Microsoft", but that as owner of Intellectual Ventures, the most powerful non- practising patent troll in existence, he is perhaps the world's biggest example of what is wrong with the patent system and why ideas, innovative or not, are almost impossible to turn into reality without the threat of litigation.
The fact that he would avoid mentioning this shows that anything else said in this piece can be assumed to be utter bullshit and spin.
Re: Stop building dumb stuff
#19What exactly is the point of this? That non humanitarian efforts are useless?
No, my point was to make meaning -- not trivial stuff. There's lots of non-humanitarian efforts that create lots of meaning: * Facebook, helps me stay connected to my friends * Etsy & Kickstarter, empowers artists around the world * Reddit & HackerNews, lets me find stuff about topics I like There's also lots of humanitarian stuff that's just pretty pointless. But folks can build some pretty amazing things and I want…
I think it's fine to create things that seem trivial, as long as they are original, experimental, or new in some way.
Often times, ideas don't seem important until after they have been implemented.
Re: Stop building dumb stuff
#20There's something that rubs me the wrong way about this article, and I think it's the false dichotomy. On the one hand we have safe conveniences like "another link shortener" and "Facebook for X" which do not involve any innovation. On the other, we have risky humanitarian projects which require huge innovation.
So there are three differences here: safe vs. risky, easy vs. innovative, and luxury vs. necessity. I feel like the author is trying to bolster our valuations of each difference by associating them with our valuations of the others.
So we start out with this true but completely obvious idea that it's not the best use of our time to build safe and easy luxuries, yet the alternatives we're pushed to are risky and difficult necessities. And I suppose if you want to point to that as an ideal, then that's one thing.
But then we get to the quote about "faster aliens", and I start to wonder what universe we're talking about. Much of the research that went into making those aliens faster? Directly applicable to a ton of other fields! Is the author suggesting that we should take the engineers off of the teams that are working to build more powerful GPUs and CPUs, and instead get them working on a malaria vaccine? Should we send them back to school first, or just plop them in a bio lab and tell them to get crackin'? Or instead, we could let them just keep doing what they're good at, since faster computers will also help us find a vaccine for malaria.
If you want to attack something out of the safe/easy/luxury group, attack "easy". Safe luxuries have proven to be absolutely amazing for driving innovation, and then we get to use that innovation for the really important stuff.