101–110 of 188 posts
Since when is this stuff zero-sum? Yo allegedly took 8 hours to build. Sure, during those 8 hours, Moshe Hogeg wasn't out solving the "big" problems, but in that day alone, he had 16 other hours, to do things the OP might deem worthy of his time.
Why ignore the possibility that writing apps, new web frameworks, and "pivoting" is in fact the best possible use of this talent?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> And, by the way, who appointed Christoph McCann arbiter of what it good and valuable in this world? This is such an important point, and why free markets work best. If people derive value out of Yo, then terrific. If they don't, it goes away. Don't need a moral crusader to decide what is worthy.
> If people derive value out of Yo, then terrific. If they don't, it goes away. Don't need a moral crusader to decide what is worthy. Then you wind up with things like Fox "News" (actually Entertainment, NOT news) being popular, because they found that entertainment is much better at making money than actual news. If you let "making money" be the decider, lots of valuable things fade away.
20th century was spent exploring the alternatives to such a decider. As the result we do know that "making money" is the most efficient and effective decider that humanity has so far been able to come up with. Basically the humanity is just too stupid to use anything else at the moment.
There's a lot that I dislike about this article, but I'll start with this: it is probably self-refuting. Someone could just have easily written: "I find it difficult to see individuals who could focus their time and effort solving [problems like energy, food, water, health, education], instead put their efforts into something like a takedown of the moral priorities of the people behind Yo on a their personal blog." A…
>> And, by the way, who appointed Christoph McCann arbiter of what it good and valuable in this world? This is such an important point, and why free markets work best. If people derive value out of Yo, then terrific. If they don't, it goes away. Don't need a moral crusader to decide what is worthy.
The OP isn't a jack-booted right-thinking enforcer. The OP isn't even a "moral crusader", as you put it. In a free society, it is perfectly reasonable to gently mock people you believe are engaging in stupid and/or pointless pursuits. As the OP did. Of course the people doing the dumb stuff are free to scoff and ignore them. As you are.
Anyway, I think the OP has a perfectly valid point. Just because there is some market demand for an app like Yo, doesn't mean that we are predestined to make building it our life's mission. Some of us, if we slow down and reflect, might opt to be remembered for doing something other than: "Invented an app that no consumer was willing to pay for, and which solved no meaningful problems for anyone, but which some investment bankers managed to persuade some big company had strategory value. RIP".
That's fine if all y'all want that on your tombstone (the other kind of tombstone), but it's also fine to at least reflect on whether that's really what you want.
There's a lot that I dislike about this article, but I'll start with this: it is probably self-refuting. Someone could just have easily written: "I find it difficult to see individuals who could focus their time and effort solving [problems like energy, food, water, health, education], instead put their efforts into something like a takedown of the moral priorities of the people behind Yo on a their personal blog." A…
Yes, I believed you missed the point. Someone lamenting the fact that smart people are working on stupid problems is not the same thing as them saying that smart people should be forced to work on hard problems. Hamming put it best: "Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and…
- As others have pointed out, talent is not fungible. Just because you can program Yo, doesn't mean to can solve other issues. - If everyone is so convinced that Yo is such a dumb idea, do you really want the founder who's "capable" of doing something so stupid working on serious issues?
- What is worthwhile? If you view Yo as art (in the modern sense) it's pretty effective! Seems to have made the entire tech community collectively think. That's a hard thing to do. We don't mock the choices made by Banksy (who on the surface is a vandal)... Perhaps Yo will be a godsend to folks with severe disabilities, allowing them to simply communicate with others nearby easily and effectively. Or perhaps it's just fun. Why is that bad?
- Or maybe the whole thing fails and that's OK. Far more 'worthwhile' companies have failed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> And, by the way, who appointed Christoph McCann arbiter of what it good and valuable in this world? This is such an important point, and why free markets work best. If people derive value out of Yo, then terrific. If they don't, it goes away. Don't need a moral crusader to decide what is worthy.
> If people derive value out of Yo, then terrific. If they don't, it goes away. Don't need a moral crusader to decide what is worthy. Then you wind up with things like Fox "News" (actually Entertainment, NOT news) being popular, because they found that entertainment is much better at making money than actual news. If you let "making money" be the decider, lots of valuable things fade away.
Real people happen to like Facebook and Fox News and Snapchat and Yo. And that's fine. To say that those desires are somehow immoral because they aren't lofty enough is elitist, condescending, and anti-humanist.
Unfortunately, this line of criticism works equally well about all games, art, haute cuisine, movies, national parks, and about 96% of our economy. More importantly, it also works against articles that gripe about effort wasted on apps the author doesn't care for.
While Yo may prove to have some value, the author's post more speaks to how so many smart people are incentivized (by money) towards trivial ends; our economy seems often to reward trifles over things that benefit human well-being.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Octopus:_A_Story_of_Califor...
There's a lot that I dislike about this article, but I'll start with this: it is probably self-refuting. Someone could just have easily written: "I find it difficult to see individuals who could focus their time and effort solving [problems like energy, food, water, health, education], instead put their efforts into something like a takedown of the moral priorities of the people behind Yo on a their personal blog." A…
>> And, by the way, who appointed Christoph McCann arbiter of what it good and valuable in this world? This is such an important point, and why free markets work best. If people derive value out of Yo, then terrific. If they don't, it goes away. Don't need a moral crusader to decide what is worthy.
Well, there's a subtlety there.
It's not that "free markets work best". It's that the efficient market hypothesis claims that a market with perfect information dissemination consisting of uniformly rational agents will deliver Pareto-optimal resource allocations.
There's a lot to disagree with in that sentence; market agents collude, people are demonstrably irrational/rely on cognitive heuristics and just because something is Pareto efficient doesn't mean it's fair or equitable.
All three are valid critiques, and the case in point in TFA - the market allocated money to Yo, but that doesn't mean a priori that funding Yo is a worthy and moral choice.
So, if we have markets that routinely deliver inequitable outcomes it's perfectly reasonable to ask - why is this happening?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Totalitarian"? From the article: "We need to think big, see the real problems that are out there and go solve them. For my part, I hope to stick by this philosophy and play my part."
Well, right. That's why I wrote the sentence prior to what you've quoted. I'm not sure I understand quite what the article's point is. The part you quoted sounds very live-and-let-live. But then there's this: > it saddens me that some of the worlds most driven, focused, intelligent and inspiring individuals don't focus their time on solving the real problems our society faces. It may well be that Yo has the user enga…