The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation • Hacker News Board

Re: The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

#121

Post by jskonhovd » Sun, Mar 10, 2013, 10:25 PM UTC

harryh wrote: post #102

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so here's a fun question: where do I find a list of the Big Problems? Because when I look at the world, it seems to me as if most of the really Big Problems are not technological but social. In the end, the conversion to solar energy won't be a single man's heroic effort, it'll be the combined efforts of an entire society that finally decided to go solar. On the other hand, technological approaches to social prob…

Really? What do you wish you could do that you can't? Let's make a list of things: * I wish my body didn't start to break down as I get older. * Related to that there are a whole host of diseases and disorders that I'll probably get one of and die from one day. * I wish I didn't have to spend so much money on energy (not just directly on my monthly bill, but as part of the cost of almost everything I buy). * I wish m…

Sign me up anytime for anyone of those projects, but wait will it pay as much as my mediocre average crud software developer job??

Re: The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

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Post by tedsanders » Sun, Mar 10, 2013, 10:27 PM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #108

kevinalexbrown wrote: post #49

Edit: Seriously, I really want to know what people think about the question at the end. I worked with someone who works at cd2, and on a selfish note I'm just curious. I'm a "pasty scientist" paid by DARPA, in biotech. I work for someone who previously founded a brain-machine-interface company that had a small IPO (cyberkinetics). I would love nothing more than to see things I work on get turned into viable products.…

One issue I have not been able to resolve in thinking about the idea of society-funded research has to do with what I'll refer to as "bad" global actors. It is no secret that China shines for its lack of respect for intellectual property. The same is true for their willingness to steal just about anything from anyone and make it their own. If we, as an open society, fund programs costing billions of dollars we would,…

I think the worry of giving away research is natural, but misguided. Consider these scenarios:

(1) If Earth's population was 1 billion, would it be worthwhile for society to fund research?

(2) If Earth's population was 7 billion, but 6 billion are freeloaders, would it still be worthwhile for the 1 billion to fund research?

The answer to number (1) is an obvious yes. Even with only 1 billion people, humanity gains when it devotes resources to research.

How about the answer to (2)? I think if you answer yes to (1) you have to answer yes to (2). The costs are the same, but the benefits are even greater. Even though freeloading isn't fair, it doesn't mean we shouldn't fund research.

Re: The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

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Post by eli_gottlieb » Sun, Mar 10, 2013, 10:28 PM UTC

michaelochurch wrote: post #106

te_chris wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This rings true and people always seem to forget that it's much easier to innovate when the cost of living is lower. I'm currently living in Auckland, New Zealand, which by NZ (and world standards I think, though can't cite anything off hand) is quite expensive, but myself and my girlfriend have been contemplating moving to Sydney, Australia, a city which is one of most expensive in the world but where we would both…

This rings true and people always seem to forget that it's much easier to innovate when the cost of living is lower. The problem, or the balance that must be struck, is that it's hard to innovate without being surrounded by other innovative people. You need a city with a critical mass of innovative, talented people and a low cost-of-living. California in the 1970s had that. I don't know what the 2013 analogue is, or…

It's a lot easier to just have the government implement a land-value tax and repeal zoning laws than to actually administrate 60% of the "dwellable" land.

Re: The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

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Post by eli_gottlieb » Sun, Mar 10, 2013, 10:32 PM UTC

tsotha wrote: post #69

qdog wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you want to see big changes, create big rewards for solutions without constraint to how they are accpomplished. So let's see $50 Billion to anybody who can take us to a repeatable $10/kilo to low earth orbit. Or $10 Billion for the first 3D printer able to print an electric car." Arguably that's what government grants do or should do. Taking 50 billion dollars in tax money and stoking the fire in an area we are i…

>Of course, some of that 50 billion gets eaten by graft, and that's where the problem a lot of people have with government programs. That's why prizes are a good way to go. Nothing gets paid out if you don't reach your goal. >Although private companies don't seem to have any better levels of control (usually much worse control) over corruption, a lot of people seem to think only 100% success demonstrates "working" go…

The thing about prizes is that negative results are quite significant in real science.

Re: The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

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Post by tsotha » Sun, Mar 10, 2013, 10:46 PM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #124

tsotha wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Of course, some of that 50 billion gets eaten by graft, and that's where the problem a lot of people have with government programs. That's why prizes are a good way to go. Nothing gets paid out if you don't reach your goal. >Although private companies don't seem to have any better levels of control (usually much worse control) over corruption, a lot of people seem to think only 100% success demonstrates "working" go…

The thing about prizes is that negative results are quite significant in real science.

Prizes still generate negative results. It's just that someone else is paying for it.

Re: The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

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Post by ahoyhere » Sun, Mar 10, 2013, 10:53 PM UTC

a_p wrote: post #63

David Wheeler has an interesting list of what he considers to be important software innovations. [1] Most of the innovations listed occurred in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. An interesting quote from an article[2] about an interview with Linus Torvalds in LWN.net: "A member of the audience asked Linus to describe his single most memorable moment from the last 20 years. Linus responded that he didn't really have one; the…

Along those lines, the BBC documentary "The Story of Science" shows over its episodes that this is true. It's really a fantastically intellectual series and well worth acquiring and watching.

Re: The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

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Post by mbetter » Sun, Mar 10, 2013, 10:58 PM UTC

sultezdukes wrote: post #57

rayiner wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of blue-sky R&D funding is that you can't plan exactly what you're going to get out of it. Today DARPA is a bit more focused on practical application than it used to be, but it's ethos is still: "let's throw $10-30 million at a bunch of smart people and see what happens." The "plan" is to fund fundamental R&D and hope something really useful comes out of it. In that sense, the development of the inter…

Maybe if government wasn't so massively wasteful, there'd be a few dollars to throw at blue-sky R&D funding these days, but there isn't.

"blue-sky R&D funding" is the definition of "massive waste" to many people. To you, it's probably feeding poor children or something else.

Re: The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

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Post by zevets » Sun, Mar 10, 2013, 11:00 PM UTC

jskonhovd wrote: post #79

zevets wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This notion that people can't pick winners is, in my opinion quite inaccurate. The need for light weight electronics for aerospace systems, and the view that semiconductors were 'the answer' to this problem led to a massive amount of government funding (50% of all R&D funding) and support (the government was far and away the largest customer for semiconductor devices) almost directly led to the creation of the Silico…

I think everyone on this thread would agree that people can pick winners, but some would argue that the government has been inefficient about picking those winners in the past. I personally think that there is a lack of scientifically literate people in our government, outside of Steven Chu, compared to the VC community who can pick winners.

While it's hard to make a data driven argument in this field, I think the US government has been incredibly successful in picking winning new technological ideas, judged by my notion that the vast majority of the scientific and technical advances in the last 60 years have occurred here in the United States. The US government has long had a tradition of picking winners in science and technology, and I don't think the fact that we are also the leader in science and technology is simply coincidental to that.

Looking for counterexamples, ie technical advances that have occurred outside of the US due to lack of government support, the only one that comes to mind is the failures in green technology, but I think that small failures there are minor compared to the other successes.

I also think looking for scientific literacy in the executive positions of government is less relevant in the highly bureaucratic world of government funded research, as there executives have less control on individual funding than they would in the private sector. As long as the the executives respect the technical expertise of their bureaucrats, (and the workforce is knowledgeable), then individual domain knowledge is less critical than it would be in the private sector.

Re: The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

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Post by timr » Sun, Mar 10, 2013, 11:01 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #87

These articles are easy to write (and upvote) but such conclusions are pretty meaningless till you have a definition of what counts as innovation. That's a very interesting question, and yet just about everyone who talks about this topic ducks it and goes instead for the easy score. Maybe we can do better here on HN. What's the right way to measure innovation? E.g. surely the 5 year old's definition (big shiny things…

I think new economies is a good proxy. The computer invented an entirely new economy. So did the automobile, computer networking, television, radio, the telegraph, electricity, air travel, moving pictures, recorded audio, the light bulb, washing machine, dishwasher, etc. All of these things created not just the immediate industry, but an entire ecosystem of products and services related to the industry.

You could probably also measure it in terms of essential inventions: we can't live without the internet, but if Instagram or Facebook went away tomorrow, we'd have lots of alternatives for sharing photos and talking to our friends. Instagram and Facebook make those things nicer, but don't allow us to do anything we weren't doing before. The internet (or, I guess, the web) allowed for entirely new forms of communication and commerce.

From my perspective, we haven't seen a new economy emerge in the last decade, at least. The internet (maybe molecular biology) was the last invention to really create a new industry, and that was the mid-90s. Maybe robotics is the next one, but it's hard to tell prospectively.

Re: The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

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Post by devdas » Sun, Mar 10, 2013, 11:02 PM UTC

pbiggar wrote: post #51

jQueryIsAwesome wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many many people github introduced them to GIT and many of them would still don't know about it if it wasn't for it. Twitter is a more accessible version of RSS feed allowing way easier access to subjects of interest for non-tech-savvy people.

I think you're underselling twitter: its a completely new communication mechanism by which people can communicate short thoughts directly to their followers. It can be used as a better RSS, but that doesn't account for all the other ways it can be used, everything from celebrity gossip, to starting and managing violent revolutions.

IRC over HTTP would be a better analogy?