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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"

#121

Post by haihaibye »

nsxwolf wrote: post #107

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.

Find some opensource bioinformatics projects and contribute.

Add some new features or fix some bugs in IGV or other common projects and you'll be helping thousands of cancer researchers be slightly more productive.

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

#122

Post by exratione »

rayiner wrote: post #74
exratione wrote: post #33

At some point an individual has to come to terms with the fact that 99% (or some equally large percentage) of human economic activity has nothing much to do with improving the human condition, but is rather beer and circuses writ large. You can cure a disease for the cost of a large video game development these days, and an election year of political donations in the US could be used to cure aging. Medical research i…

The total cost of the 2012 election was $6.3 billion, about half of which was the Presidential election, so over a period of 4 years you're looking at roughly 2.4 billion per year. That would do jack shit for curing aging or even an important disease. The NIH spends $30 billion per year on those things. We do the beer and circuses because they're cheaper than large-scale human advancements. The Manhattan project was…

The cost of implementing SENS, a detailed research plan to demonstrate rejuvenation in old mice, is between $1 to $2 billion over 20 years.

Of the NIH budget, much less than 1% goes towards ways to intervene in aging I'm sorry to say. The NIA yearly budget is ~$1 billion, and of that very little has anything to do with actually altering the course of aging.

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

#123

Post by wikiburner »

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…

To be fair, that also describes a lot of people in tech.

Are you sure who was who? :)

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

#124

Post by nfoz »

eksith wrote: post #21

There's one hiccup in this line of thought: You can't always predict how the flashy toy tech will turn out to be a benefit later on. Case in point, Kinect. It should have been just a play accessory, but it's being used to help people with disabilities, like the wi-Go : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-17jRfX9Sw And also aiding surgeons during operations as well as helping disabled children interact with their environ…

I'm sure if we spent billions to build another Great Pyramid we'd discover a bunch of things that are peripherally helpful to society in other ways. But it will still be an enormous waste of resources. If we want more medical cures we should be funding work towards medical cures.

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

#125

Post by Ensorceled »

vacri wrote: post #108
Ensorceled wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 everyon…

I don't doubt it. I just hated seeing "Doctors" tarred with that overly broad brush when the ones I worked with were universally pleasant colleagues.

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

#127

Post by cell303 »

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…

I don't see why so much cynicism is needed to describe perfectly normal economic behaviour.

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

#128

Post by enraged_camel »

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…

>>Paul Graham himself says he advises every start-up to "work on something for which they are the initial market"

I would bet that there is a gigantic initial market for the cure for cancer.

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

#129

Post by jessaustin »

jballanc wrote: post #85

I think the author is close, but doesn't quite capture the entire reasoning behind "cure cancer" versus "disrupt dry-cleaning" or "new car manufacturer". The disparity between these things is not just a matter of probability of success, but also of the timeline over which success is realized. When I was just over a year-and-a-half into my Ph.D. training, I had something of an epiphany. At the time, I was designing an…

How do you convince shareholders to invest their money if you can only promise returns on a 100+ year schedule?

Genuinely curious: what specific returns do you promise on this schedule, if you could obtain all the resources you envision? If this question is unfair, could you be more specific on a 50- or 20-year schedule?

From the bit of science history I've read, it seems rare for any successful investigator to have a 100-year plan. They work on the problems that are of current interest, and later researchers do the same, and it's only in long hindsight that we see any sort of logical path.

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

#130

Post by _dps »

enraged_camel wrote: post #128
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…

>>Paul Graham himself says he advises every start-up to "work on something for which they are the initial market" I would bet that there is a gigantic initial market for the cure for cancer.

As Hamming says in his excellent essay "You and Your Research", there are two components to an "important problem": an objective one and a subjective one.

The objective requirement: in the success-case the project must have a large impact on the community (in Hamming's case, physicists; for strtups, an initial market / society at large)

The subjective requirement: the researcher must have "an attack" [0], i.e. a credible approach to a solution that others probably have not tried yet.

For the vast majority of SF Bay Area founders of tiny software companies, they have no "attack" on cancer.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

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