Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

christophmccann.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 188 posts

Re: We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

#121

Post by logfromblammo »

aashishkoirala wrote: post #23

Your reasoning suggests that if the people who built Yo were not building Yo, that they might be out there curing the world's diseases. See the flaw there?

If the people who built Yo had been curing the world's diseases instead of building Yo, then everyone would still be stuck with giving each other Facebook pokes, and would therefore be too demoralized and disconnected to complete the task.

The article simply sounds like sour grapes. If something as simple and stupid as Yo can get funded for $X, then why hasn't my worthy and interesting project been funded for $Y ? Obviously, the developer of Yo is to blame for finding a big pile of money curated by fools and taking it?

It is pointless to question why Yo exists. It is far more useful to ask why nearly everyone capable of accomplishing great things has to go beg shrewd financiers and capricious morons (depending on whether or not they give you anything) for the money required to attempt one, or languish under the direction of someone else as an employee until finally saving enough to try.

And the answer is that life is not fair. A plutocracy is not a meritocracy. If you don't like it, be born rich or win big at business roulette, and then invest only in worthy things.

Re: We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

#122

Post by gfodor »

digz wrote: post #105
gfodor wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While I have some sympathy for your point of view (after all the guy is free to say what he wants) I still think the argument is facile. A few thoughts: - 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 worki…

Re: fungible talent, I disagree, talent is not non-fungible, it's semi-fungible within certain subfields. If you know how to hammer a nail you can apply that to different applications. Beyond that, I'd argue that if you are a smart individual who is generally well educated and adept at learning, your labor is fairly fungible given enough ramp-up time to acquire new skills.

The entire article (and this viewpoint in general) is predicated on the idea that if you are capable enough to learn what is necessary to build and launch a mobile app you are capable enough to solve similar technical problems that apply to what the author considers more worthwhile to society. I don't think this is far fetched.

As far as determining what is worthwhile, I think this is less about what others think and more about what you think about what you are working on and its worth. Just because you have built something doesn't mean you actually have reflected on if it was the best use of your time. It's easy to be drawn in (due to flow, endorphins, cash, etc) and then suddenly you realize you've spent half of your life working on something you're not exactly proud of. It's easy to throw out moral relativism as an excuse to never be able to say something is objectively stupid, but some things are dumber than others, and at the end of the day this is about what you decide to spend your limited time on Earth doing. These little reminders I think provide a good nudge for people to think about what they are working on and consciously decide they want to continue on that path, regardless of what others think.

Re: We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

#124

Post by digz »

phillmv wrote: post #109
digz wrote: post #79

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.

>This is such an important point, and why free markets work best. 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 demonst…

Having studied with the originators of the efficient market hypothesis (Fama), I regret to inform you that what you describe is not a feature of EMH but is rather frequently attributed to it in an attempt to discredit it. There is nothing that rationally follows EMH that leads to Pareto-optimal outcomes in society.

EMH means that well informed markets make sound decisions on the pricing of assets. This means that based on the current information available, markets are excellent at understanding the probability-weighted value of an asset. It doesn't mean that the outcome ends up being right, it means that it's fairly priced based on the information at hand. Nothing guaranteeing Pareto-optimal outcomes from that.

Furthermore, an investor giving 1.2M to a company is not an efficient market under any circumstance.

Re: We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

#125

Post by diminoten »

What the heck is wrong with Yo?

Have any of you installed and tried to use it? It's an app designed to send pre-fabricated messages amongst its users. Instead of typing "are you up?" late at night while I'm driving home (hypothetically; texting while driving is bad, kids), all I have to do is hit the "Yo" button on my screen. One, MAYBE 2 clicks later, my existence and consciousness is broadcast to my friends, en masse, and I can continue focusing on the road instead of my phone keyboard.

It also looks like, soon, new phrases will be sendable. Stuff like an actual, "Are you up?", "Lunch?" etc. I know in my friend circle, a button like, "Wanna game?" would work immensely well.

What about a "Help!" button? Now we're suddenly into the, "saving lives" territory the submission tries to say Yo has nothing to do with. "I'm suicidal"? "I'm lost"? "I'm hurt"?

Can we solve this problem using a million other apps, in a million other ways? Yes. Did Twitter go under because text messaging was the "exact same thing"? No.

Re: We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

#126

Post by nickff »

phillmv wrote: post #109
digz wrote: post #79

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.

>This is such an important point, and why free markets work best. 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 demonst…

The efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) requires neither "perfect information dissemination" or "uniformly rational agents".

Here is one well stated version of the EMH:

"The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) essentially says that all known information about investment securities, such as stocks, is already factored into the prices of those securities. Therefore no amount of analysis can give an investor an edge over other investors. EMH does not require that investors be rational; it says that individual investors will act randomly but, as a whole, the market is always "right." In simple terms, "efficient" implies "normal." For example, an unusual reaction to unusual information is normal."[1]

[1] http://mutualfunds.about.com/od/mutualfundglossary/a/Efficie...

Re: We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

#127

Post by JoshuaDavid »

timr wrote: post #113
jal278 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." [0] The reason why this article resonates with many readers is that it expresses frustration with the triviality of how our economy allocates resources to start-ups. The promise of tech is huge, but following the money often leads to optimizing ads, machine learning algorithms competing with each other in HFT, or other appl…

"It's not that EVERYONE should be working on the big problems -- just that the incentive systems seem to lean towards triviality over deep human benefit." Yes, exactly. And even more importantly: we can fix it, but we choose not to. I know brilliant people with extremely specialized training in chemistry, physics, biochemistry, and so on. People who should be developing new drugs, or high-speed trains, or improving s…

Who is "we"?

Re: We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

#128

Post by onewaystreet »

jal278 wrote: post #90
pdabbadabba wrote: post #51

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…

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." [0] The reason why this article resonates with many readers is that it expresses frustration with the triviality of how our economy allocates resources to start-ups. The promise of tech is huge, but following the money often leads to optimizing ads, machine learning algorithms competing with each other in HFT, or other appl…

Ad money is what's paying for all the interesting projects and acquisitions going on at Google right now. If not directly a net benefit to society, it has been one indirectly.

Re: We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

#129

Post by [deleted] »

imgabe wrote: post #119

I disagree with the premise that being able to create an app that sends "yo" to somebody implies that you should be able to solve any of the various health crises around the world. For one thing, this is incredibly insulting. Do you think that nobody is working on solving these already? Do you think that the people conducting medical research are just so unbelievably stupid that they couldn't comprehend how to write…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN