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We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

christophmccann.com

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

#181

Post by jkaunisv1 »

trhway wrote: post #103
grecy wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>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.

I find it so strange when people make this argument, that a century was "spent" exploring these alternatives. I don't disagree that "making money" is our best heuristic so far, but it's not like the entire 20th century was devoted solely to exploring these options. There are various other concerns intertwined with the economic strategies that competed. Fascism could have won, Stalinist communism could have won, and it would not be accurate to say that any one economic strategy is the "best we've got" just because they came out, geopolitically/militarily, on top.

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

#182

Post by ryanpardieck »

steveklabnik wrote: post #173
lbrandy wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't do any of that. Read closer.

Considering on-topic is "anything hackers find interesting," a complaint that something is not interesting is a complaint that something isn't appropriate for the site.

I think you've seized too tightly to the word 'interesting' here. He was rejecting the advice as too paternalistic. And after reading the blog, I think that's pretty reasonable, even as I find myself agreeing somewhat with the blog.

"I'm not terribly interested in following this advice" is a lot different from "this advice is not appropriate for the site." Rejecting something doesn't mean it wasn't relevant.

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

#183

Post by jjoonathan »

rfrey wrote: post #111
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…

That quote is dripping with hubris. There's a few high profile cases where it's true -- Ng at google and now Baidu, for example -- but I guarantee that the bulk of the "best minds" of the generation are not programmers at Google or Facebook.

You have a point, but it's worth mentioning that the fundamental observation behind the complaint is still sound: incentives are rigged to guide smart people towards pursuits of dubious utility compared to what they would otherwise choose to work on. Let's look at a rough picture of incentives for a new graduate:

1. Helping the poor: $0 (maybe $12k if you count a fellowship)

2. Trying to Cure Cancer: $25k/yr, bump to $40k after 6 years

3. Engineering Medical Devices, Airplanes, etc: $60k/yr

4. Trying to Build the Next Twitter: $100k/yr-$150k/yr

5. Helping Rich People Game the System to Get Richer: $150k/yr, $300k/yr after a few years if successful

I have placed these in decreasing order of social value per my own judgement. Note that salary has precisely the opposite trend. The probability of that particular relative order occurring by chance is 1 in 120. I could add other jobs to the list to drop the probability even further.

In some cases the market is conveying valuable information. If we have enough !Software Engineers, it makes sense to depress their wages as a way of discouraging people from entering those fields. Similarly, it makes sense to encourage smart people to pursue roles with a lot of leverage (in the value creation sense, not the bargaining sense), which is a plausible excuse for sending smart people into finance (not one that I buy, but it's plausible).

But in other cases we can identify the information that the market is conveying and pass judgement with the opposite conclusion. By design, the market rewards those who feed and clothe wealthy people and punishes those who feed and clothe the poor and penniless. In this instance the market's reasoning is transparent enough to judge and few would rule in its favor ("necessary evil" is the best I've heard, and then only in the context of the circular "it's the best system we've tried" argument).

Another negative example would be medical research. Next time someone you care about is sick or dying and has run out of options, reconsider the wisdom of our system in spending ~3% of all medical expenditures on research. Also remember that much of that is governmental -- if the market had its way, that figure would be even lower. The market's reasoning is transparent: a doctor, insurance company, or drug company can threaten to withhold the service or good they provide in order to capture a fraction of the value they create. A researcher can't do that, at least not effectively (their product only appreciates in value once they no longer control it). So they are systematically undervalued and the options that your loved one has are artificially reduced as a result of this.

Market-based incentives have huge problems. The million dollar question (many trillion dollar question) is how to fix them.

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

#184

Post by mtdewcmu »

collyw wrote: post #87
mtdewcmu wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>energy, food, water, health, education The problem with those problems is that they are very hard. Much harder than starting a Yo. It's a false choice. Even if the founders of Yo were working on important problems, those problems might not get solved, because they are very hard. The world is big enough to have people working on big problems and people working on Yo.

I would disagree. Sure the app itself does something ridiculously trivial. But setting up an app that is expected to scale is not (I assume it is, if they got 1.2 million). They must have some very good marketing, or something special to get that million. I do the database for a DNA sequencing centre. I guess some of these things are considered "important" problems (working towards curing cancer, or other diseases).…

Ok, I didn't claim that starting Yo was easy, or that merely contributing to important problems is harder than starting Yo. I meant that, e.g., solving the energy problem is much harder than starting Yo. Basically, those big problems are so big that even if everyone at Yo devoted their careers to one of those problems, the chances of that being the difference in solving it is almost infinitesimal.

There have been a lot of brilliant efforts at curing cancer. You could spend a large portion of a brilliant career following up on one lead. Odds are, that lead won't yield a cure. Cancer is that hard.

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

#185

Post by alttab »

paxtonab wrote: post #32
ganeumann wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't mean the industry has a problem, it means the people who put the $1 million into the company have a problem.

If only I hadn't squandered my life savings on beanie-babies I could've invested in Yo before it went public!

I don't even think the screenwriter for Idiocracy could have planned Yo! as a stock symbol.

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

#186

Post by spacefight »

sharemywin wrote: post #53
spacefight wrote: post #10

Yo is a hack, over 100k Anroid downloads. They built their audience, now they can turn it into something usable. Oh, and they have your social graph based on cell numbers.

Or Arbel, cofounder and CEO of Yo, told Mashable that the app has had 110,000 downloads since Wednesday morning and 160,000 total downloads since it launched quietly in April.

I was just quoting the stats Google gives in the play store.

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

#187

Post by tekalon »

odonnellryan wrote: post #167
tekalon wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a business analyst that also does some basic IT work. I know some basic HTML/CSS/JS, enough to tweak some web pages that I support, but nothing from scratch.

My email should be in my profile. If you can't view it let me know. We'd need to get an outline.

I cannot see the email. My email should be in my profile, if you want to contact me.

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

#188

Post by gress »

digz wrote: post #150
gress wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising is a service designed to help corporations exploit psychology to induce people to buy their products. What you are describing is more like a concierge. Hint: The person who pays is the person who's interests are being served.

Reaching consumers is hard, even if you have the superior product. Facilitating such a transaction should make one proud. The 'psychological exploits' are a marginal component, but again, why is it inherently bad for someone to feel good about using product x over product y, even if they're exactly the same?

Are you suggesting that advertising never influences people to make choices that are not in their best interests?
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