Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem • Hacker News Board

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#211

Post by eli_gottlieb » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 11:27 AM UTC

api wrote: post #113

jmsduran wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't blame people choosing to work in other business areas rather than putting their efforts in fixing government, curing cancer, improving medicine, rebooting our space program, fixing education, etc. Why? Because it's honestly very hard work, often with little recognition and less pay. People trying to innovate or 'disrupt' these fields are up against deep rooted political institutions, large corporations with m…

"fixing government, curing cancer, improving medicine, rebooting our space program, fixing education, etc." I think a big part of it is less pay. Important things pay very little compared to frivolous metoo.io apps and social advertising and whatever. Capitalism is a greedy optimizer. When it finds a local maximum it goes all in. It does not explore the fitness landscape.

It's also an Unfriendly optimizer. Capitalism's local maxima often consist of things like Gilded Ages and Great Depressions in which return on investment is maximized to the hilt at the expense of nearly all other values. Yes, once we force it out of those local maxima, it goes back to generating wealth in a way that people actually want it to, but eventually, without deliberate management to keep it out of them, it always finds another damn local maximum to get stuck in.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#212

Post by eli_gottlieb » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 11:31 AM UTC

badman_ting wrote: post #122

powera wrote: post #50

I stopped reading this when I got to "Why do these smart, quantitatively trained engineers, who could help cure cancer or fix healthcare.gov, want to work for a sexting app?" - there was the cover article in Time Magazine not less than 2 weeks ago about these very engineers fixing healthcare.gov, and describing why they don't do it permanently (government procurement is awful and almost always unrelated to actual ski…

It's funny how that line of thinking should boil down to "capitalism, or at least the way we are practicing it, misallocates resources", but the thought-buck always stops with the smart people. There's no "well, I the incentives must say these people should work on sexting apps, and they are acting rationally, I wonder why the incentives are that way?", it's just "Ugh! You're smart! Stop it with the sexting and start…

Large portions of our culture have a mental block about thinking that capitalism might be doing the wrong thing. Or rather, they simplistically equate "capitalism" with "freedom", fail to acknowledge that capitalism imposes its own imperative (namely: return-on-investment) on society, and thus end up wondering why these intelligent, free individuals haven't chosen to engage in noble, moral work. Since the presumption of "freedom" cannot be questioned (by noting that the capitalist imperative and the incentive structures flowing from it have a compelling power all their own), only one possible conclusion remains: all those intelligent, free individuals are just not very noble people, actually.

These people then proceed to sulk in a corner at the general suckitude of our species while voting for more capitalism.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#213

Post by eli_gottlieb » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 11:39 AM UTC

harryh wrote: post #188

rayiner wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you intend to respond to me? I'm sure Facebook does lots of neat things, I'm not criticizing it. All I'm saying is that its a cop-out when companies and investors say that its legal challenges that prevent investment into curing cancer, or whatever it is people think smart kids should work on besides sexting apps or the infrastructure for sexting apps. Its cover for the fact that there's just not much money in sa…

> Its cover for the fact that there's just not much money in saving the world. The question for me is why is this true? It seems like there should be.

>The question for me is why is this true? It seems like there should be.

As someone else noted, "saving the world" usually translates into economics as "generating large positive externalities". It's not just that you might have to give out cancer cures for free (in most countries the state will pay for health-care anyway), it's that you simply can't patent the Theory of General Relativity or the Germ Theory of Disease or the Dead Germ Method of Vaccination. Even improvements in nutrition and yield of crops can only partially be treated as private, excludable property.

Radical new discoveries are almost always nonexcludable, and thus can't really be treated as private commodities sold on a market. Note that I said can't, not shouldn't: trying to treat nonexcludable goods as private commodities leads to bankruptcy rather than sin.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#214

Post by eli_gottlieb » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 11:41 AM UTC

Vervious wrote: post #68

powera wrote: post #50

I stopped reading this when I got to "Why do these smart, quantitatively trained engineers, who could help cure cancer or fix healthcare.gov, want to work for a sexting app?" - there was the cover article in Time Magazine not less than 2 weeks ago about these very engineers fixing healthcare.gov, and describing why they don't do it permanently (government procurement is awful and almost always unrelated to actual ski…

> The whole article reads like a narrative that is grabbing random anecdotes to support a point, even when the facts say otherwise. I'm curious what facts you're talking about. The very problems you point out about healthcare.gov support part of the author's argument - that today's tech environment rewards the creation of a sexting app over more groundbreaking work, and therefore youth do the former. From my perspect…

Huh. Hold on. Let's go check the "Who's Hiring" monthly job listings here on Hacker News. Usually, when I read those, I see about 40% stupid-but-sexy bullshit, 40% dull but genuinely significant companies whose product does make life better for its users (for example: healthcare analytics companies), 15% awesome idealistic ventures, and the remaining 5% is either complete weird bullshit or the awesomest, coolest radical ventures I've ever seen.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#215

Post by eli_gottlieb » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 12:13 PM UTC

Jaiguss wrote: post #177

mmxiii wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you exemplify the kind of self-righteous person that probably spews this kind of junk daily. The reason people work on sexting apps over curing cancer is because it is a more human problem than curing cancer. In all your tunnel-visioned dash to label problems as "hard and "worthy" you are the one that missed the forest from the trees. All people will die, and while it would be great if they could stick around a b…

Lets just be honest with ourselves. The biggest reason more people are willing to work on these substance-less apps is because its far easier to create something superfluous as a twitter-helper(or any of the hundreds of ecommerce sites that simply provide new ways to do old things like laundry, via your phone), than it is to cure cancer, and they get to call themselves "hackers", "entrepreneurs", "techies", etc. Ther…

Let's just be honest with ourselves. The people who become research doctors working on curing cancer have very, very hard lives, and most aspiring cancer curers never get to do any actual curing. They have to do a PhD/MD, survive their internship and residency process, and most likely publish papers before they're even out of school before a cancer lab will even hire them.

Substanceless apps are not only objectively easier than curing cancer, there are much lower barriers to entry. In fact, for some perverse reason, our society seems to feel that the most trustworthy process for handling real, major problems like cancer research is to erect the highest possible barriers to entry, throw even the survivors out of the field at every least opportunity, and then place absolute trust in the few who survive this winnowing process.

The concept that treating everything serious as a tournament-structured winnowing process might have some negative impact on the ability of our research institutions to actually treat and cure cancer does not seem to occur.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#216

Post by eli_gottlieb » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 12:23 PM UTC

leoc wrote: post #92

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those all seem like a reach, perhaps made up after the fact. For instance, who blockades a bus, commits violence on the riders and fakes a scene as a rider (pretending to be an entitled Google employee and yelling out the window while having it filmed)? Not somebody annoyed at a bus stop. It all smells like protester-chic, finding something semiplausible to complain about then faking a protest. They didn't have drone…

> It all smells like protester-chic, finding something semiplausible to complain about then faking a protest. They're the torchbearers for the lawlessness and thuggery of the late-'60s "student revolutions" etc.

If you'd like to see some actual thuggery and lawlessness, I invite you to take a flight to Beirut or Istanbul and cross the border into Syria. Until then, please stop overblowing protests over real issues.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#217

Post by jusben1369 » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 1:34 PM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #22

jusben1369 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever you can land at an airport and take a train (BART) into the heart of the City in under 30 minutes you've got a subway system. BART could always be better (loop the Bay or go across the Golden Gate) but it is a real Subway system.

BART is more commuter rail than metro (what is usually meant by "subway"). It provides transport from other cities into the city (SF), but provides little coverage in the city itself. For people living in very specific parts of the city (see: the Mission) the lack of a real metro has made BART into a pseudo-subway, but at the end of the day it's still commuter rail (the seating arrangements in a BART car is telling a…

That's a good point.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#218

Post by fulafel » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 2:01 PM UTC

badman_ting wrote: post #122

powera wrote: post #50

I stopped reading this when I got to "Why do these smart, quantitatively trained engineers, who could help cure cancer or fix healthcare.gov, want to work for a sexting app?" - there was the cover article in Time Magazine not less than 2 weeks ago about these very engineers fixing healthcare.gov, and describing why they don't do it permanently (government procurement is awful and almost always unrelated to actual ski…

It's funny how that line of thinking should boil down to "capitalism, or at least the way we are practicing it, misallocates resources", but the thought-buck always stops with the smart people. There's no "well, I the incentives must say these people should work on sexting apps, and they are acting rationally, I wonder why the incentives are that way?", it's just "Ugh! You're smart! Stop it with the sexting and start…

You seem to have confused the econospeak-meaning of "rational" with its usual English meaning. It's rational to prefer meaningful work.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#219

Post by Kalium » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 2:45 PM UTC

Jaiguss wrote: post #182

Kalium wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sex and photo-sharing pays the bills. Thinking about "everyone" does not.

This sounds so unbelievably ignorant I laughed. Do you honestly think solving a problem that aids "everyone" is worthless, or cannot pay bills? Just an fyi, pharmaceutical industry is actually pretty lucrative because everyone is vulnerable to illness. Honestly though, I suspect most of the people sitting there writing those silly apps wouldn't be able to do things like cure Cancer or aid in creating vaccines and etc…

Solving a problem would be worth a great deal. Thinking about how to solve a problem is not worth a great deal. Attacking problems that have been unsolved for decades, despite lots of work, seems like a poor idea when compared to smaller problems that can actually be solved today.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#220

Post by michaelochurch » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 4:19 PM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #215

Jaiguss wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets just be honest with ourselves. The biggest reason more people are willing to work on these substance-less apps is because its far easier to create something superfluous as a twitter-helper(or any of the hundreds of ecommerce sites that simply provide new ways to do old things like laundry, via your phone), than it is to cure cancer, and they get to call themselves "hackers", "entrepreneurs", "techies", etc. Ther…

Let's just be honest with ourselves. The people who become research doctors working on curing cancer have very, very hard lives, and most aspiring cancer curers never get to do any actual curing. They have to do a PhD/MD, survive their internship and residency process, and most likely publish papers before they're even out of school before a cancer lab will even hire them . Substanceless apps are not only objectively…

Well fucking said.