41–50 of 50 posts
They will go after whoever is making money. And what do they contribute? Nothing.
I disagree with this. It's essentially the same argument that there should be a single societal focus on shipping all of our extra food to those who are starving. True, in sheer numbers we have the gross resources to do just that. We have the infrastructure in terms of ships, planes, and boots on the ground. But there are other reasons we don't do this. Capitalism doesn't work like this. Resources are allocated via c…
Start a company selling assassinations, and the wider world will quickly tell you your business isn't socially correct - you will be shut down. Pyramid schemes are another illegal class of business.
There are also businesses that, while legal, do not appear socially useful. There's nothing wrong with disapproving of such businesses.
>You never know how or when your product will be used, or who it will help.
Your argument is: because businesses can yield unanticipated utility, there is no point reasoning about which business is best to spend time on.
Sure, perhaps the cat-pictures business will, through some unexpected turn of events, yield greater social utility than an education startup: Our models of the world are imperfect, and sometimes we mis-predict which actions will be most beneficial.
But that doesn't mean we should give up reasoning about what the most beneficial thing to do is. We should still attempt to reason about relative benefits, and act to maximise our expected future utility.
Which is not to say we should always "focus on shipping all of extra food to those who are starving". Indeed, maybe some technology that looks trivial will yield huge benefits. So we should definitely spend some time exploring new technologies, to try and catch unexpected windfalls. In order words, we have an explore/exploit tradeoff to make.
But: Trading off exploration/exploitation is not the same as just throwing up our hands and saying "do whatever you want, don't attempt to reason about relative utilities".
I disagree with this. It's essentially the same argument that there should be a single societal focus on shipping all of our extra food to those who are starving. True, in sheer numbers we have the gross resources to do just that. We have the infrastructure in terms of ships, planes, and boots on the ground. But there are other reasons we don't do this. Capitalism doesn't work like this. Resources are allocated via c…
>Telling entrepreneurs that one class of businesses is more socially correct than others isn't how the world works. Start a company selling assassinations, and the wider world will quickly tell you your business isn't socially correct - you will be shut down. Pyramid schemes are another illegal class of business. There are also businesses that, while legal, do not appear socially useful. There's nothing wrong with di…
I disagree with this. It's essentially the same argument that there should be a single societal focus on shipping all of our extra food to those who are starving. True, in sheer numbers we have the gross resources to do just that. We have the infrastructure in terms of ships, planes, and boots on the ground. But there are other reasons we don't do this. Capitalism doesn't work like this. Resources are allocated via c…
But there are a striking number of people building "pictures of cats doing x" websites. It's technically easy, which appeals to some people.
But there's nothing wrong with reminding developers that they have the talent to address bigger problems than a shortage of cat meme websites.
It surprises me that the author holds Myrvhold to such high esteem when his company, Intellectual Ventures, is working pretty hard to stifle innovation.
"Stop building dumb stuff. Actually, just stop building anything and instead sue people who do"
So the "logical" thing to do is to stop executing and just acquire existing patents and file for new ones. Then wait for others who want to execute or who try to execute. Then, if it looks like they have, or will have, the money to pay, threaten to sue them.
Brilliant!
A true innovator.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Telling entrepreneurs that one class of businesses is more socially correct than others isn't how the world works. Start a company selling assassinations, and the wider world will quickly tell you your business isn't socially correct - you will be shut down. Pyramid schemes are another illegal class of business. There are also businesses that, while legal, do not appear socially useful. There's nothing wrong with di…
There's an implicit assumption here that entrepreneurial motivation is fungible, that a person who could found a successful cat picture business could also found a successful education startup just as easily. I don't think that's the case. In turning someone away from something they're truly interested in and guilting them into working on a more "serious" business, the most likely result is a failed education startup…
In reality, the entrepreneur is going to have to make some tradeoff between likelihood of success (given motivation) and utility of success.
But entrepreneurs intuitively make these sort of tradeoffs all the time. This is just another judgement to make.
Because the guys building Facebook for dogs, or working on faster games have the transferable skills required to work on a Malaria vaccine.
If you can make another meme generator, then you can probably make a good dent in the world. That's a shamefully bad cop-out to say you couldn't do any of these things: http://freerice.com/ http://www.donorschoose.org/ http://www.shiftlabs.org/ http://www.sparked.com/
If you want to help the developing world it's worth the time to take a look at what has actually worked to get countries out of poverty and what hasn't. As far as I can tell there are only two proven ways for countries to get out of poverty: (1) Kill a bunch of other people and take their stuff. (2) Industry. Notice that aid isn't on the list. So it seems that if you actually care about a country you should spend you…
Does post-WW2 Germany count? A lot of people credit the Marshall Plan[0] for their tremendous recovery.
If you want to help the developing world it's worth the time to take a look at what has actually worked to get countries out of poverty and what hasn't. As far as I can tell there are only two proven ways for countries to get out of poverty: (1) Kill a bunch of other people and take their stuff. (2) Industry. Notice that aid isn't on the list. So it seems that if you actually care about a country you should spend you…
"P.S. Can anyone think of a country that has gotten out of poverty based on aid? All the modern examples I can think of (Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Latvia, Lithuania, etc.) haven't." Does post-WW2 Germany count? A lot of people credit the Marshall Plan[0] for their tremendous recovery. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Afghanistan, maybe? U.S. and Societ completely ruined the country in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s (in the 90s Soviet were gone and U.S. involvement was passive and indirect though, bu they "blessed" The Taliban as an ally nevertheless), and in the past decade U.S. and Europe have helped kinda rebuild the country by technical and financial aid . I quite and completely agree with your comment; because that's exactly what…
Does Afghanistan qualify as a has gotten out of poverty country?