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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"

#81

Post by DougWebb »

mpyne wrote: post #76
DougWebb wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood the claim that "market makers" are providing a valuable service in the stock market by providing liquidity and reducing spreads. If this is a necessary service, why aren't there market makers in every market? My local grocery wants to sell bananas for $1.50 a pound, but I only want to pay $1.00. Why isn't there a market maker buying and selling these bananas thousands of times per second to redu…

> No market maker is needed That doesn't mean that market makers don't provide value , just that they are not necessary .

I don't see the value; I never have. I understand that the market maker is able to extract profit from the spread, but they keep that for themselves. The original buyer and seller don't gain anything they wouldn't have gained otherwise, and it seems likely that one or both of them lose out on a share of that spread-profit.

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

#82

Post by Maro »

auggierose wrote: post #48
jaxytee wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Venture Capitalist primary concern is making money. Sure they'll go for changing the world too, if it means they make more money.

That's a pretty naive world view for many reasons.

I downvoted you because your comment doesn't add to the discussion. Maybe if you explained your position wrt. to the parent in greater detail.

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

#83

Post by lkrubner »

nicholassmith wrote: post #66

Don't forget as well, the barrier to entry for solving cancer is non-trivial compared to the barrier to entry for creating Angry Birds. It's significantly easier to develop an app than solving cancer in terms of the equipment, research and background you need. I haven't seen many 'Learn cellular analysis in a week' books floating around.

But big problems are usually solved as a series of small problems, yes? It's unlikely that one day some researcher will combine a few chemicals in a new way and shout "Eureka! I have found the drug that cures all cancer!" A problem as complex as cancer (and diverse too: meningiomas are very different from, say, basal cell skin cancer) is something that will probably be solved by a 1,000 small breakthroughs, rather than 1 huge breakthrough. And there are a lot of apps that could help in that direction.

Here are some ideas that would be great, if someone could figure out a clever way to implement them:

1.) an app that allows the discovery of important papers that have received no attention, perhaps because they were published in journals that have low prestige

2.) an app that can detect possible bias on the part of the researchers (perhaps a tool that combines data about grants received from Big Pharma to papers that seem to prove the effectiveness of Big Pharma's drugs). At the very least this might protect some researchers from wasting time doing follow-up research based on a paper that is false.

3.) apps that offer different color encodings to DNA information to reflect different theories of the how DNA works, and how DNA damage contributes to cancer. In the same way that in Emacs you can get different color schemes for looking at your Java code, it would be useful to be able to easily format and color DNA sequences, based on the various theories regarding how non-coding segments effect the overall functioning of DNA -- this would be especially useful now, when there is as yet no dominant theory about exactly what roles certain non-coding segments play in the life of our cells.

These are 3 apps that would be helpful to researchers and which face no regulatory hurdles.

I do not offer these examples to say "We should all be working to cure cancer", though the thought is not completely unreasonable given that close to 25% of all Americans die of cancer. But rather, I offer these 3 examples simply to challenge glib assertions that programmers can't work on a problem like cancer because it is too hard -- rather, there are a million small tasks that programmers could undertake that would help the overall effort.

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

#84

Post by mpyne »

DougWebb wrote: post #81
mpyne wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No market maker is needed That doesn't mean that market makers don't provide value , just that they are not necessary .

I don't see the value; I never have. I understand that the market maker is able to extract profit from the spread, but they keep that for themselves. The original buyer and seller don't gain anything they wouldn't have gained otherwise, and it seems likely that one or both of them lose out on a share of that spread-profit.

I don't even own stock, but I believe the "value" is as simple as a reduction in the price for the buyer, along with an increase in liquidity for the seller, along with a reduction of the spread for both (which should make it easier to budget and make predictions).

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

#85

Post by jballanc »

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 experiment that would be part of a larger research course. As part of the work, I scaffolded out the entire research course to its eventual conclusion. Having finished this, I took a figurative step back...and realized that I would be long dead before the entire project could be finished.

I was 24 at the time.

Graduate school, and scientific research in general, has a way of slapping you upside the head with your own finite lifespan. The resulting problem, of course, is how do you convey to a non-scientist that the work you are doing is important, despite the fact that you will not live to see its conclusion?

I've often thought this is the great unsolved problem with capitalism. How do you convince shareholders to invest their money if you can only promise returns on a 100+ year schedule? I think the insurance industry might have some insights here, but I still haven't quite cracked this nut...

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

#86

Post by gus_massa »

DougWebb wrote: post #45
ig1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those milliseconds being shaved off forex trading are the reason that commercial and retail spreads are much tighter than they were a decade ago. When currencies were priced every second market makers had to set a spread that would protect them from market variance within that one-second period, as that time period shrunk the amount of risk dropped as did the spreads. Think about the thousands of currency transaction…

I've never understood the claim that "market makers" are providing a valuable service in the stock market by providing liquidity and reducing spreads. If this is a necessary service, why aren't there market makers in every market? My local grocery wants to sell bananas for $1.50 a pound, but I only want to pay $1.00. Why isn't there a market maker buying and selling these bananas thousands of times per second to redu…

On the other hand, if your local grocery wants to sell bananas for $1.00 a pound tomorrow (because the have no banana today), but you want to pay $1.50 but you need them now (because you have a party), then someone with a scooter and a nearby warehouse can go and find some bananas for you (at $1.50) and replenish the banana stock tomorrow (at $1.00). Probably this business will not work with bananas, because bananas rote, the fuel cost and the time someone has to sit in front of the groceries. It's easier to implement with stocks and bonds.

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

#87

Post by cell303 »

Does anybody dare to argue that angry birds did provide more value to peoples lives than a cure for cancer?

Why is it so obvious that curing cancer is the right thing to do as opposed to engaging in economic and cultural activity, which has been the norm for mankind as long as we have been around? (and by the way provides the social stability that is the very basis for any kind of progress at all)

What's worse is the implication that there is a cure for cancer and all it would take is a few talented entrepreneurs to tackle the problem in an directed effort (which, to my knowledge, is happening anyway but with limited success while chemo therapy is still around, which was a by-product of war efforts)

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

#88

Post by carbocation »

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…

No, really, I discharged a patient from the hospital late the other day because the software gave me no indication that the 4 pieces of disconnected discharge orders/paperwork were missing a fifth piece that finalized the discharge. Software is a real problem.

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

#89

Post by Maro »

I hypothesize these types of arguments would fail if you quantified them, ie. compared the actual amount spent investing (VC money, people, manhours) in (1) Angry Birds type startups versus (2) training medical researchers, medical research in academia and industry.

Ie. I hypothesize (2) >> (1)

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

#90

Post by zimpenfish »

6d0debc071 wrote: post #78
patio11 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, just throwing this out there as an option, you could solve any problem for a physician's practice -- like, say, patients not complying with their treatment regimen by failing to make scheduled check ups. You might even be able to do that with a SaaS app. Granted, it won't cure cancer, but you'll save more lives at the margin than doing Zynga ads. (And, n.b., healthcare clients often have more than $500 available…

How? Making software for government is like a two year bidding process. The barriers to entry are incredibly high when it should just be a case of, "Okay, you want X Y and Z as your most critical features, let's keep the initial product small, we can add features as we go along. It'll be done in two months and then we'll iterate." Instead it's more like, "We're going to have bids for two years for the project and the…

To be fair, the BBC did hire an Yahoo manager to manage it. Doomed before it even started...
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