Cancer and Startups
chris-granger.com
Cancer and Startups
1–10 of 59 posts
Re: Cancer and Startups
#2A great IDE or language can add "Force multiplication":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_multiplication
Hopefully, Light Table will enable developers to many times more productive.
Re: Cancer and Startups
#3It is easy to focus on the "glory" positions, but easy to forget all of the support required. For a doctor to save someone who comes in on an ambulance, there's the other staff in the hospital, the training for everyone, the tools, the work to get the right tools in the right place, the roads the ambulance drove in on, etc etc.
Re: Cancer and Startups
#4It is easy to focus on the "glory" positions, but easy to forget all of the support required. For a doctor to save someone who comes in on an ambulance, there's the other staff in the hospital, the training for everyone, the tools, the work to get the right tools in the right place, the roads the ambulance drove in on, etc etc.
I talk specifically about being a doctor only because that was my personal path. My argument was generally meant to apply to anyone with more direct influence over someone's well-being, so nurses, EMTs, hospital staff, pharmacists, researchers, and everything in between could certainly be swapped in any time I used "doctor."
Re: Cancer and Startups
#5You have my full sympathies and empathies. Living at home with a sick relative (terminal or not) is a deeply emotionally taxing but personally important act.
No one person can fix / help with every problem. You can only at best better enable others to more effectively solve problems. That's what I'm doing with my tech, that's what you're doing with your tech. That's what everyone building a genuinely technological venture is trying to do.
Re: Cancer and Startups
#6I applaud your mission to try and improve lives, and I believe that every start-up should focus on just that. I would also like to give it a little perspective though.
There is generally an inverse correlation between the effectiveness of solving a problem and the directness of the approach. If you would like to cure cancer, the most effective way is to cure cancer. The next most direct approach is to help the doctors who are curing cancer. The next most direct approach is to help the medical companies who are helping the doctors who are curing cancer. And so on.
Having "a mission" is of paramount importance to succeeding, but it bothers me when we believe we're on a mission to solve a problem that we're simply not solving. A photo sharing application could say they're improving the lives of cancer patients by allowing them to see photos of their grandchildren, and yes, by the letter that is a true statement, and honestly maybe that's all the patient really wanted -- to see photos of their grandchildren, but to me it seems like an indirect drop in the bucket toward solving the real problem.
I feel like this thinking is actually poisonous to the ecosystem. It prevents us from solving the real problems we've set out to solve by deluding us to think that by building some indirect tool for people who may help people who may help people who may actually solve the problem, we've accomplished our mission. We haven't. It's a text editor, and you have to see it for what it is. If we want to cure cancer, we need to sit down, understand the problem landscape, and solve it without five layers of indirection. Otherwise, we shouldn't be stealing the thunder of those whose actual mission is to cure cancer.
Re: Cancer and Startups
#7I applaud your mission to try and improve lives, and I believe that every start-up should focus on just that. I would also like to give it a little perspective though. There is generally an inverse correlation between the effectiveness of solving a problem and the directness of the approach. If you would like to cure cancer, the most effective way is to cure cancer. The next most direct approach is to help the doctor…
I apologize if my post implies I believe we're out curing cancer - we're not and that was not my intent. If you point out to me where I've somehow stated that, I'll be happy to fix it.
That being said, I'm not sure I agree with your argument. Both indirect and direct means are ultimately necessary for any serious change or innovation. By your logic, a microscope is just an item that lets you see things up close. Now imagine a world without it. We'd certainly be hard-pressed to do much in the medical field. Tools, by definition, enable us to do something we couldn't do before or increase the efficiency of something we did have the ability to do. Without advancements in tools, we won't get very far.
If a new "text editor" ends up providing us a much more efficient means of creating things like Watson, in what way is that not just as important as curing any one disease? The argument is certainly not that one case is better than the other, just that I've decided to go down a different path, one that I believe is just as important. I can fix 100% of something or increase everything by 1% - I believe the latter is the best thing I can do at this point.
Re: Cancer and Startups
#8> Isn't it my moral duty to do that?
No, there is no absolute "moral duty" to anything or anyone. There is a thing called "guilt", that some people try to induce (moral manipulation), when you don't do the things they want you to do. You only duty is to do things that you think are right.
> Could I have saved Kristie, or if not her, others like her?
Saving her - quite unlikely, unless you manage to find a cure for the kind of terminal cancer she has, in less than the survival expectation that were given.
Saving others - unlikely, unless you manage to find a cure for any cancer. There seems to be many people working on that.
I would say this is a battle you have >if this is really the "right" thing to do
That being said, considering death is a final state, you may want to spend some time with the dying person instead of working on your project. If you don't, you may have regrets later on. You won't be able to interact with the person after death. I'd suggest stalling the IDE work, unless you have very compelling reasons to prioritize that.
Don't fight the battle, but instead, provide care and comfort to the dying person.
>I'm doing this because I believe that this is the greatest contribution I can make
Good statement. You do with the cards you are dealt with. Just make sure to take the right decisions to avoid regrets.
Re: Cancer and Startups
#9It is easy to focus on the "glory" positions, but easy to forget all of the support required. For a doctor to save someone who comes in on an ambulance, there's the other staff in the hospital, the training for everyone, the tools, the work to get the right tools in the right place, the roads the ambulance drove in on, etc etc.
I talk specifically about being a doctor only because that was my personal path. My argument was generally meant to apply to anyone with more direct influence over someone's well-being, so nurses, EMTs, hospital staff, pharmacists, researchers, and everything in between could certainly be swapped in any time I used "doctor."
I recently went through this with somebody close to me. Don't forget that doctors, nurses, etc ... can't always save somebodies life, but can only prolong or make it better. You too, can make somebodies life better in many, many ways and that is as important as anything else.
Re: Cancer and Startups
#10> my mother's partner was diagnosed
What business is this mother in? An accountancy? Perhaps you meant to say spouse?