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My new favourite person. "In his talk, Palihapitiya criticized not only Facebook, but Silicon Valley’s entire system of venture capital funding. He said that i

My new favourite person. "In his talk, Palihapitiya criticized not only Facebook, but Silicon Valley’s entire system of venture capital funding. He said that investors pump money into “shitty, useless, idiotic companies,” rather than addressing real problems like climate change and disease." Amen brother. Nailed it. I caught up with a friend the other day. He has a first class honours degree in Physics from Cambridge University. He went on to do a PhD in Quantum Mechanics. He is the smartest person I have ever met. He works for a company that trawls social media looking for "trends". This is a guy who could probably be building the warp drive, or a nuclear fusion reactor - instead he spends his days writing code that helps clients sell people shit they don't need - because that is what this insane "market" puts value on. It is a terribly toxic culture exacerbated by social media. I did a "hard break" from social media a year or two back and have never regretted the decision.

caractacus 9y ago
> because that is what this insane "market" puts value on. Because that is where he decided to work. I imagine he could find a role elsewhere focused on the areas you mentioned if he wished with those qualifications. I don't doubt for a second that VCs fund a shedload of shite and that the social media world has pernicious effects that we are only just starting to understand, but in your example I don't think the tech industry can be blamed for your friend wasting his life building widgets.
- fnl 9y ago
  As someone in a similar situation: I hold a PhD in Molecular Biology, yet the pay as a post-doc was so low, I couldn't even get my two kids into a decent school. And don't even discuss pre-doc salaries if you have any family ambitions... Guess where I am in now? Machine learning consulting, left science - doing work that finally pays my bills and gets my kids to a first-class school.
  - jabv 9y ago
    I don't intend to mock you -- I am sure there is much more relevant context to your life decisions, and they're your own, anyway. However, I have observed friends seemingly get caught in a pattern: go to a top school, so you can have a high-paying job, so you can afford to send kids to a top school, so they can get high-paying jobs, so that... In some folks' lives, the value of the "top school" seems to have a circular definition (not true for all folks, of course). It's a little sad, because by breaking out of that pattern, many more possibilities open up (like working in important and fascinating science for lower pay).
    - fnl 9y ago
      Well, I live in Spain - the qualitative difference here between a standard public school (the ones you can go to are the closest ones and we live in no fancy neighborhood...) and a private one simply is that in the public school not even I understand the English teacher (yes, that seriously happened to me), while the private school at least has the standards I was used to (I went to school in Austria). So overall, for me the issue here is mostly about the rapidly growing inequality gap and our society's relentless, unhealthy obsession with [market] performance & efficiency at all costs. But yes, I totally understand what you are referring to - having my kids go to a private school means we have a number of those "circular types" you described to cope with...
drmpeg 9y ago
"I saw the best minds of our generation writing spam filters." Neal Stephenson Although I like to update the quote to: "I saw the best minds of our generation writing Snapchat filters."
- zafiro17 9y ago
  It wasn't too many years ago that the best minds of our generation were engaged in trying to reverse engineer a popular text document format (that remains ubiquitous to this day). In each case, it's a shame we haven't built a better climate of collaboration, but capitalism doesn't reward sharing, it rewards risk and sometimes artificial scarcity.
zodiac 9y ago
> because that is what this insane "market" puts value on It is an unfortunate outcome, but how would you change the systems (e.g. capitalism) that produced this outcome?
- zapperdapper 9y ago
  I don't need to change the system. I only need to change my own behaviour. Eventually, when enough people have got sick of the current situation, and have changed their behaviour too, we will have a new system...
  - wolfgke 9y ago
    > I don't need to change the system. I only need to change my own behaviour. Already done for a long time (and still doing). It does not change anything since most other people do not change their behavior.
    - zapperdapper 9y ago
      > Already done for a long time (and still doing). Yes, me too. It has been a process. > It does not change anything since most other people do not change their behavior. I disagree. People do change their behaviour. You did. I did. There are many, many others. It's just not reached a critical mass yet, but give it time, it will. There are whole communities out there that didn't exist ten or fifteen years ago that are kicking back at the system because it gives them a better life. Keep doing what you are doing, keep the faith, look for ways to accelerate change (something I've become increasingly interested in). It will happen.
      - csallen 9y ago
        I disagree that removing yourself from the system changes much of anything. It's effectively no different than committing suicide. The rest of the world goes on. And, in fact, they have more power, because now a smaller percentage of conscious individuals control any resources.
eksemplar 9y ago
You can blame the market all you want, but at the end of the day, your friend chose the job he works over doing something else. The market is going to buy a warp-drive when someone makes it.
- heyyou123 9y ago
  Market also drives job-choice, unfortunately. He may be drowning in loans and may have to take this shitty job to pay up
- zapperdapper 9y ago
  The Market is, left to its own devices, notoriously bad at pricing social and human values. Two examples: teachers and nurses. The social value of a compassionate nurse, if you are cheyne-stoking or supping on your last chemo cocktail is huge. My partner is a nurse and the comfort she has given to the sick and dying cannot be priced by the market. Compare to the banksters who brought about 2008 GFI. In my friend's case he was simply not able to get sufficient funding for his core research. In the end he gave up and got a job and I don't blame him for that. > The market is going to buy a warp-drive when someone makes it. It won't happen if our best brains are figuring out how to make you click on ads and concocting the most effective form of fake news. It is a massive diversion of raw talent and resources away from, say, that nuclear fusion reactor.
  - watwut 9y ago
    People tend to think that the compassion of people in nursing profession come for free and that those people are effortlessly like that. Nothing could be further from truth. But also, there is much more in nursing then compassion. It reqires a lot of self control and knowledge.
agumonkey 9y ago
Reminds me of Steve Yegge soul searching post where he decided to go into ... bioinformatics (not sure, fuzzy memory). The previous decades were all cool, and the system keeps optimizing for fun innovation but there are other issues right now
mvkel 9y ago
A more apt analogy is taking the best mathematicians and having them exclusively work on stock market algorithms on wall street. To pretend this is isolated to SV is ignorant. This is what you get in capitalism

caractacus 9y ago

> because that is what this insane "market" puts value on. Because that is where he decided to work. I imagine he could find a role elsewhere focused on the areas you mentioned if he wished with those qualifications. I don't doubt for a second that VCs fund a shedload of shite and that the social media world has pernicious effects that we are only just starting to understand, but in your example I don't think the tech industry can be blamed for your friend wasting his life building widgets.

fnl 9y ago
As someone in a similar situation: I hold a PhD in Molecular Biology, yet the pay as a post-doc was so low, I couldn't even get my two kids into a decent school. And don't even discuss pre-doc salaries if you have any family ambitions... Guess where I am in now? Machine learning consulting, left science - doing work that finally pays my bills and gets my kids to a first-class school.
- jabv 9y ago
  I don't intend to mock you -- I am sure there is much more relevant context to your life decisions, and they're your own, anyway. However, I have observed friends seemingly get caught in a pattern: go to a top school, so you can have a high-paying job, so you can afford to send kids to a top school, so they can get high-paying jobs, so that... In some folks' lives, the value of the "top school" seems to have a circular definition (not true for all folks, of course). It's a little sad, because by breaking out of that pattern, many more possibilities open up (like working in important and fascinating science for lower pay).
  - fnl 9y ago
    Well, I live in Spain - the qualitative difference here between a standard public school (the ones you can go to are the closest ones and we live in no fancy neighborhood...) and a private one simply is that in the public school not even I understand the English teacher (yes, that seriously happened to me), while the private school at least has the standards I was used to (I went to school in Austria). So overall, for me the issue here is mostly about the rapidly growing inequality gap and our society's relentless, unhealthy obsession with [market] performance & efficiency at all costs. But yes, I totally understand what you are referring to - having my kids go to a private school means we have a number of those "circular types" you described to cope with...

drmpeg 9y ago

"I saw the best minds of our generation writing spam filters." Neal Stephenson Although I like to update the quote to: "I saw the best minds of our generation writing Snapchat filters."

zafiro17 9y ago
It wasn't too many years ago that the best minds of our generation were engaged in trying to reverse engineer a popular text document format (that remains ubiquitous to this day). In each case, it's a shame we haven't built a better climate of collaboration, but capitalism doesn't reward sharing, it rewards risk and sometimes artificial scarcity.

zodiac 9y ago

> because that is what this insane "market" puts value on It is an unfortunate outcome, but how would you change the systems (e.g. capitalism) that produced this outcome?

zapperdapper 9y ago
I don't need to change the system. I only need to change my own behaviour. Eventually, when enough people have got sick of the current situation, and have changed their behaviour too, we will have a new system...
- wolfgke 9y ago
  > I don't need to change the system. I only need to change my own behaviour. Already done for a long time (and still doing). It does not change anything since most other people do not change their behavior.
  - zapperdapper 9y ago
    > Already done for a long time (and still doing). Yes, me too. It has been a process. > It does not change anything since most other people do not change their behavior. I disagree. People do change their behaviour. You did. I did. There are many, many others. It's just not reached a critical mass yet, but give it time, it will. There are whole communities out there that didn't exist ten or fifteen years ago that are kicking back at the system because it gives them a better life. Keep doing what you are doing, keep the faith, look for ways to accelerate change (something I've become increasingly interested in). It will happen.
    - csallen 9y ago
      I disagree that removing yourself from the system changes much of anything. It's effectively no different than committing suicide. The rest of the world goes on. And, in fact, they have more power, because now a smaller percentage of conscious individuals control any resources.

eksemplar 9y ago

You can blame the market all you want, but at the end of the day, your friend chose the job he works over doing something else. The market is going to buy a warp-drive when someone makes it.

heyyou123 9y ago
Market also drives job-choice, unfortunately. He may be drowning in loans and may have to take this shitty job to pay up
zapperdapper 9y ago
The Market is, left to its own devices, notoriously bad at pricing social and human values. Two examples: teachers and nurses. The social value of a compassionate nurse, if you are cheyne-stoking or supping on your last chemo cocktail is huge. My partner is a nurse and the comfort she has given to the sick and dying cannot be priced by the market. Compare to the banksters who brought about 2008 GFI. In my friend's case he was simply not able to get sufficient funding for his core research. In the end he gave up and got a job and I don't blame him for that. > The market is going to buy a warp-drive when someone makes it. It won't happen if our best brains are figuring out how to make you click on ads and concocting the most effective form of fake news. It is a massive diversion of raw talent and resources away from, say, that nuclear fusion reactor.
- watwut 9y ago
  People tend to think that the compassion of people in nursing profession come for free and that those people are effortlessly like that. Nothing could be further from truth. But also, there is much more in nursing then compassion. It reqires a lot of self control and knowledge.

agumonkey 9y ago

Reminds me of Steve Yegge soul searching post where he decided to go into ... bioinformatics (not sure, fuzzy memory). The previous decades were all cool, and the system keeps optimizing for fun innovation but there are other issues right now

mvkel 9y ago

A more apt analogy is taking the best mathematicians and having them exclusively work on stock market algorithms on wall street. To pretend this is isolated to SV is ignorant. This is what you get in capitalism