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I work in medical/pharma, an area that some consider "Socially Beneficial". The reality isn't much different than the consumer web. For instance, hundreds of mi

I work in medical/pharma, an area that some consider "Socially Beneficial". The reality isn't much different than the consumer web. For instance, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on making small improvements to diabetes monitoring tools. We are talking about chasing minor improvements e.g. reducing test times by 1s. All those resources could be spent researching a cure. Pharma's actions are dictated by the same financial reporting as tech so even if smart people moved from consumer web to pharma, its not as if we'd end up with a better world. Maybe just one with thinker, more lustrous lashes...http://www.latisse.com/ http://www.latisse.com/ I guess my take on the "bigger point" is that the market seems to work. We are much better off in almost every area of our lives now compared to 50 years ago. Walmarts goal of keeping their shelves stocked for the "bovine masses" has led to a revolution in logistics. People who invented cellular phones as yuppie status symbols have saved millions of lives through better communication. And a couple guys who made devices to get free calls on pay phones ignited a computing revolution that has reshaped the world in the most grand fashion since Gutenberg. My larger point is that toys have a way of becoming seriously useful and that socially engineering people to go into "valuable" fields could lead to a glut of mismanaged resources that don't necessarily yield benefits.

aamar 16y ago
Great comment. There are probably many, great, socially beneficial things for technical-entrepreneurial people to do in healthcare (a field I worked in for a long time), education, and poverty. But "industry" is the wrong level of analysis for social benefit -- the analysis has to go to specific problems and impact. Ten years ago, one would very frequently come across essays decrying the alienating nature of the internet, how it dehumanized us and isolated us. They would argue that online relationships are inveterately shallow but displace our fraying real-word relationships with friends and family. But: Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. alongside broadband, wireless, cell-phone cameras, etc. seem to be doing something very meaningful to reverse the (real, though possibly exaggerated) problems those essays described. And by correcting these problems and strengthening the social fabric, we may be indirectly reducing problems in healthcare, education, and poverty. Again, the problem with the article is not really misprision of social networks, the problem is analyzing social impact at a level where Twitter = Zynga = LinkedIn.

aamar 16y ago

Great comment. There are probably many, great, socially beneficial things for technical-entrepreneurial people to do in healthcare (a field I worked in for a long time), education, and poverty. But "industry" is the wrong level of analysis for social benefit -- the analysis has to go to specific problems and impact. Ten years ago, one would very frequently come across essays decrying the alienating nature of the internet, how it dehumanized us and isolated us. They would argue that online relationships are inveterately shallow but displace our fraying real-word relationships with friends and family. But: Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. alongside broadband, wireless, cell-phone cameras, etc. seem to be doing something very meaningful to reverse the (real, though possibly exaggerated) problems those essays described. And by correcting these problems and strengthening the social fabric, we may be indirectly reducing problems in healthcare, education, and poverty. Again, the problem with the article is not really misprision of social networks, the problem is analyzing social impact at a level where Twitter = Zynga = LinkedIn.