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And yet some of the brightest analytical minds are regularly drawn to the big dollar signs that comes with optimizing advertising tech at FAANG companies when t

by sizzle 8y ago

And yet some of the brightest analytical minds are regularly drawn to the big dollar signs that comes with optimizing advertising tech at FAANG companies when they could be curing cancer.

sigkrieger 8y ago
I believe they had never been asked whether or not they wanted to be born intelligent and I don’t see why should they be given the burden of fixing the world when the world, quite often, turned their backs on them. I don’t see how its their responsibility or why it should be.
- oipqweqw 8y ago
  Everything is everybody's responsibility.
skrebbel 8y ago
I never understood this sentiment. I'm good at JavaScript, not biochemistry. How will I be curing cancer? Trick the cancer cells into calling undefined as a function?
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  It's not a criticism at your individual specialization. It's fucking hard to get into cancer research at this stage, though if you know the right people, you could maybe help scientists with some simulations or visualizations or whatever other tangential concern that requires JavaScript knowledge. This is a complaint against the market at large. There is work to be done in things like curing cancer(s) and mitigating climate change, but the jobs are few, far between, and pay peanuts. Meanwhile advertising is a direct social negative (IMO a cancer on human society), but it offers plenty of positions with good wages. The choice thus becomes: take the hard road and a paycut to maybe help some unspecified amount of people you don't know, vs. take the easy road with good wages and hurt an unspecified amount of people you don't know. This complaint is about the market, and it's essentially the same thing you may say during debugging some algorithm: "I understand the steps it make and they all look good, but the final result is wrong".
  - nuznil 8y ago
    Hang in there. Things change. Society as a whole takes it's own sweet time to make hard choices. But we do. Otherwise the market would still have slave ships running. Is it possible to speed things up? History says no. But scaling things fast is a very new thing. Islam took a few hundred years to spread from Delhi to Lisbon. That was before the invention of the printing press. The Reformation after the printing press, took a hundred years of war before most not all got along with each other. Today Fortnite or what the Kardashians are upto spreads through the globe in a few months. This is a new thing. And sooner or later someone will figure out how to infect minds positively at the same rate.
    - scotty79 8y ago
      > Otherwise the market would still have slave ships running. I think the slavery ended mostly because its relative efficiency dropped as technology developed. You'll see how fast acceptance of animal slaughtering will drop once we can get cheaper, provably healthier lab grown burger.
      - lr4444lr 8y ago
        Slavery dropped due to European Enlightenment values in the inherent dignity of man finally taking root among educated people in power. The cotton gin and the steam engine only made slaves more efficient and ramped up their quotas, not reduced the worth of their labor.
        DataWorker 8y ago
        No, enlightenment values were and still are quite good at rationalizing the status quo. It was wealthy religious zealots that ended slavery, to the opposition of the businessmen and economic pragmatists.
        scotty79 8y ago
        > ... steam engine only made slaves more efficient ... Yeah, because so many slaves were trained to be steam engine operators. Slaves are only worthwhile if they do machine job and you don't have a machine and you don't have local population in deep poverty that you could just pay a little bit to do your thing and not care what they eat, where they sleep and whether they die or not. That's why slavery never realy caught on in Europe in industrial times. Europeans were cheper than slaves.
- jobigoud 8y ago
  You are not good at "javascript" you are good at problem solving and logic.
- collyw 8y ago
  Bioinfomatics is where a lot of research will be going on. And that's a lot closer to JavaScript than it is to biochemistry most of the time.
- Mirioron 8y ago
  >I'm good at JavaScript, not biochemistry. How will I be curing cancer? Trick the cancer cells into calling undefined as a function? No, that's how we get cancer in the first place. You need to trick it into calling a defined termination function.
- wongarsu 8y ago
  I am good at programming, but I wasn't bad at chemistry either. I could have chosen to go study that instead, or gone into bioinformatics. I still could. There's plenty of software involved in modeling cell functions, which I imagine is pretty significant for curing cancer. Yet here I am, doing other stuff out of my free will. I'm happy at my current job, but if I truly wanted to make the world a better place there would be more effective ways to do that (cancer research being one of them).
- jghn 8y ago
  Many of the hardest problems facing us today in biological research are computational in nature. You could have a lot more of an impact than you think
- clinth 8y ago
  Doing software work in support of scientists trying to cure cancer. Scientists aren't curing cancer with a notebook and pen, they have have problems that a software engineer can really help with. Boring internal software, with some public-facing software. It's not glorious work, and your team is typically understaffed and overworked. There are tradeoffs in the job, it's not for everyone. I work at New York Genome Center, and at the Broad Institute before that, both are nonprofits, and there are plenty of firms with software jobs out there where you can do "just software" and help with something meaningful. Drop me a note, I'm happy to talk about this more. I missed the monthly jobs thread, but my group is hiring.
  - arandr0x 8y ago
    You mention you work at a nonprofit. Do you take volunteers as well?
    - clinth 8y ago
      We do not, we're a combination of grant-driven research, production/clinical genome sequencing, and scale computing; the work is hard to structure for ad-hoc volunteer contribution.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- arandr0x 8y ago
  Nobody's gonna cure cancer. We'll be able to prevent some cancers and treat others, but cancer is a large number of distinct diseases with different causes and outcomes and you can't eradicate it. That said you don't need to be good at biochemistry to help treat cancer. The bottleneck in pharma research right now is essentially finding big enough patient groups for clinical trials, I'm sure Javascript can help with that. (And the "best ad minds" of the generation as well). What about tracking habits that may increase cancer rates? Hmmm, Javascript can help with that. What about mapping out locations that have abnormal occurences of cancer due to possible environmental factors so nobody buys a house somewhere the local plant is dumping waste into the nearby water supply? Well, there again... Also, you can just study biochemistry and become good at it. I did just that. It's perfectly attainable and does not require extraordinary skill.
jbm 8y ago
Genetics grad here, working in IT. It’s an understandable sentiment but the salary one would be offered in Biology was basically laughable. Even in the so-called hotbed of biotech where I lived. I don’t see an easy way to fix that either. Working in a politicized government funded organization would be the most likely outcome and I think most of us would hate it.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > Even in the so-called hotbed of biotech where I lived. Where was that, if I could ask, and how bad is it? A "hotbed of biotech" is an entry on my list of cities to consider relocating to in the near future.
  - schmookeeg 8y ago
    Not who you are replying to, but in my mind, the only two "hotbed" cities in the US that I can think of are Boston and San Diego.
    - j_b_s 8y ago
      Bay area (Emeryville and East Bay are pretty interesting, in addition to South SF), and Research Triangle Park (North Carolina). Seattle a bit.
    - ls612 8y ago
      Minneapolis has one of the largest biotech&medical device sectors in the US as well.
  - jbm 8y ago
    I was referring to Montreal, as there were a lot of biotech labs at the time. I recall none of them paid above 35k$ at the time, which was the same as one would be paid handling phone support for telecoms. This was 15 years back so things may have changed.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  The academic model is bankrupt. No wonder a lot of people are dropping out because spending years, if not decades of low paying scholarships (at best) for the possibility of a good paying job later is just not a good proposition. And then big companies require Masters/PhDs for people to go and do jobs when On The Job training would suffice? Yeah, does not sound good.
johnfn 8y ago
One of the brightest minds who did the same in the previous generation was Bill Gates, who then used his wealth to cure polio and is working on malaria. So maybe making money in tech isn’t actually so bad.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  It's not just about money, it's about the "brightest minds" part. Injecting arbitrary amounts of money to some cancer projects won't suddenly make smart people to come back from making ads, especially if such donations are unsustainable. And you can't plan for billionaires; a Bill Gates is one-in-a-billion fluke combination of skill, upbringing, luck and conscience. For all the good Gates family is doing, you can't base humanity's most important projects on whether or not a billionaire wants to help their fellow men, instead of hoarding it all for their estate, or damaging some market in an attempt to turn their fortune into a greater fortune, or just blowing it all on heroin and hookers.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    Bill Gates isn't really that much of an outlier within the class of people with that level of wealth. There is a long tradition of it stretching to the likes of Andrew Carnegie, and Gates isn't even the only modern example. Warren Buffet has committed to giving 99% of his wealth to charity. Elon Musk is Elon Musk. Any random billionaire is more likely to have a charitable foundation than not. It's pretty much impossible to spend that amount of money on heroin and hookers in practice. The problem with relying on billionaires isn't that they won't do it, it's that they don't actually have that much money. Gates with ~$90B is #2 in the world, but spending every cent of it all in the same year would amount to less than one half of one percent of US GDP. His entire fortune is not quite half of what the US spends on just advertising each year.
    - L_226 8y ago
      > Any random billionaire is more likely to have a charitable foundation than not. something something tax avoidance
mjg59 8y ago
I've got a PhD in genetics from Cambridge and I do security development work at Google. I'm far better at the latter, and the skills that I use on a daily basis wouldn't have made me a good fit for the former. These aren't fields where capability in one is equivalent to competence in the other.
- mnw21cam 8y ago
  Interestingly, I did computer science at Cambridge, and now I'm doing university research in genetics. I very much view what I'm doing as applied computer science, with a not-insignificant amount of software development. By the way, you gave your supervisor quite a scare when you went off and got a computing job before you had submitted your thesis. I remember him lamenting about it quite clearly.
  - mjg59 8y ago
    There's overlap between the fields, just as there is between, say, physics and genetics - but we don't usually end up telling physicists that they should be busy curing cancer rather than fucking about with subatomic particles. Different people have different aptitudes, and there aren't many people I've met in the FAANG space who'd I'd say would be well suited to wet lab work no matter how smart they are. (And hey, I'd finished my revisions before I got the job, submitting them just ended up being a lower priority than moving to America and getting married…)
    - mnw21cam 8y ago
      It's just as well there are areas of genetics that one can do just sat in front of a computer. I wouldn't trust me in a wet lab.
Fomite 8y ago
Ironically, one of my close colleagues left the tech sector to become an HIV epidemiologist.
dorgo 8y ago
The incentives are not alligned properly. Cancer patients don't pay as good as advertisers. It would help if everybody would have an expensive cancer insurance. But I guess most people don't think about cancer until it's too late. It's more fun to buy stuff after clicking on ads. Edit: the incentive of an insurance doesn't work either :( . It should be possible to bet money on getting cancer. Everybody who bets against me gets my money in the case that I don't get cancer.
- pbourke 8y ago
  > Everybody who bets against me gets my money in the case that I don't get cancer. That’s called universal healthcare.
darkpuma 8y ago
Most cancer researchers aren't working on curing cancer! Rather they're working on fabricating for themselves an impressive history of published papers using p-hacking. RP:CB has been trying to reproduce many landmark cancer studies and found that 1) the majority do not reproduce or only partially reproduce and 2) that the authors of the original papers are generally hostile to attempts to reproduce their work.
gus_massa 8y ago
Does inventing gmail count? Webmail before gmail sucked, now they are essentially clones (or improvements) of gmail. Many cancer researches use gmail (or other similar webmail) instead of the horrible internal email of the university, with a bad spam filter, small disk quotas, bad browser support (only IE6), etc. And other researches use gmail (or a similar webmail) too, like to cure tuberculosis, eradicate polio, launch rockets, heart surgery, ...
ZeroFries 8y ago
The FAANG companies might end up producing the machine learning algorithms which are key to solving many problems in biochemistry.
eternauta3k 8y ago
Sounds like you'd be a fan of http://80000hours.org/ http://80000hours.org/

by sizzle 8y ago

And yet some of the brightest analytical minds are regularly drawn to the big dollar signs that comes with optimizing advertising tech at FAANG companies when they could be curing cancer.

sigkrieger 8y ago

I believe they had never been asked whether or not they wanted to be born intelligent and I don’t see why should they be given the burden of fixing the world when the world, quite often, turned their backs on them. I don’t see how its their responsibility or why it should be.

oipqweqw 8y ago
Everything is everybody's responsibility.

skrebbel 8y ago

I never understood this sentiment. I'm good at JavaScript, not biochemistry. How will I be curing cancer? Trick the cancer cells into calling undefined as a function?

TeMPOraL 8y ago
It's not a criticism at your individual specialization. It's fucking hard to get into cancer research at this stage, though if you know the right people, you could maybe help scientists with some simulations or visualizations or whatever other tangential concern that requires JavaScript knowledge. This is a complaint against the market at large. There is work to be done in things like curing cancer(s) and mitigating climate change, but the jobs are few, far between, and pay peanuts. Meanwhile advertising is a direct social negative (IMO a cancer on human society), but it offers plenty of positions with good wages. The choice thus becomes: take the hard road and a paycut to maybe help some unspecified amount of people you don't know, vs. take the easy road with good wages and hurt an unspecified amount of people you don't know. This complaint is about the market, and it's essentially the same thing you may say during debugging some algorithm: "I understand the steps it make and they all look good, but the final result is wrong".
- nuznil 8y ago
  Hang in there. Things change. Society as a whole takes it's own sweet time to make hard choices. But we do. Otherwise the market would still have slave ships running. Is it possible to speed things up? History says no. But scaling things fast is a very new thing. Islam took a few hundred years to spread from Delhi to Lisbon. That was before the invention of the printing press. The Reformation after the printing press, took a hundred years of war before most not all got along with each other. Today Fortnite or what the Kardashians are upto spreads through the globe in a few months. This is a new thing. And sooner or later someone will figure out how to infect minds positively at the same rate.
  - scotty79 8y ago
    > Otherwise the market would still have slave ships running. I think the slavery ended mostly because its relative efficiency dropped as technology developed. You'll see how fast acceptance of animal slaughtering will drop once we can get cheaper, provably healthier lab grown burger.
    - lr4444lr 8y ago
      Slavery dropped due to European Enlightenment values in the inherent dignity of man finally taking root among educated people in power. The cotton gin and the steam engine only made slaves more efficient and ramped up their quotas, not reduced the worth of their labor.
      - DataWorker 8y ago
        No, enlightenment values were and still are quite good at rationalizing the status quo. It was wealthy religious zealots that ended slavery, to the opposition of the businessmen and economic pragmatists.
      - scotty79 8y ago
        > ... steam engine only made slaves more efficient ... Yeah, because so many slaves were trained to be steam engine operators. Slaves are only worthwhile if they do machine job and you don't have a machine and you don't have local population in deep poverty that you could just pay a little bit to do your thing and not care what they eat, where they sleep and whether they die or not. That's why slavery never realy caught on in Europe in industrial times. Europeans were cheper than slaves.
jobigoud 8y ago
You are not good at "javascript" you are good at problem solving and logic.
collyw 8y ago
Bioinfomatics is where a lot of research will be going on. And that's a lot closer to JavaScript than it is to biochemistry most of the time.
Mirioron 8y ago
>I'm good at JavaScript, not biochemistry. How will I be curing cancer? Trick the cancer cells into calling undefined as a function? No, that's how we get cancer in the first place. You need to trick it into calling a defined termination function.
wongarsu 8y ago
I am good at programming, but I wasn't bad at chemistry either. I could have chosen to go study that instead, or gone into bioinformatics. I still could. There's plenty of software involved in modeling cell functions, which I imagine is pretty significant for curing cancer. Yet here I am, doing other stuff out of my free will. I'm happy at my current job, but if I truly wanted to make the world a better place there would be more effective ways to do that (cancer research being one of them).
jghn 8y ago
Many of the hardest problems facing us today in biological research are computational in nature. You could have a lot more of an impact than you think
clinth 8y ago
Doing software work in support of scientists trying to cure cancer. Scientists aren't curing cancer with a notebook and pen, they have have problems that a software engineer can really help with. Boring internal software, with some public-facing software. It's not glorious work, and your team is typically understaffed and overworked. There are tradeoffs in the job, it's not for everyone. I work at New York Genome Center, and at the Broad Institute before that, both are nonprofits, and there are plenty of firms with software jobs out there where you can do "just software" and help with something meaningful. Drop me a note, I'm happy to talk about this more. I missed the monthly jobs thread, but my group is hiring.
- arandr0x 8y ago
  You mention you work at a nonprofit. Do you take volunteers as well?
  - clinth 8y ago
    We do not, we're a combination of grant-driven research, production/clinical genome sequencing, and scale computing; the work is hard to structure for ad-hoc volunteer contribution.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
arandr0x 8y ago
Nobody's gonna cure cancer. We'll be able to prevent some cancers and treat others, but cancer is a large number of distinct diseases with different causes and outcomes and you can't eradicate it. That said you don't need to be good at biochemistry to help treat cancer. The bottleneck in pharma research right now is essentially finding big enough patient groups for clinical trials, I'm sure Javascript can help with that. (And the "best ad minds" of the generation as well). What about tracking habits that may increase cancer rates? Hmmm, Javascript can help with that. What about mapping out locations that have abnormal occurences of cancer due to possible environmental factors so nobody buys a house somewhere the local plant is dumping waste into the nearby water supply? Well, there again... Also, you can just study biochemistry and become good at it. I did just that. It's perfectly attainable and does not require extraordinary skill.

jbm 8y ago

Genetics grad here, working in IT. It’s an understandable sentiment but the salary one would be offered in Biology was basically laughable. Even in the so-called hotbed of biotech where I lived. I don’t see an easy way to fix that either. Working in a politicized government funded organization would be the most likely outcome and I think most of us would hate it.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
> Even in the so-called hotbed of biotech where I lived. Where was that, if I could ask, and how bad is it? A "hotbed of biotech" is an entry on my list of cities to consider relocating to in the near future.
- schmookeeg 8y ago
  Not who you are replying to, but in my mind, the only two "hotbed" cities in the US that I can think of are Boston and San Diego.
  - j_b_s 8y ago
    Bay area (Emeryville and East Bay are pretty interesting, in addition to South SF), and Research Triangle Park (North Carolina). Seattle a bit.
  - ls612 8y ago
    Minneapolis has one of the largest biotech&medical device sectors in the US as well.
- jbm 8y ago
  I was referring to Montreal, as there were a lot of biotech labs at the time. I recall none of them paid above 35k$ at the time, which was the same as one would be paid handling phone support for telecoms. This was 15 years back so things may have changed.
raverbashing 8y ago
The academic model is bankrupt. No wonder a lot of people are dropping out because spending years, if not decades of low paying scholarships (at best) for the possibility of a good paying job later is just not a good proposition. And then big companies require Masters/PhDs for people to go and do jobs when On The Job training would suffice? Yeah, does not sound good.

johnfn 8y ago

One of the brightest minds who did the same in the previous generation was Bill Gates, who then used his wealth to cure polio and is working on malaria. So maybe making money in tech isn’t actually so bad.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
It's not just about money, it's about the "brightest minds" part. Injecting arbitrary amounts of money to some cancer projects won't suddenly make smart people to come back from making ads, especially if such donations are unsustainable. And you can't plan for billionaires; a Bill Gates is one-in-a-billion fluke combination of skill, upbringing, luck and conscience. For all the good Gates family is doing, you can't base humanity's most important projects on whether or not a billionaire wants to help their fellow men, instead of hoarding it all for their estate, or damaging some market in an attempt to turn their fortune into a greater fortune, or just blowing it all on heroin and hookers.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  Bill Gates isn't really that much of an outlier within the class of people with that level of wealth. There is a long tradition of it stretching to the likes of Andrew Carnegie, and Gates isn't even the only modern example. Warren Buffet has committed to giving 99% of his wealth to charity. Elon Musk is Elon Musk. Any random billionaire is more likely to have a charitable foundation than not. It's pretty much impossible to spend that amount of money on heroin and hookers in practice. The problem with relying on billionaires isn't that they won't do it, it's that they don't actually have that much money. Gates with ~$90B is #2 in the world, but spending every cent of it all in the same year would amount to less than one half of one percent of US GDP. His entire fortune is not quite half of what the US spends on just advertising each year.
  - L_226 8y ago
    > Any random billionaire is more likely to have a charitable foundation than not. something something tax avoidance

mjg59 8y ago

I've got a PhD in genetics from Cambridge and I do security development work at Google. I'm far better at the latter, and the skills that I use on a daily basis wouldn't have made me a good fit for the former. These aren't fields where capability in one is equivalent to competence in the other.

mnw21cam 8y ago
Interestingly, I did computer science at Cambridge, and now I'm doing university research in genetics. I very much view what I'm doing as applied computer science, with a not-insignificant amount of software development. By the way, you gave your supervisor quite a scare when you went off and got a computing job before you had submitted your thesis. I remember him lamenting about it quite clearly.
- mjg59 8y ago
  There's overlap between the fields, just as there is between, say, physics and genetics - but we don't usually end up telling physicists that they should be busy curing cancer rather than fucking about with subatomic particles. Different people have different aptitudes, and there aren't many people I've met in the FAANG space who'd I'd say would be well suited to wet lab work no matter how smart they are. (And hey, I'd finished my revisions before I got the job, submitting them just ended up being a lower priority than moving to America and getting married…)
  - mnw21cam 8y ago
    It's just as well there are areas of genetics that one can do just sat in front of a computer. I wouldn't trust me in a wet lab.

Fomite 8y ago

Ironically, one of my close colleagues left the tech sector to become an HIV epidemiologist.

dorgo 8y ago

The incentives are not alligned properly. Cancer patients don't pay as good as advertisers. It would help if everybody would have an expensive cancer insurance. But I guess most people don't think about cancer until it's too late. It's more fun to buy stuff after clicking on ads. Edit: the incentive of an insurance doesn't work either :( . It should be possible to bet money on getting cancer. Everybody who bets against me gets my money in the case that I don't get cancer.

pbourke 8y ago
> Everybody who bets against me gets my money in the case that I don't get cancer. That’s called universal healthcare.

darkpuma 8y ago

Most cancer researchers aren't working on curing cancer! Rather they're working on fabricating for themselves an impressive history of published papers using p-hacking. RP:CB has been trying to reproduce many landmark cancer studies and found that 1) the majority do not reproduce or only partially reproduce and 2) that the authors of the original papers are generally hostile to attempts to reproduce their work.

gus_massa 8y ago

Does inventing gmail count? Webmail before gmail sucked, now they are essentially clones (or improvements) of gmail. Many cancer researches use gmail (or other similar webmail) instead of the horrible internal email of the university, with a bad spam filter, small disk quotas, bad browser support (only IE6), etc. And other researches use gmail (or a similar webmail) too, like to cure tuberculosis, eradicate polio, launch rockets, heart surgery, ...

ZeroFries 8y ago

The FAANG companies might end up producing the machine learning algorithms which are key to solving many problems in biochemistry.

eternauta3k 8y ago

Sounds like you'd be a fan of http://80000hours.org/ http://80000hours.org/