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That's an interesting set of questions, and it feels frustrating that we'll probably never get an answer for most of them. My most important question regarding

That's an interesting set of questions, and it feels frustrating that we'll probably never get an answer for most of them. My most important question regarding software engineering would probably be something like: how well are resources allocated and could we do a better job? Consider how many brilliant and outstanding people go work on some useless software at a big adtech company rather than helping to improve the world. The greatest tragedy of our time.

wzwy 4y ago
Do you have any notable example of brilliant people working on something that doesn’t improve the world? My naïveté inclines me to think that there are more brilliant people working on world-improvement project than the opposite.
- hardware2win 4y ago
  Ads, imo.
- hkpack 4y ago
  I think for the most part we can only say retrospectively, what was worth doing. Facebook was created to connect people and ended up facilitating genocide. Breakthrough in private health-improving tech can bring unfathomed gap between rich and poor. We can only speculate where new developments such as AI will lead us.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Was genocide so rare before Facebook? The 1990s Rwandan genocide was coordinated by 1-way radio.
  - jmeister 4y ago
    >Facebook was created to connect people and ended up facilitating genocide. Throwing out the baby with the bath water here. How many lost friendships were recovered through FB? In my network of immigrants and refugees: countless. >Breakthrough in private health-improving tech can bring unfathomed gap between rich and poor. This is absurd. Why is the gap more important than the absolute level of the poor? All medical tech began as expensive and only for the rich.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      "Throwing out the baby with the bathwater" is an expression that's never really made sense to me. The bath isn't a permanent position, babies and bathwater aren't fundamentally inseparable, why do we want to throw out the bathwater in the first place, is it even safe for the baby? In the case of Facebook, the bath is toxic, we should remove the baby from the bathwater, toss out the bathwater, and then figure out what's going on (maybe we can just refresh the bath, maybe we need to figure out a regulatory framework for designing baths).
  - baq 4y ago
    history of civilization is a history of people making other people miserable using whatever tools available. this _maybe_ changed a bit in the second half of XX century... looks like we're back to usual programming nowadays.
- js8 4y ago
  > Do you have any notable example of brilliant people working on something that doesn’t improve the world? Manhattan project?
- galdosdi 4y ago
  The smartest people I met in my career were at Google, and their main concern, institutionally, ultimately, was increasing ad click thru rates. (their main concern, individually, was doing whatever the institution required for getting promoted) There's a lot of people on HN who can relate to this experience. That's where our intuition that there's a lot of people working on stuff that is useless to 99% of people, but will help a small elite get richer, comes from. It's literally what we do for a living, or used to. Look at the top companies on the S&P 500 and where most of their revenue comes from. How much are these activities really improving the world? If only the internet had had a built in mechanism for automatically micropaying for content as part of your internet bill (like flip phone ringtones used to work in the aughts, or how Minitel supposedly worked in France in the 1980s) adtech would never have happened and we would have a totally different internet. Instead we have this tragedy of the commons where the greatest minds money could buy are figuring out how to get people to waste more of their precious minutes on earth clicking on more cat videos so candy companies will pay for the server bill.
worldsayshi 4y ago
I think the question is applicable to more than just engineers. Our economy is a paperclip maximizer of sorts - in the sense that its maximization target is far removed from the target of building the best possible world that we can imagine building. And the costs and risks are running away from us. How far removed is it? Seeing how we're "slowly" but surely killing the biosphere I think paperclip maximizer is not a bad analogy.
- k0k0r0 4y ago
  Well, that's one of the main points from Marx analysis of capitalism.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Communism has a worse track record with environmentalism.
    - phkahler 4y ago
      >> Communism has a worse track record with environmentalism. That doesn't have any relevance to a critique of capitalism. They both have problems. Also, even if we compare them on "environmentalism", that's only one criteria.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        > That doesn't have any relevance to a critique of capitalism. Pedantically, you are correct. But pragmatically, the people who write "capitalism is bad because of X" are usually interested in replacing it with leftism. > only one criteria Your post would be more interesting if you pointed out one criteria where Marxism is better.
        galdosdi 4y ago
        > But pragmatically, the people who write These alleged people aren't here though. This is the definition of strawman arguing. Sorry, but you need to engage with the actual positions of the people who you are actually responding to, not the positions of some other people you once met somewhere else but that remind you of us. That kind of discussion is a total waste of time.
qsort 4y ago
> outstanding people go work on some useless software at a big adtech company rather than helping to improve the world Considering how well central planning has worked historically, allow me to approach this issue with a bit of skepticism.
- vandreas2 4y ago
  Perhaps the disastrous outcomes were not a result of central planning per se, but the skewed incentives that central planning mandated. Not sure if central planning can work differently though, probably it's first goal is self preservation.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    The problem is inherent to central planning, because central planning is unable to deal with the local complexities of a problem. For example, during the gas crisis around 1980, the Dept of Energy was empowered to determine the gas allocation for every station in the country. The allocation was based on the previous year's markets. This was well-intentioned, but it did not take into account the fact that markets change constantly. The result was stations with gluts and stations with shortages.
- sgift 4y ago
  Central planning got us to the moon, current market forces brought us Facebook. Sounds like a win for central planning to me.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Central planning annihilated Iraq, market forces brought us Ubuntu and Wikipedia. Sounds like a win for market forces.
    - goodpoint 4y ago
      > market forces brought us Ubuntu and Wikipedia Not for a second. Ubuntu is a repackaged Debian and both Debian and Wikipedia are volunteer-driven. They are not for sale and therefore unrelated to "market forces". Besides, tax-funded government-managed research gave us telephone networks, semiconductors, computers, GSM, GPS, fiber optic, satellites, Internet, airplanes. Is that enough?
mym1990 4y ago
There are many outstanding athletes who spend their whole career on the bench. Your resource allocation concern is a valid one, but it isn't one that is going to be addressed by big companies anytime soon, at some point individuals needs to weigh the 'pay vs helping world' thing.
- entropicdrifter 4y ago
  So your resolution to a systemic issue like this is to say it's the responsibility of each individual? That's not a solution, it's a misdirection from the problem
  - mym1990 4y ago
    You've extrapolated quite a bit. The truth is that I don't have a resolution, it is a very difficult problem that has many moving parts. The salaries that these 'highly talented' developers working on 'useless technology' command is not something that can easily brushed off.
    - entropicdrifter 4y ago
      Right, we agree on that. The salaries are a symptom of a system built on a number of perverse incentives that have ended up putting the majority of humanity's most productive minds to work thinking about stuff other than how to mitigate the catastrophe of the current mass extinction event
WalterBright 4y ago
> Consider how many brilliant and outstanding people go work on some useless software at a big adtech company rather than helping to improve the world. I've had conversations with young people nearing graduation about their career choices. Often it revolved around compensation levels at various tech companies. I'd ask them if they really wanted to dedicate their life to finding better ways to serve advertisements, or do they want to do something great?

wzwy 4y ago

Do you have any notable example of brilliant people working on something that doesn’t improve the world? My naïveté inclines me to think that there are more brilliant people working on world-improvement project than the opposite.

hardware2win 4y ago
Ads, imo.
hkpack 4y ago
I think for the most part we can only say retrospectively, what was worth doing. Facebook was created to connect people and ended up facilitating genocide. Breakthrough in private health-improving tech can bring unfathomed gap between rich and poor. We can only speculate where new developments such as AI will lead us.
- lupire 4y ago
  Was genocide so rare before Facebook? The 1990s Rwandan genocide was coordinated by 1-way radio.
- jmeister 4y ago
  >Facebook was created to connect people and ended up facilitating genocide. Throwing out the baby with the bath water here. How many lost friendships were recovered through FB? In my network of immigrants and refugees: countless. >Breakthrough in private health-improving tech can bring unfathomed gap between rich and poor. This is absurd. Why is the gap more important than the absolute level of the poor? All medical tech began as expensive and only for the rich.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    "Throwing out the baby with the bathwater" is an expression that's never really made sense to me. The bath isn't a permanent position, babies and bathwater aren't fundamentally inseparable, why do we want to throw out the bathwater in the first place, is it even safe for the baby? In the case of Facebook, the bath is toxic, we should remove the baby from the bathwater, toss out the bathwater, and then figure out what's going on (maybe we can just refresh the bath, maybe we need to figure out a regulatory framework for designing baths).
- baq 4y ago
  history of civilization is a history of people making other people miserable using whatever tools available. this _maybe_ changed a bit in the second half of XX century... looks like we're back to usual programming nowadays.
js8 4y ago
> Do you have any notable example of brilliant people working on something that doesn’t improve the world? Manhattan project?
galdosdi 4y ago
The smartest people I met in my career were at Google, and their main concern, institutionally, ultimately, was increasing ad click thru rates. (their main concern, individually, was doing whatever the institution required for getting promoted) There's a lot of people on HN who can relate to this experience. That's where our intuition that there's a lot of people working on stuff that is useless to 99% of people, but will help a small elite get richer, comes from. It's literally what we do for a living, or used to. Look at the top companies on the S&P 500 and where most of their revenue comes from. How much are these activities really improving the world? If only the internet had had a built in mechanism for automatically micropaying for content as part of your internet bill (like flip phone ringtones used to work in the aughts, or how Minitel supposedly worked in France in the 1980s) adtech would never have happened and we would have a totally different internet. Instead we have this tragedy of the commons where the greatest minds money could buy are figuring out how to get people to waste more of their precious minutes on earth clicking on more cat videos so candy companies will pay for the server bill.

worldsayshi 4y ago

I think the question is applicable to more than just engineers. Our economy is a paperclip maximizer of sorts - in the sense that its maximization target is far removed from the target of building the best possible world that we can imagine building. And the costs and risks are running away from us. How far removed is it? Seeing how we're "slowly" but surely killing the biosphere I think paperclip maximizer is not a bad analogy.

k0k0r0 4y ago
Well, that's one of the main points from Marx analysis of capitalism.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Communism has a worse track record with environmentalism.
  - phkahler 4y ago
    >> Communism has a worse track record with environmentalism. That doesn't have any relevance to a critique of capitalism. They both have problems. Also, even if we compare them on "environmentalism", that's only one criteria.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      > That doesn't have any relevance to a critique of capitalism. Pedantically, you are correct. But pragmatically, the people who write "capitalism is bad because of X" are usually interested in replacing it with leftism. > only one criteria Your post would be more interesting if you pointed out one criteria where Marxism is better.
      - galdosdi 4y ago
        > But pragmatically, the people who write These alleged people aren't here though. This is the definition of strawman arguing. Sorry, but you need to engage with the actual positions of the people who you are actually responding to, not the positions of some other people you once met somewhere else but that remind you of us. That kind of discussion is a total waste of time.

qsort 4y ago

> outstanding people go work on some useless software at a big adtech company rather than helping to improve the world Considering how well central planning has worked historically, allow me to approach this issue with a bit of skepticism.

vandreas2 4y ago
Perhaps the disastrous outcomes were not a result of central planning per se, but the skewed incentives that central planning mandated. Not sure if central planning can work differently though, probably it's first goal is self preservation.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  The problem is inherent to central planning, because central planning is unable to deal with the local complexities of a problem. For example, during the gas crisis around 1980, the Dept of Energy was empowered to determine the gas allocation for every station in the country. The allocation was based on the previous year's markets. This was well-intentioned, but it did not take into account the fact that markets change constantly. The result was stations with gluts and stations with shortages.
sgift 4y ago
Central planning got us to the moon, current market forces brought us Facebook. Sounds like a win for central planning to me.
- lupire 4y ago
  Central planning annihilated Iraq, market forces brought us Ubuntu and Wikipedia. Sounds like a win for market forces.
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    > market forces brought us Ubuntu and Wikipedia Not for a second. Ubuntu is a repackaged Debian and both Debian and Wikipedia are volunteer-driven. They are not for sale and therefore unrelated to "market forces". Besides, tax-funded government-managed research gave us telephone networks, semiconductors, computers, GSM, GPS, fiber optic, satellites, Internet, airplanes. Is that enough?

mym1990 4y ago

There are many outstanding athletes who spend their whole career on the bench. Your resource allocation concern is a valid one, but it isn't one that is going to be addressed by big companies anytime soon, at some point individuals needs to weigh the 'pay vs helping world' thing.

entropicdrifter 4y ago
So your resolution to a systemic issue like this is to say it's the responsibility of each individual? That's not a solution, it's a misdirection from the problem
- mym1990 4y ago
  You've extrapolated quite a bit. The truth is that I don't have a resolution, it is a very difficult problem that has many moving parts. The salaries that these 'highly talented' developers working on 'useless technology' command is not something that can easily brushed off.
  - entropicdrifter 4y ago
    Right, we agree on that. The salaries are a symptom of a system built on a number of perverse incentives that have ended up putting the majority of humanity's most productive minds to work thinking about stuff other than how to mitigate the catastrophe of the current mass extinction event

WalterBright 4y ago

> Consider how many brilliant and outstanding people go work on some useless software at a big adtech company rather than helping to improve the world. I've had conversations with young people nearing graduation about their career choices. Often it revolved around compensation levels at various tech companies. I'd ask them if they really wanted to dedicate their life to finding better ways to serve advertisements, or do they want to do something great?