5 ms·

Essentially he's asking why person-hours are expended on things that make the most money rather than things that are important, for some definition of important

by pg 14y ago

Essentially he's asking why person-hours are expended on things that make the most money rather than things that are important, for some definition of important. There are several answers to that. 1. The most obvious is that people need to make a living. People can and do work at some discount in order to work on things they think are important, but it rarely stretches as much as 10x. I expect most workers either don't care or can't afford to. 2. A lot of people do work for nonprofits (the biggest of which is the government), but the number of such jobs is constrained by the amount of money nonprofits can raise. 3. The number of people employed on frivolous things seems larger than it is, because e.g. things designed for entertainment are by their nature more visible than infrastructure. So it is dangerous to draw conclusions based on anecdotal evidence.

wamatt 14y ago
Meta: OP is looking past the author's sentiment, generalizations and inaccuracies to respond thoughtfully to the central point of the message. Someone is following their own advice: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html So regarding hypocrisy, while it's true in certain contexts and under certain conditions, calling out hypocrisy, could constitute a logical fallacy, simply stating that possibility, says very little about how to value it. Is hypocrisy good or bad? Perhaps the question is ill-framed. Avoiding hypocrisy, can create a powerful resonance between the speaker's aligned actions and words. It may be worth nothing this not a moral value judgement, but speaks to leadership. People on average, appear more willing to follow those with strong and bold congruency, and yet abandon them, when that illusion shatters (aka Lance Armstrong). That said, my own view is that hypocrisy is generally inefficient, as it appears to increase the noise in the system.* As the proverb goes "talk is cheap" and hence it costs little to put an opinion out there, which is not bad in and of itself, merely that it requires little effort. Thus with a sea of opinions floating out there, and limited time to process (if your cognition doesn't naturally operate in a frequentist manner), who can you trust? There does not appear to be a definitive set of answers, however the heuristic of matching words to actions, while not perfect, combined with a test for integrity, has personally proven useful over the years. *cf bounded rationality, opportunity cost, SnR etc.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  Since you asked earlier, you probably got downvoted for concatenating a reply to the bottom of your post about a totally different part of the thread with no transition in between. It took me a minute to figure out why you were talking about hypocrisy.
  - wamatt 14y ago
    Thanks. In general I find articulating the conceptual stream to be a challenge, especially since it jumps around disjointedly. Usually it takes a few iterations of a post, to improve the quality or tone, even though from my perspective, the core spirit of message remains unchanged between drafts. The trick in communication is to be understood on multiple levels, not to simply output claims, irrespective of how accurate they are. Took me two decades to realize that, and still trying to improve. :) Hence, the feedback is appreciated.
    - sukuriant 14y ago
      I actually think the parent's confusion is twofold. First, you're comma-splicing some of your sentences, making it harder to read what you're saying. Commas have rhymes and reasons to them; and, it is good to know when to use them and where. It also seems like you are too quick to begin a new paragraph. Concepts that connect to one another should be put into the same paragraph so a person knows where one idea (or sub-idea) ends and another begins. And second, you're choosing to use words that are larger that, while possibly being more precise, actually make you more difficult to understand in a normal conversation. For example, "I find articulating the conceptual stream to be a challenge." "The conceptual stream" is hard to follow. What conceptual stream? Do you mean you're having trouble articulating what you want to say? Then why not say that? "Conceptual stream" is not something usually said in conversational English and means that people will need to parse everything you said, rather than read it. It's almost like obfuscating code, or at least code-golfing. For the right audience it's great; but in other audiences, or in production code, it's just difficult, and un-necessarily so. Remember that in most instances, people online that you're speaking with are conversing at about the same level as a group of chums in a circle, at a pub. What you say may very well be important; but, remember that being heard is equally important, and speaking in language too high to be followed in a conversation is too high to be heard, especially since so much is already lost from speaker to listener. I've read some of your other comments in other posts, and I have noticed that you can and do speak in a more conversational tone, albeit fleetingly so, and often by mistake (if you consider it a mistake. It seems more like passion for a topic seeping through); so, I know you still can. Long story short, know your audience. :)
saurik 14y ago
Am I wrong in thinking that, if you actually did solve the kinds of problems mentioned in the article (obesity, diabetes, etc.) that your resulting business would make a lot of money? Is it really "makes more money" that keeps people working on ad-optimization, and not a simpler reason like "that is the kind of mathematical problem with an algorithmic solution that the analytical brain of a programmer can solve"? It's just that I would have thought that a problem that so many people had (again, such as obesity, diabetes, etc.) and that led to such horrible quality of life would cause there to be tons of money ready to pounce on a solution (and would have cited the depressing amount of resources thrown at things like diet pills, as well as the number of Google ads people have placed on the keywords "diabetes cure", as evidence).
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  Actually solving diabetes would make you a lot of money. This is almost certainly accurate. But- Let me put it this way. How many people do you know that have made it big selling out to a MegaCorp? Not many, I'm sure, but now how many people do you know that have cured diabetes? Even though making it big in the startup world is not a sure thing, curing diabetes is even less of a sure thing.
  - thisishugo 14y ago
    There's also the MVP factor. It's easy to throw out a half-broken software prototype and then "pivot" until you have something you can sell (whether to users or a bigger company). The minimum viable cure for diabetes still has to be a cute for diabetes. This is unarguably a harder problem to solve than "apply a filter to a photo and put in on the web."
- pg 14y ago
  The critical distinction here is between how much something would make, and how much it would make per person-hour.
  - saurik 14y ago
    Ah, that perfectly explains it; sorry for failing to notice that variable. :( (I was actually quite prepared to be told "actually, there isn't much money in those things", and had thereby been in the interim researching the market size of things like "weight loss"; I've been quite shocked to find out that, globally, it is only about three times as large as the market for "smartphones".)
pknerd 14y ago
The most obvious is that people need to make a living I think this is why YC and other incubators exist today to help developers financially so that they can work on Real World Problems rather than coming up with another photo sharing apps? I also wonder why YC did not encourage devs who want to work in such domains. Aza Raskin's Massive Health is the one which comes in my mind that is doing something for humanity.
anonymouz 14y ago
4. Our economic system does not allocate resources as efficiently as we as a society would like to. In particular it is susceptible to favoring the short term over the long term, and tends to develop self-reinforcing trends and bubbles. Trends and bubbles seem to be exaggerated by the fact that in our globalized world the media reporting tends to synchronize over large parts of the globe when it comes to those trends (e.g. Facebook being hyped almost universally prior to its IPO).

by pg 14y ago

wamatt 14y ago

Meta: OP is looking past the author's sentiment, generalizations and inaccuracies to respond thoughtfully to the central point of the message. Someone is following their own advice: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html So regarding hypocrisy, while it's true in certain contexts and under certain conditions, calling out hypocrisy, could constitute a logical fallacy, simply stating that possibility, says very little about how to value it. Is hypocrisy good or bad? Perhaps the question is ill-framed. Avoiding hypocrisy, can create a powerful resonance between the speaker's aligned actions and words. It may be worth nothing this not a moral value judgement, but speaks to leadership. People on average, appear more willing to follow those with strong and bold congruency, and yet abandon them, when that illusion shatters (aka Lance Armstrong). That said, my own view is that hypocrisy is generally inefficient, as it appears to increase the noise in the system.* As the proverb goes "talk is cheap" and hence it costs little to put an opinion out there, which is not bad in and of itself, merely that it requires little effort. Thus with a sea of opinions floating out there, and limited time to process (if your cognition doesn't naturally operate in a frequentist manner), who can you trust? There does not appear to be a definitive set of answers, however the heuristic of matching words to actions, while not perfect, combined with a test for integrity, has personally proven useful over the years. *cf bounded rationality, opportunity cost, SnR etc.

unimpressive 14y ago
Since you asked earlier, you probably got downvoted for concatenating a reply to the bottom of your post about a totally different part of the thread with no transition in between. It took me a minute to figure out why you were talking about hypocrisy.
- wamatt 14y ago
  Thanks. In general I find articulating the conceptual stream to be a challenge, especially since it jumps around disjointedly. Usually it takes a few iterations of a post, to improve the quality or tone, even though from my perspective, the core spirit of message remains unchanged between drafts. The trick in communication is to be understood on multiple levels, not to simply output claims, irrespective of how accurate they are. Took me two decades to realize that, and still trying to improve. :) Hence, the feedback is appreciated.
  - sukuriant 14y ago
    I actually think the parent's confusion is twofold. First, you're comma-splicing some of your sentences, making it harder to read what you're saying. Commas have rhymes and reasons to them; and, it is good to know when to use them and where. It also seems like you are too quick to begin a new paragraph. Concepts that connect to one another should be put into the same paragraph so a person knows where one idea (or sub-idea) ends and another begins. And second, you're choosing to use words that are larger that, while possibly being more precise, actually make you more difficult to understand in a normal conversation. For example, "I find articulating the conceptual stream to be a challenge." "The conceptual stream" is hard to follow. What conceptual stream? Do you mean you're having trouble articulating what you want to say? Then why not say that? "Conceptual stream" is not something usually said in conversational English and means that people will need to parse everything you said, rather than read it. It's almost like obfuscating code, or at least code-golfing. For the right audience it's great; but in other audiences, or in production code, it's just difficult, and un-necessarily so. Remember that in most instances, people online that you're speaking with are conversing at about the same level as a group of chums in a circle, at a pub. What you say may very well be important; but, remember that being heard is equally important, and speaking in language too high to be followed in a conversation is too high to be heard, especially since so much is already lost from speaker to listener. I've read some of your other comments in other posts, and I have noticed that you can and do speak in a more conversational tone, albeit fleetingly so, and often by mistake (if you consider it a mistake. It seems more like passion for a topic seeping through); so, I know you still can. Long story short, know your audience. :)

saurik 14y ago

Am I wrong in thinking that, if you actually did solve the kinds of problems mentioned in the article (obesity, diabetes, etc.) that your resulting business would make a lot of money? Is it really "makes more money" that keeps people working on ad-optimization, and not a simpler reason like "that is the kind of mathematical problem with an algorithmic solution that the analytical brain of a programmer can solve"? It's just that I would have thought that a problem that so many people had (again, such as obesity, diabetes, etc.) and that led to such horrible quality of life would cause there to be tons of money ready to pounce on a solution (and would have cited the depressing amount of resources thrown at things like diet pills, as well as the number of Google ads people have placed on the keywords "diabetes cure", as evidence).

sliverstorm 14y ago
Actually solving diabetes would make you a lot of money. This is almost certainly accurate. But- Let me put it this way. How many people do you know that have made it big selling out to a MegaCorp? Not many, I'm sure, but now how many people do you know that have cured diabetes? Even though making it big in the startup world is not a sure thing, curing diabetes is even less of a sure thing.
- thisishugo 14y ago
  There's also the MVP factor. It's easy to throw out a half-broken software prototype and then "pivot" until you have something you can sell (whether to users or a bigger company). The minimum viable cure for diabetes still has to be a cute for diabetes. This is unarguably a harder problem to solve than "apply a filter to a photo and put in on the web."
pg 14y ago
The critical distinction here is between how much something would make, and how much it would make per person-hour.
- saurik 14y ago
  Ah, that perfectly explains it; sorry for failing to notice that variable. :( (I was actually quite prepared to be told "actually, there isn't much money in those things", and had thereby been in the interim researching the market size of things like "weight loss"; I've been quite shocked to find out that, globally, it is only about three times as large as the market for "smartphones".)

pknerd 14y ago

The most obvious is that people need to make a living I think this is why YC and other incubators exist today to help developers financially so that they can work on Real World Problems rather than coming up with another photo sharing apps? I also wonder why YC did not encourage devs who want to work in such domains. Aza Raskin's Massive Health is the one which comes in my mind that is doing something for humanity.

anonymouz 14y ago

4. Our economic system does not allocate resources as efficiently as we as a society would like to. In particular it is susceptible to favoring the short term over the long term, and tends to develop self-reinforcing trends and bubbles. Trends and bubbles seem to be exaggerated by the fact that in our globalized world the media reporting tends to synchronize over large parts of the globe when it comes to those trends (e.g. Facebook being hyped almost universally prior to its IPO).