11 ms·

"Instead of cures for cancer we got Angry Birds"

• nkuttler 13y ago
  I have a feeling it's a good thing that game developers don't work on curing cancer. I know this isn't what the article is about, but the headline makes it sound so.
  • morganwilde 13y ago
    Well then you share the same feelings with the author of this article.
• 16s 13y ago
  I call it the Fart App Generation. Triviality rules the day. People make money selling whoopee cushions too. And if you find meaning in that, then more power to you. It's not for me though.
  • lazyjones 13y ago
    I fail to see the problem with that. If people prefer "bright minds" to work on cancer cures rather than on new casual games, why don't we make a $5 app to sponsor cancer research and see how well it sells? My conclusion is, that most people simply aren't bothered with cancer research until they get it (apparently in these areas, about 50% of the population do at some point in their lives).
    • praptak 13y ago
      > My conclusion is, that most people simply aren't bothered with cancer research until they get it This is part of the problem, coupled with the "immediate reward versus distant punishment" bias. Another is the obvious tragedy of the commons here. Once the research is successful it also benefits those who chose not to contribute so fund it please while I spend my $5 on a tasty cookie.
    • 16s 13y ago
      I make no judgement as to whether it is good or bad. That's just how it is.
  • Dewie 13y ago
    How is this a generational thing, in the social sense? Maybe it's just the fact that as we manage to get more and more productive and automate more and more of our work, we have to invent more and more needs for people to spend their money on, to keep the majority of the adult workforce employed. Eventually we get really diminishing returns, providing services and products that seem frivolous to most people at a second glance.
• rational_indian 13y ago
  False dichotomy much?
  • praptak 13y ago
    FYI, that is the point of the article.
    • James_Duval 13y ago
      The point of this article, but not the point of the Telegraph article the quote is from.
  • James_Duval 13y ago
    Very much agreed. In addition... Brain power is not a fungible resource. You cannot divert excess brain power to any task you choose. It's a highly specific, highly targeted resource which seems to me to be horribly capricious and (ironically?) irrational in its choice of target. In other words, the answer for any app entrepreneur when asked "Why didn't you work on a cure for cancer?" is simply "Well, I didn't think of that. I thought of an app." I like the apparent contradiction in the Telegraph article too: "Hackers/entrepreneurs used to invent revolutionary things like the PC!" "People are only using personal computing devices for trivialities!" Either personal computing was a great idea or it's a platform for the trivial and banal, you can't have it both ways.
    • alexjeffrey 13y ago
      I understood the article as less saying "People are only using personal computing devices for trivialities!", more saying "Entrepreneurs are building businesses with little to no real positive impact on the world". Obviously the PC is revolutionary given that people can now do things that were impossible/difficult before, like meeting people from disparate communities (see: HN), freely communicating with distant family/friends, becoming citizen journalists through blogging, finding their place in hard-to-find or sparsely-located communities, so on.
    • theorique 13y ago
• jaggederest 13y ago
  I just wish that societally we would put more of a financial emphasis on things that deliver the most social utility. That would solve the gradient problem, and still deliver efficiency since people would have different competitive advantage. I think games are something of a poor example, since they clearly do bring happiness to people at least, but the financial industry seems to spend inordinate amounts of energy and human capital shaving milliseconds and tenths of a percent off trading strategies. Imagine if we had some of those people being paid $300k salary + $300k bonus instead working on vaccines, or new antibiotics? Clearly the skills aren't transferrable, but there's a brain drain to finance that is unfortunate, and I think startups suffer some of the same social-good-to-reward-ratio problems
  • ig1 13y ago
    Those milliseconds being shaved off forex trading are the reason that commercial and retail spreads are much tighter than they were a decade ago. When currencies were priced every second market makers had to set a spread that would protect them from market variance within that one-second period, as that time period shrunk the amount of risk dropped as did the spreads. Think about the thousands of currency transactions that had to happen for your smartphone to exist. It makes a huge difference to international trade when you can pay a lower premium to exchange currencies. Just because you don't understand the value something provides, it doesn't mean that it doesn't provide it.
    • koralatov 13y ago
      Just because you don't understand the value something provides, it doesn't mean that it doesn't provide it. I don't think the argument is that these optimisations don't bring value; it's that they don't bring as much value to society as an effective cancer treatment, or a new technology that cheaply and cleanly purifies water, or [insert other breakthrough here].
      • notacoward 13y ago
        I think it's more about the ratio of value created vs. value extracted. Sure, more efficient markets create some benefits for the rest of us, but those benefits are the crumbs under the market makers' tables. So we get slightly better smart phones, huh? Whoop de do. That's a benefit very close to zero. If I had to choose between a new smart phone and one scoop of good ice cream, even for an equal price, I'd go for the ice cream. On the flip side, for that "amazing increase in market efficiency" quite a few financiers end up making nine or even ten figures. Which part of that really motivates them? Which part has a greater effect on society (a negative one BTW) ten years from now? People who dismiss the value of complex derivatives and HFT and other Wall Street shenanigans don't necessarily lack understanding, and it's obnoxious to say so. They just add perspective to that understanding. People who obsess over prices and ignore true value are sociopaths and should be dealt with as such.
• tcbawo 13y ago
  Some ask, "Why can't these minds be contributing more to society?" I find that they often are, by being good parents, citizens, volunteers, donors. A similar vein of thought might be applied to the talent in the financial industry.
  • koralatov 13y ago
    True, but just as often they're wretched parents and citizens who never volunteer or donate.
• buro9 13y ago
  I mentioned on Twitter how my earlier pitches for what I'm working on focused a lot more on the reasons I'm doing it... attacking loneliness in cities and densely populated areas, and inspiring people to pursue their interests. As the pitches to users and investors evolved, I realised I'd moved a long way from this and now mention just the numbers, just the personal benefits to the user. No-one seems to care so much for any wider benefit... just the selfish* ones. I haven't lost my faith, but I hope to build what I believe in as fait accompli rather than something needing individuals to think beyond themselves. * Dictionary meaning, no offence intended or meant
  • rorrr2 13y ago
    It's not about selfishness, it's just that most easy problems got solved, and we're left with really really hard ones. Cancer is so mind-boggingly complex that one person cannot even begin to look at ways to solve it on his own. Think about web developers, for example. We can either develop some SaaS website in 6 months that will bring us something like $500/month, or we can attack the cancer problem for 30 years and pretty much guaranteed to get nowhere.
    • patio11 13y ago
      Or, just throwing this out there as an option, you could solve any problem for a physician's practice -- like, say, patients not complying with their treatment regimen by failing to make scheduled check ups. You might even be able to do that with a SaaS app. Granted, it won't cure cancer, but you'll save more lives at the margin than doing Zynga ads. (And, n.b., healthcare clients often have more than $500 available to spend.)
      • foobarbazqux 13y ago
        Yes, there are a lot of outstanding problems with simple solutions that aren't hard in any practical way. The problem is that we want (I want?) headline-making accomplishment and intellectual gratification.
      • IanChiles 13y ago
• rmc 13y ago
  This presumes there is no social benefit from the Internet. But there are loads of margalized groups who have been able to find a group and community thanks to quick and easy communication of the Internet. Just look at a lot of lesbian, gay, bi and trans people who wouldn't be able to find people like themselves in many places. I'd even think the more common acceptance of atheism is a result of this too.
  • icebraining 13y ago
    I'm failing to find the original article, but from the quote, I don't think the author is arguing against the Internet, but small stuff like iPhone apps and other "small impact" startups. Besides, is the Internet really an accomplishment by Silicon Valley and its startups? ARPA and BBN certainly don't fit the model.
    • rmc 13y ago
      is the Internet really an accomplishment by Silicon Valley and its startups? Well, look at Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and reddit. These are "Silicon Valley startups". They are tools that empower minorities to do things. Here's a video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBeNfSoMqjY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBeNfSoMqjY ) of someone who started @EverydaySexism on Twitter, talking about how that project has empowered her and lots of other women with compating low level sexism. A "trivial" website like twitter is fighting sexism (while also have lots of cat pics and memes). The big game changer with the internet isn't so much the technology, but the fact that so many mundane average people are on it. For that we can thank Silicon Valley's push for "growth" and "user count", the end result is people (incl. marginalized groups) having access to the tool. It's not the technical superiority of the tools, but the widespread availability of the tools, that is the game changer.
      • dragonwriter 13y ago
        > Well, look at Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and reddit. These are "Silicon Valley startups". None of those are Silicon Valley startups, and Facebook and Twitter never were Silicon Valley startups.
• znowi 13y ago
  I'm curious how many of HN readers have never played Angry Birds. Could it be more than half? Or less than 1%?
  • MrBra 13y ago
    I hope, that at least 70% (to be nice..) haven't - or that same percentage have only taken a quick look at it once, and never again.
• louwrentius 13y ago
  I think that the return on investment on curing cancer does not impact the sale of Angry Birds much. At least not sufficiently to justify the investment. Sorry for being cynical. On another note, look at Bill Gates, made a fortune with software, now spending it on charity. Maybe that's a route that is more reasonable.
  • geogra4 13y ago
    Elon Musk too. Remember he started with PayPal, not SpaceX and Tesla.
• binarymax 13y ago
  I've found that those who try to impose their ideals on someone else, are usually (but not always) trying to cover up and deflect their own self-doubt and insecurities. Do what you love, and to heck with whatever anyone else thinks. I used to work on predicting baseball. And before that, even worse, performance management software! Now I am lucky enough to work on "socially responsible" software, and enjoy it. But I don't delude myself into thinking I am curing cancer, and I don't think I ever could. But damn anyone else who thinks I should spend my time doing something to meet their own standards.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    • sigzero 13y ago
      Sometimes that "genius" doesn't translate into other areas.
• eksith 13y ago
  There's one hiccup in this line of thought: You can't always predict how the flashy toy tech will turn out to be a benefit later on. Case in point, Kinect. It should have been just a play accessory, but it's being used to help people with disabilities, like the wi-Go : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-17jRfX9Sw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-17jRfX9Sw And also aiding surgeons during operations as well as helping disabled children interact with their environment with more subtle gestures. http://kotaku.com/5950834/in-japan-the-kinect-may-soon-be-more-common-in-hospitals-than-in-homes http://kotaku.com/5950834/in-japan-the-kinect-may-soon-be-mo... Just like cosmetics and other "vanity medicine" used in the West can have life-saving applications elsewhere, for now, we get Angry Birds. It may turn out to something else later on. The point is, cumulative knowledge can lead to great things later on. It's the NASA trickle-down theory.
  • decasteve 13y ago
    Angry Birds may help Thwart Alzeihmer's: Study: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/01/23/brain-games-may-help-thwart-alzheimers-study/ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/01/23/brain-games-ma...
  • nfoz 13y ago
    I'm sure if we spent billions to build another Great Pyramid we'd discover a bunch of things that are peripherally helpful to society in other ways. But it will still be an enormous waste of resources. If we want more medical cures we should be funding work towards medical cures.
• apitaru 13y ago
  I sometimes feel like the ice-cream factory guy in this funny bit by Mitchell and Webb - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-zRPDvTJTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-zRPDvTJTo At the same time, I'm happy Mitchell and Webb stayed in comedy rather than attempt to cure cancer. If you feel a calling to a particular space or venture, follow it - even if its Angry Birds. On the other hand, if you think your calling is in medicine, think well before attempting a go at this "golden age of entrepreneurship", as chances are you'll regret not doing what you love.
• kvakvs 13y ago
  Markets are self regulating. Worry why noone grows crops and feeds the country? The hunger will come, prices on food raise, and it becomes profitable to raise crops - there will be inflow of new made farmers and farms.
• exratione 13y ago
  At some point an individual has to come to terms with the fact that 99% (or some equally large percentage) of human economic activity has nothing much to do with improving the human condition, but is rather beer and circuses writ large. You can cure a disease for the cost of a large video game development these days, and an election year of political donations in the US could be used to cure aging. Medical research in general is a sliver of the economic activity spent kicking leather balls around grassy fields. This is the world. The only way to make it better is to do what you can to add to the sliver rather than to the circuses.
  • Jimmy 13y ago
    On the other hand, if all of those "circuses" disappeared tomorrow - not just the sports, but the music, the art, the novels, the films, the video games, everything - you probably wouldn't like it very much.
  • theorique 13y ago
    People vote with their money and attention and time.
  • anoncow 13y ago
    Living includes staying happy. If playing games makes you happy, the game developer is doing a useful job for you. If the developer is happy making games, he is doing a useful job for himself too.
  • ecopoesis 13y ago
    You don't believe art and sport improve the human condition? I would argue that what you dismiss as circuses are actually what make life living. Being a scientist or engineer is fine, but is far from the only way to make the world better. Life would be very drab if all art and sport stopped tommorrow.
    • ahomescu1 13y ago
      Arts and sports improve the present, science improves the future.
• 300bps 13y ago
  Had to break out my Android tablet to read. Linked site is the first one I've come across that was totally unreadable on Windows Phone 8.
  • james-skemp 13y ago
    Huh. My first gen Nexus 7 suffered from half the content being cut off. Having read the comments here, though, I won't be reading the article on another device.
    • 300bps 13y ago
      Similar problem on WP8. About 80% of the content was cut off and not visible. On my Acer Iconia tablet running Jelly Bean it looked mostly OK maybe because it has a 10.1" screen? iPad looked fine. I guess we know what device OP has.
      • petenixey 13y ago
        An old Macbook - someone stole all my other ones :(
• napoleoncomplex 13y ago
  I don't think the people who work on these "useless" apps are to blame, rather it's the system in which they are brought up in and in case of start-ups, are taught entrepreneurship in. Paul Graham himself says he advises every start-up to "work on something for which they are the initial market"[0], so every YC cycle you get numerous companies which solve the problems of young San Francisco residents ([1] for comic relief), who help you save 30 minutes of your week you can then reinvest into working more on problems which aren't really problems while the world crumbles around you, but you don't really care about that because your Uber driver doesn't drive through those neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, your doctor in the hospital is stuck using some 1980's software, which drains the very life-force out of him by the amount of pain it inflicts with every use, but you'll never need a doctor anyway, not with this healthy-eating/exercising app, plus it's too hard to work on that with the regulations and all, and the carpeting in your apartment is moldy. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6106528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6106528 [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guf0kNV7D1w http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guf0kNV7D1w ps. On an honest note, I've been working both on apps of the "useless" type, and spend most of my time on working on "useful" medical apps, and fuck if it's not easy to see why no one thinks these areas "sexy", so bogged down in regulation and old entrenched players. But I still think, at least in the case of these super incubators, who have the connections, who have the access to the financing, the focus should be on something more than what it is right now.
  • xradionut 13y ago
    "Meanwhile, your doctor in the hospital is stuck using some 1980's software, which drains the very life-force out of him by the amount of pain it inflicts with every use..." Most of the problems with medical software is the doctors and medical administrators themselves. They get so used to be worshiped as Gods That Save Lives, they assume that they Know Everything About Everything. I've seen more software and business talent quit the medical software field than any other....
    • carbocation 13y ago
      No, really, I discharged a patient from the hospital late the other day because the software gave me no indication that the 4 pieces of disconnected discharge orders/paperwork were missing a fifth piece that finalized the discharge. Software is a real problem.
• TimSAstro 13y ago
  Just to throw another point into the discussion - to some extent, brain power is fungible. I say this speaking as someone who has a clear and ongoing choice between academia and industry. However, currently, academia is a world of hurt for most post-docs (several articles on the topic have passed HN, they're out there if you're interested). So, maybe the reason people aren't curing cancer is because curing cancer doesn't pay even half as well as selling ads, and it comes with a whole lot of other issues (short term contracts, high pressure, long hours, etc). I really believe that if there was a higher financial incentive / more funding support for science, we could keep more of the brightest, and things would progress faster. But in a recession, we get austerity measures, and half the kids move into strategy consulting / finance. Anyway, that's another conversation. </rant>
• ttflee 13y ago
  FYI: If you do not know how difficult it is to cure a patient from cancer, just see: 1 http://xkcd.com/931/ http://xkcd.com/931/ 2 http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1162 http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1162
• lcedp 13y ago
  So let's just ditch everything non-functional. No really. Does music helps cure cancer? I don't think so. Banned. Movies? No. Paintings? Not a bit. Gymnasts, you are uselessly hanging all the time, better learn some biology.
• lotsofcows 13y ago
  "Instead of"? One does not preclude the other. We slowly advance in all areas, whether that be beating cancer or boredom.
• ivv 13y ago
  "The Valley’s brightest minds once invented things of immense significance like the first PC" Weren't the first PCs mostly toys for hobbyists?
• ttflee 13y ago
  > Being an entrepreneur is a nail-biting, ration-sapping, wind-bitten, multi-year unsupported journey into the unknown. Not that different being an entrepreneur from being a cancer researcher.
• _pmf_ 13y ago
  Instead of intellectually stimulating discussions we got Reddit, Facebook and HN.
• rayiner 13y ago
  Nobody who had the skills to seriously take a stab at curing cancer is instead coding up Angry Birds. All those kids from Stanford going to work at consumer technology shops are smart kids, but even at a place like Stanford the talent to really make fundamental breakthroughs in human knowledge is exceedingly rare. And it's not like there is any undersupply of smart people going into biology. As a practical matter, it's more like "we got Angry Birds instead of some middling papers about some cellular pathways that are kind of interesting but ultimately not useful." Or more realistically, a bunch of smart kids got siphoned away from Wall Street and management consulting, and maybe big corporations like IBM or Oracle.
  • ohblahitsme 13y ago
    This is important. The people cashing in their skills to make small things like Angry Birds (perhaps with the intention of making a lot of money without a lot of effort) aren't the people who can sit down and figure out how to cure diseases. Research is hard and not everyone can do it. Progress on diseases will be slower than progress on new forms of entertainment (or productivity, as many startups are geared towards).
• mekoka 13y ago
  If Bill Gates had gone to "cure cancer" or "feed Africa" instead of selling operating systems and word processors, is it guaranteed that he would have succeeded? I'm pretty certain that in that alternate reality someone else would have stepped up to create the equivalent of Windows and maybe become a billionaire, but do we have the assurance that they would also make the same altruistic use of their money? I always get a bit annoyed by people who claim to understand that life isn't some balanced chemical equation with swappable variables, but then display a contradictory logic. If you mention the "butterfly effect" they engage in a dissertation. Later you catch them off-guard and they're lamenting on brilliant minds being wasted on meaningless problems, or on people not eating organic food anymore, or music being too commercial nowadays, etc. The thing that really gets me is not the lack of merit of such complaints, it's the refusal by people who emit them to extrapolate on the implications of their hypotheses. They somehow always assume that the alternate reality in their proposition is some sort of utopia. Life is a huge mess, but as chaotic as it is, every little variation has an effect and a price. Just don't assume that you'll like what they are.
• Legogris 13y ago
  I for one am at a point in my life where I'm starting to switch my focus from web apps and games to bioinformatics. Not that I believe I will be the one to cure cancer or that this field isn't without it's problems too, but it feels great that whatever I accomplish will hopefully lead to improving medicine, no matter how small the contribution. Right now I'm doing my first project on antibiotic resistance and I get to use my knowledge about computer science, mathematical staistics and *NIX shell hacking, while learning a lot of new cool stuff baout biochemistry and molecular biology. Personally, I want to do more than flashy games and entertainment that are essentially luxury products for the happy few that can afford a smartphone and a computer. That being said, it's weird for a Sunday Times writer to be pointing fingers at game developers for what they are doing instead of, I don't know, curing cancer themselves.
• henryaj 13y ago
  There's a lot of this sort of discussion in the strong artifical intelligence/transhumanism crowd. The reasoning goes: * The threat (and possible upside) of strong AI is too great to ignore. * We should be spending as much effort on understanding and developing friendly strong AI as we can, to outcompete any efforts that will produce a malevolent strong AI (whether intentionally or not). * Ergo, everyone should maximise their gross income by becoming a high-flying lawyer, derivatives trader, or similar, live off a minimal income and give the rest to a strong AI research group. Which is fine, except that the economy is, by nature, a huge web of networked interactions. The ways in which those interactions are linked is probably very hard to discern. Which is to say that I think the kind of redistribution of wealth to good causes that people are calling for is worthwhile, but only to an extent. It's the problem that utilitarianism has - it requires perfect knowledge of the outcomes of the various choices you could make. As others have said, the thing you develop might prove useful in treating some disease. Or the skills you pick up while developing it might lead to down a more 'socially responsible' path. Or the thing you make might produce utility for someone else and lead them to contribute to an important cause (e.g. the entrepreneur who sets up a coffee shop in town isn't curing cancer, but the people who now have a place to gather and collaborate might).
• nicholassmith 13y ago
  Don't forget as well, the barrier to entry for solving cancer is non-trivial compared to the barrier to entry for creating Angry Birds. It's significantly easier to develop an app than solving cancer in terms of the equipment, research and background you need. I haven't seen many 'Learn cellular analysis in a week' books floating around.
  • lkrubner 13y ago
    But big problems are usually solved as a series of small problems, yes? It's unlikely that one day some researcher will combine a few chemicals in a new way and shout "Eureka! I have found the drug that cures all cancer!" A problem as complex as cancer (and diverse too: meningiomas are very different from, say, basal cell skin cancer) is something that will probably be solved by a 1,000 small breakthroughs, rather than 1 huge breakthrough. And there are a lot of apps that could help in that direction. Here are some ideas that would be great, if someone could figure out a clever way to implement them: 1.) an app that allows the discovery of important papers that have received no attention, perhaps because they were published in journals that have low prestige 2.) an app that can detect possible bias on the part of the researchers (perhaps a tool that combines data about grants received from Big Pharma to papers that seem to prove the effectiveness of Big Pharma's drugs). At the very least this might protect some researchers from wasting time doing follow-up research based on a paper that is false. 3.) apps that offer different color encodings to DNA information to reflect different theories of the how DNA works, and how DNA damage contributes to cancer. In the same way that in Emacs you can get different color schemes for looking at your Java code, it would be useful to be able to easily format and color DNA sequences, based on the various theories regarding how non-coding segments effect the overall functioning of DNA -- this would be especially useful now, when there is as yet no dominant theory about exactly what roles certain non-coding segments play in the life of our cells. These are 3 apps that would be helpful to researchers and which face no regulatory hurdles. I do not offer these examples to say "We should all be working to cure cancer", though the thought is not completely unreasonable given that close to 25% of all Americans die of cancer. But rather, I offer these 3 examples simply to challenge glib assertions that programmers can't work on a problem like cancer because it is too hard -- rather, there are a million small tasks that programmers could undertake that would help the overall effort.
• crb002 13y ago
  Cancer will be "cured" when mRNA sequencing gets below $100. At that price point it will be cheap to identify the exact mutations. Then comes the harder part of hacking the millions of mutations to create millions of cancer specific drugs.
• Spooky23 13y ago
  We can have both. There is a dizzying array of diseases, cancers and traumas that were death sentences in 1960 that are completely curable today. If I were born in the late 40's instead of the late 70's, I would be an invalid living in a room somewhere due to a back injury. Instead, because of modern surgical techniques, I missed six weeks of work ten years ago and are 100% fine today. So I'm not going to sneer at entrepreneurs who invent video games or make movies or start a laundromat or who sell t-shirts in a resort town. They find places where demands are unmet and fill them. If for you, the opportunity is curing cancer, good for you. If it's hocking t-shirts on a boardwalk, good for you.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
• michaelochurch 13y ago
  First off, there isn't a zero-sum game between Angry Birds and curing cancer. It takes different resources and skills and there isn't an easy or immediate conversion between the two. I don't like Zynga (not to lump Angry Birds in with Zyngarbage) and what they do, but it's not like one could, if given majority ownership of the company, walk into their office and say, "Okay, we're going to sequence oncogenes now". You can't really fault them for not curing cancer, because they aren't set up to do it. All that said, I think there is truth in the argument that VC lends itself to frivolity. VCs are no longer investors, so much as detachable managers. The problem is that a non-expert can't evaluate cancer research. On the other hand, any moron can evaluate and run a "social" web app. If you treat executive positions as political favors to be handed out to one's cronies, and you're running biotech companies, you'll destroy them, because one actually needs to know things to run biotech. On the other hand, with the hot "social" companies, no one will notice the change. Just as reality TV survived the end of its hype cycle, because it was so much cheaper (no writers or professional actors) than scripted television, so it is with social media. Talent is the scarce resource, and the nice thing about the social world is that one doesn't need much of it. They're marketing experiments; they can back-fill with solid technology later on in the process. The dark secret to this is that there are a lot of middle-aged MBA types who never learned to understand technology, and haven't actually worked in over a decade, but want something to manage. As investors in cancer research, they'd be passive philanthropists; as paratrooper managers they'd have no clue. On the other hand, social media they can take over and run because it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what those companies are doing.
• workbench 13y ago
  Nice linkbait headline
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• jballanc 13y ago
  I think the author is close, but doesn't quite capture the entire reasoning behind "cure cancer" versus "disrupt dry-cleaning" or "new car manufacturer". The disparity between these things is not just a matter of probability of success, but also of the timeline over which success is realized. When I was just over a year-and-a-half into my Ph.D. training, I had something of an epiphany. At the time, I was designing an experiment that would be part of a larger research course. As part of the work, I scaffolded out the entire research course to its eventual conclusion. Having finished this, I took a figurative step back...and realized that I would be long dead before the entire project could be finished. I was 24 at the time. Graduate school, and scientific research in general, has a way of slapping you upside the head with your own finite lifespan. The resulting problem, of course, is how do you convey to a non-scientist that the work you are doing is important, despite the fact that you will not live to see its conclusion? I've often thought this is the great unsolved problem with capitalism. How do you convince shareholders to invest their money if you can only promise returns on a 100+ year schedule? I think the insurance industry might have some insights here, but I still haven't quite cracked this nut...
  • Ensorceled 13y ago
    This is actually the best reason for government funding of basic and applied research. Society has to take the long view since individuals and corporations can not. This is why it is scary that politics has degenerated to the point where even 4 year plans are becoming difficult.
    • acjohnson55 13y ago
      A refreshing comment on a message board where it's so fashionable to write government off as inherently corrupt and inferior. It's corrupt because we allow it to be, and its inferiority/superiority vs. the private sector is situational.
    • sergiosgc 13y ago
      While capitalism is quite successful, it has shortcomings. These should be addressed by the society as a whole, and the State is THE organization that is participated in by the whole society. Major categories of capitalism faults: - It does not guard against negative externalities: pollution, long term degrading employee health and safety, value extraction with no value creation (think stealing and other crimes). Here, laws and police/justice are needed to guarantee an even playing field. - It does not guard against value capture by monopoly, be it natural or artificial monopoly. Here, state companies and anti-monopoly regulation are needed. - It does not invest in positive externalities (think fundamental investigation in generic areas like math). Here, government funding of investigation is a good target. - It does not guarantee its own persistence, when attacked by a different ideology (think national security). This is what justifies having the military. Having the State intervene in the market to reduce these shortcomings should never be viewed as anti-capitalist, much to the contrary: it is essential to preserve capitalism. For a very vivid example: large banks are capturing an exceedingly large added value from the market, and are creating negative externalities through risky behaviour. We have done nothing to contain this problem. Worse, we are generally failing to take the long view in planning government intervention in the areas government must operate, and are having the government act in areas where it shouldn't.
• cell303 13y ago
  Does anybody dare to argue that angry birds did provide more value to peoples lives than a cure for cancer? Why is it so obvious that curing cancer is the right thing to do as opposed to engaging in economic and cultural activity, which has been the norm for mankind as long as we have been around? (and by the way provides the social stability that is the very basis for any kind of progress at all) What's worse is the implication that there is a cure for cancer and all it would take is a few talented entrepreneurs to tackle the problem in an directed effort (which, to my knowledge, is happening anyway but with limited success while chemo therapy is still around, which was a by-product of war efforts)
  • eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    Which is better: getting your cancer successfully treated and then playing Angry Birds, or playing Angry Birds and then dying of cancer? That is why.
• Maro 13y ago
  I hypothesize these types of arguments would fail if you quantified them, ie. compared the actual amount spent investing (VC money, people, manhours) in (1) Angry Birds type startups versus (2) training medical researchers, medical research in academia and industry. Ie. I hypothesize (2) >> (1)
• VLM 13y ago
  If you destroy and corrupt businesses and the way of doing business, the only way to "do stuff" without having to hold your nose as much is new areas. People have been curing cancer, admittedly at variable success rates, for decades. Medical industrial complex is much older. You're going to have to hold your nose pretty bad to eliminate cancer. Your triumphs will be via paying off political candidates to purchase laws, and patent warfare. Maybe something the "smart kids" do in the lab will matter, but probably not. On the other hand mobile apps aren't as corrupt yet, therefore they're effective, therefore you can make money and businesses in them... for awhile, before they get tainted.
• nsxwolf 13y ago
  Cancer is being cured gradually. People don't notice this gradual progress and are thus prone to making silly statements like the one in the headline. What it means to be diagnosed with various cancers today is not the same as what it meant 30 years ago.
• mechanical_fish 13y ago
  Jack Handey: Instead of trying to build newer and bigger weapons of destruction, mankind should be thinking about getting more use out of the weapons we already have. Let's explore this topic for three minutes, with Jack as our guide. An effective way to prevent cancer is to stop causing it, and cigarette smoking causes cancer. Convincing smokers to quit is an unambiguous way to save lives. I used to wonder if the three years I spent as a cancer researcher would have been better spent wandering the streets like an end-times prophet, trying to convince people to put down their cigarettes. (Don't get me started on the tanning booths.) Unfortunately, cigarette smoking is a very strong habit and habits are hard to break. But part of the process can involve replacing one addictive habit with another. Angry Birds (plus, perhaps, a sequence of nicotine patches of decreasing strength) is a much healthier addiction than smoking. Another effective way to prevent cancer is to take the safe and effective products of our expensive cancer research and actually deploy the damn things. We have an effective vaccine against HPV, which causes cervical cancer in women and throat cancer in men, but the vaccination rate lags terribly in, um, certain countries: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/health/hpv-vaccine-not-reaching-enough-girls-cdc-says.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1375189808-WzHqK4r/pDWQ0sJEUkqDwA http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/health/hpv-vaccine-not-rea... Curing HPV-based cancers is no longer a technical problem. It is a marketing problem. (And, if you haven't been vaccinated against HPV, go ask a doctor why not!) Finally, we should be honest: Cancer is a very difficult problem, perhaps an intractable one, and for the foreseeable future we'll treat it as we've done for decades: With painful, disfiguring, debilitating, demoralizing surgical, chemical, and radiation procedures. I'm not looking forward to that, if and when the day arrives. But, if I go into treatment, I'm going armed with the best damned mobile entertainment I can find. Games, music, streaming movies, Twitter threads, YouTube kittens, you name it. And I will daily bless the people who took the time to make my existence just a little less miserable.
  • gregory144 13y ago
    So... Angry Birds cures cancer?
    • mechanical_fish 13y ago
      Nothing cures cancer in the sense that people mean when they speak of "curing cancer" as some sort of saintly alternative to "living your life." Many thousands of people are treated for cancer every day. Some of them survive significantly longer, or are significantly happier, as a result. None of the many, many people who work tirelessly to treat the sick are ever credited with "curing cancer," though that is what they do, every day, one person and one day at a time. I worked as a cancer researcher for three years. It was kind of embarrassing. People tend to fawn over you. You get a lot of credit you don't deserve. I never cured any cancer that I know of. I gave cancer to a lot of mice. Few of them ever recovered. Downstairs in the shop were some machinists. They didn't have Ph.D.s. They made custom radiation shields for patients undergoing radiotherapy. When a beam of cell-destroying radiation blasts the tumor inside, say, your head, you want to be sure it blasts as little of the rest of your head as possible. Your future depends, in part, on the quality work of the machinist who carefully builds your radiation shield, just for you, according to the plans drawn up by your friendly medical physicist. These people cured cancer. For all I know they've been laid off by now, replaced by a terrifying molten-lead-extruding 3D printer or something. But they should be proud. People are alive today because of their work. People survived long enough to see graduations and weddings because of their work. People suffered less because of their work. If we ever really do "cure cancer" in the grand-visionary sense of having a magical vaccine against all cancer, people will rapidly become bored of it. Every fifty years or so there will be a resurgence of cancer because folks will have forgotten what it was like, but the rest of the time nobody will care. There will be a small but crucial guild of people who guard the knowledge and procedures for keeping cancer at bay for all humanity, and nobody will know their names except at industry conferences. But that's okay. This is how life really works. It's really big and you live your part of it. Only in the movies does a bright light shine down out of the sky when you do good things.
• amerika_blog 13y ago
  I don't want to endorse some of these behaviors, but: * Thanks to video gaming, we got super-high-powered but cheap graphics. * Thanks to people's seemingly insatiable appetite for pornography, we got the VCR and eventually, home internet. * Thanks to people's desire for conquest, we got natural selection and world exploration. Nature is boundless. From every great evil, eventually, comes great good. This isn't an endorsement of evil, but of nature's resourcefulness. Humans using technology are no exception.
• nsxwolf 13y ago
  I got bad grades in high school because I was a kid and didn't yet know what was important in life. That shut me out of any possible avenue where I'd be able to contribute to "curing cancer". No one will let me work on cancer. That door is closed. But for some reason people will pay me to write "useless" software. I'd imagine many of us are in this boat.
  • haihaibye 13y ago
    Find some opensource bioinformatics projects and contribute. Add some new features or fix some bugs in IGV or other common projects and you'll be helping thousands of cancer researchers be slightly more productive.
• Dewie 13y ago
  So, what can the average person do? Since this seems to be a deficiency of the market, it seems you have to vote with your wallet. How about using a percentage of your income to donate to worthy organizations? Maybe instead of giving a tithe to the poor, you give a tithe to causes that try to improve the whole human condition? Start communities (not hierarchical, political organizations: simply communities) that discuss this type of philanthropy. Maybe you could get a critical mass of people to donate to things that require a modest amount of funding. It's not like anyone hasn't already thought of this, but what other choice does the inidividual have if they doesn't want to dedicate their whole time to fight very systemic and perhaps even an inherent human shortsightedness?
• zeteo 13y ago
  It's a systemic problem. We can be fairly certain of it because the system used to work differently. Past decades saw major national projects that were successfully undertaken e.g. the Tennessee Valley Authority in the '30s, the WW2 effort, the interstate system in the '50s, Apollo in the '60s. This all came to a halt in the '70s (just as the baby boomers were starting to be in charge - coincidence?). In the '80s, "greed is good" was practically a campaign slogan. The ideal of public service (make the world a better place, even at great personal cost) is still as strong as ever with many young men and women. But its proper outlets are sorely missing. You can e.g. join the Peace Corps and work to improve another country with hardly any resources allocated to you. Or, if you want to follow greed instead, you can join Wall Street and have discretion over millions of other people's money. It's certainly not become impossible to improve the world in significant ways, but you just have to become very wealthy first; see Elon Musk, Bill Gates. So every young entrepreneur has to squeeze out some money at a low investment cost first. The route to great public service has thus become: 1. spend the most energetic and productive years of your life to build Angry Birds 2. make lots of money in subsequent financial and legal operations 3. balance family and retirement with building and running a foundation to cure cancer.
  • acjohnson55 13y ago
    I like where you're coming from, but I'm not sure our foundation system is as altruistic or effective as we're led to believe. Peter Buffett wrote a great op-ed the other day on this topic: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/the-charitable-industrial-complex.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/the-charitable-ind...
    • jessaustin 13y ago
      I'd managed to miss that the first time around; I wish I could thank you for prompting me to read it. Buffett offers some vague criticisms, intended I assume to mean something to his rivals in the trust-fund-gradual-diminution game. They mean little to someone outside that community. They seem especially unfair in response to a mention of Bill Gates. Gates is ending diseases. How is that kicking the can? How is that turning the world into "one vast market"?
• bayesianhorse 13y ago
  People don't appreciate that science is not an embarrassingly parallel process. Some steps have to come before others, and each of those take time. There is a ton of money being thrown at "cancer", which is a large set of incredibly complex problems. I even believe that there is never going to be "a cure for cancer", while we will be able to manage and even "cure" most types of cancer during the next two decades (IMHO). But it's a tough problem which doesn't lend itself to YC-style founder teams or extreme implementations of lean entrepreneurship.
• ghostdiver 13y ago
  Cancer has been around for tens of thousands of years, yet human kind did just fine.
• lifeformed 13y ago
  I wonder how many people are planning on going the Musk/Gates route: first make it big in something plain, then use your fortune to tackle the big problems.
• teilo 13y ago
  Then there is this: It is things like Angry Birds that provide the economic engine which funds cancer research. If there were no Angry Birds, or countless other "does it matter" products, the amount of money that would be available for charities or research of all kinds would be drastically reduced. These "does it matter" products create wealth that did not previously exist. Yes, create wealth. They don't steal from research. They create economic value that did not exist before. There is nothing systematically broken here. However, the system absolutely does break when some authoritarian power decides that they shall decide which products shall be produced, and how any existing wealth shall be apportioned. It has NEVER worked in the history of humanity. Call it unjust if you wish, but one's sense of social justice does not change the way economies function. An economy is based on human action. Humans act on fundamental needs. Sometimes they act irrationally. Nevertheless, on a scale, they act in ways that are predictable and consistent. The principles of human action cannot be changed. They can only be observed and exploited. Any economic system that is predicated upon changing human action will fail.
• Futurebot 13y ago
  Why is this? - Making Angry Birds is a whole lot easier than curing cancer, which is not even a single disease. - People need to eat, want to enjoy themselves, all that stuff. To do this, you need money. What's the easier way to do so? Making Angry Birds. - People want raised status. You'd get a lot more from curing cancer(s), but it would take so much longer, and you're not guaranteed it'll really work. Making Angry Birds is the much better option. - You need piles of money to do research to cure cancers. You also need time. Short-termism (caused by the other side of accountability, transparency, and demands for ROI) means you may not get either of these. So where does the money come from, and is what you're getting enough? If it is, do you have time (and enough of the right type of skilled researchers) to do so? Modern medicine and research is not an individual endeavor; it requires teams, sometimes large ones. Along these lines, if you believe a government's number one job is to protect people from harm (and you're inclined towards positive liberty), why is there virtually no government support for anti-aging research (in the first world, disesases of age of edged out many other killers), or life extension/immortality research? "Natural causes"/"dying is part of the natural cycle"/other excuse based on cultural beliefs/ideology are so ingrained our cultures/ideologies as just being something we have to put up with, that we haven't even gotten off the ground with this stuff. Maybe the short version here is "we don't collectively care enough about things that kill us in a way tha matters or are even actively opposed to fixing them" to do anything about it. Change the culture, change the world.
• cheez 13y ago
  Everything is working as it should. "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in." The key word here is old. Society cannot conjure up a solution for cancer, that takes dedication which only a few people who are interested in the topic can provide. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=cucj4ipzV8k&t=88 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=cuc... "(Money) gives you a position in time when you're at that second level to be a good citizen of your community. To work on community projects. To be a good neighbour." The selfish pursuit of money allows us all to make the world a better place once we have no need for it anymore. Don't let anyone fool you into thinking that trying to make money is immoral. It is the most moral thing you can do for society.
  • eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    This assumes that it's possible for everyone, or even everyone deserving, to have enough money that they can afford to spend it charitably.
    • cheez 13y ago
      Anyone who claims they can't afford to be charitable should be on the receiving end of it. You can be charitable with time or money. There is an infamous quote: "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure." At a certain point, you don't get special treatment if you came up poor. I know a guy who has been to jail a couple of times, never finished university and still makes six figures.
      • eli_gottlieb 13y ago
        Wait, what's so bad about buses? Also, "anyone" != "everyone".
• zindlerb 13y ago
  Hmm... I think an interesting way to frame this problem is to take the theory that entrepreneurs should solve problems close to them as fact. If we do this then we have two related problems. Why aren't people close to big problems becoming entrepreneurs? Why aren't entrepreneurs closer to big problems? A solution to the problem of "useless" apps might come from finding ways to bring big problems to entrepreneurs, or making it easier for those closer to big problems to become entrepreneurs. Thoughts?