Now might be a good time to revisit a previous discussion on this: Schlep Blindness (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465521 https://news.ycombinator.com/i

Now might be a good time to revisit a previous discussion on this: Schlep Blindness (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465521) I'd also add (another part) of my take on it: - Creating the "new Snapchat" is a whole lot easier than curing cancer, which is not even a single disease. It's a constellation of diseases/conditions we still don't fully understand. - 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 the new Snapchat. - 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 the new Snapchat is the much easier 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. The incentives are just not there. Some of these things also do not always lend themselves to private investment; the risks are high, the time horizons are long, and the payoffs very uncertain. The way our current systems are set up, this is not an easy problem to solve. People who have already made their fortunes elsewhere (e.g., Elon Musk) and companies that have huge cash piles and lots of big ideas (like Google) seem like our current best bets until we collectively decide that we should fund more of these things via public money. My comment on the older article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465754