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There's a lot that I dislike about this article, but I'll start with this: it is probably self-refuting. Someone could just have easily written: "I find it diff

There's a lot that I dislike about this article, but I'll start with this: it is probably self-refuting. Someone could just have easily written: "I find it difficult to see individuals who could focus their time and effort solving [problems like energy, food, water, health, education], instead put their efforts into something like a takedown of the moral priorities of the people behind Yo on a their personal blog." A person could argue that the post has more value than Yo (though I'm not sure this is self-evident), but it still isn't in the same ballpark as "energy, food, water, health, education." I mean, c'mon Christoph McCann, get your priorities straight! Of course, I don't actually make that argument, because I reject its premise. As the above argument hopefully illustrates, it is not reasonable to insist that everyone spend all their time in the most socially beneficial way possible. Should we all strive to make the world a better place? Of course. But I don't know many people who think that we need to spend all our time tackling the world's biggest problems. And, by the way, who appointed Christoph McCann arbiter of what it good and valuable in this world? Maybe an app like Yo will bring us together in a new (albeit marginal) way. That's valuable, even if it is also silly. (See, e.g., the first few paragraphs of this article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2014/06/23/goodbye-yo-or-how-the-worlds-most-fun-and-heartwarming-app-met-its-tragic-end/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2014/06/23/goo...) Or maybe it provide a cautionary tale to remind us (as, perhaps, it already has) what is really important. Value exists in subtle forms that are not so easy to glibly list, and can be advanced in subtle and unexpected ways. While I wish we lived in a world where more people focused on problems like energy, food, water, health, education, I'm not sure I want to live in a world where EVERYONE works on those problems. I want people to be free to do the unexpected, even if the results sometimes seem frivolous. So, if McCann's only point is that we should take a moment and reconsider our priorities, point taken. But this looks suspiciously like something a bit more (with respect, and apologies) totalitarian.

mtdewcmu 12y ago
>energy, food, water, health, education The problem with those problems is that they are very hard. Much harder than starting a Yo. It's a false choice. Even if the founders of Yo were working on important problems, those problems might not get solved, because they are very hard. The world is big enough to have people working on big problems and people working on Yo.
- collyw 12y ago
  I would disagree. Sure the app itself does something ridiculously trivial. But setting up an app that is expected to scale is not (I assume it is, if they got 1.2 million). They must have some very good marketing, or something special to get that million. I do the database for a DNA sequencing centre. I guess some of these things are considered "important" problems (working towards curing cancer, or other diseases). But most of the bioinformaticians are second rate programmers (there are a couple of geniuses thrown into the mix as well). Their work generally helps, but to say they are doing something smarter that a scalable web app is a bit naive. Most of the stuff is 100 line scripts that count some numbers, and do some basic stats. Their software doesn't scale, it doesn't even have to be reliable, as often it will only be run on a couple of datasets. At the end of the day its a different set of knowledge and problems, the only similarity being that there is some programming involved.
  - mtdewcmu 12y ago
    Ok, I didn't claim that starting Yo was easy, or that merely contributing to important problems is harder than starting Yo. I meant that, e.g., solving the energy problem is much harder than starting Yo. Basically, those big problems are so big that even if everyone at Yo devoted their careers to one of those problems, the chances of that being the difference in solving it is almost infinitesimal. There have been a lot of brilliant efforts at curing cancer. You could spend a large portion of a brilliant career following up on one lead. Odds are, that lead won't yield a cure. Cancer is that hard.
dionidium 12y ago
But I don't know many people who think that we need to spend all our time tackling the world's biggest problems. It's hard to see what the point of such a thing would even be. Isn't the whole point of solving the world's problems that we'll have more time to waste on frivolous pursuits like the Yo app?
- dionidium 12y ago
  Also, this attitude is an example of the well-debunked fallacy that time and effort are fungible and/or exchangeable goods (i.e. that the creators of Yo could just as easily have been solving more difficult problems instead).
sterculiusx 12y ago
"Totalitarian"? From the article: "We need to think big, see the real problems that are out there and go solve them. For my part, I hope to stick by this philosophy and play my part."
- pdabbadabba 12y ago
  Well, right. That's why I wrote the sentence prior to what you've quoted. I'm not sure I understand quite what the article's point is. The part you quoted sounds very live-and-let-live. But then there's this: > it saddens me that some of the worlds most driven, focused, intelligent and inspiring individuals don't focus their time on solving the real problems our society faces. It may well be that Yo has the user engagement and growth that justifies such an investment on purely those terms, but, to me, that is a narrow outlook. > I therefore find it difficult to see individuals who could focus their time and effort solving these problems, instead put their efforts into something like Yo. I grant that this is not exactly boot-on-the-throat language. But it's hard to read these remarks about what "saddens" McCann as anything other than (passive-aggressively) prescriptive.
  - collyw 12y ago
    I think the point is that smart money / people are not being given the funding they ought to be in the world, when our wonderful market driven economy prioritises crap like Yo app. Mis-allocation of resources thanks to market forces. Though I am guessing the pro capitalist people on here won't like that and try to justify it.
  - gfodor 12y ago
    Your analysis seems deliberately obtuse. The basic human emotion of empathy can explain sufficiently why someone can feel the way the OP does. You can question his assumptions (that in another world where incentives were aligned differently, Yo's creators would have been capable of contributing to alleviating human suffering) but to think there is some totalitarian undercurrent here is absurd when the more obvious explanation is frustration that people are suffering when they could be being helped.
saurik 12y ago
Also temporarily assuming his premise, I disagree with your conclusion that this article itself becomes a waste of time: if he convinces a couple people to work on those things he finds important by way of having written and published this article then it may be more beneficial by the stated metric of doing good for the world than directly working on those important problems. I'd instead try to question the value of the post (again, assuming the premise, so in the eyes of the author) by asking this question: "if someone actually finds Yo worthwhile enough of their time to work on, maybe they aren't the kind of person who would actually come up with useful solutions to actually important problems anyway". Then again, the cost of writing this article is so low that even if the potential reward has very low probability, it has sufficient value (the productive output of another individual working on important problems) that it is probably still worthwhile (again, if you agree with the basic premise).
atmosx 12y ago
> [...] "energy, food, water, health, education" [...] I guess 'food' stands for 'poverty', in this list. Seriously though, does anyone believe that these problems can be solved by an 'app'?
- Killswitch 12y ago
  GrubHub helped solve my food issues.
- shiven 12y ago
  Things more 'physical' than apps have been made and distributed in an attempt to solve a problem the wrong way, or even the wrong problem entirely. History is littered with examples of great aspirations and benign intent that either failed catastrophically or caused more harm than good, or frequently, both. A somewhat recent example that pops into mind is this PRI story about the Soccket... http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-04-08/impoverished-kids-love-soccer-ball-powers-lamp-until-it-breaks http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-04-08/impoverished-kids-love...
- steveklabnik 12y ago
  When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist." - Hélder Pessoa Câmara
LunaSea 12y ago
Besides the argument of the potential that an app like Yo could have, it's also a business decision. Developers have a limited amount of time they can spare to write code so they have to be wise with their venture choices. At the end of the day, when you read that Yo was funded for $1M, bubble or not, it's a smarter decision after calculating the risk / benefit ratio to emulate Yo's model. If their would be more funding in the areas described in the blog post, I'm sure more developers would launch start-ups around them.
digz 12y ago
>> And, by the way, who appointed Christoph McCann arbiter of what it good and valuable in this world? This is such an important point, and why free markets work best. If people derive value out of Yo, then terrific. If they don't, it goes away. Don't need a moral crusader to decide what is worthy.
- cwyers 12y ago
  Well, except there's all kinds of economic theories about how this isn't true: the tragedy of the commons, negative externalities. There's also a lot of evidence that rational actor theory isn't as true as pure economics would suggest. And of course market inefficiencies will distort price signals. And truly free markets have a hard time remaining such in face of large incentives for rational actors to instead engage in rent seeking or other anti-competitive behavior. But yes, if you ignore all the problems both theoretical and practical with free markets, free markets work best.
  - digz 12y ago
    Saying that free markets are best is not the same as saying free markets are perfect.
    - cwyers 12y ago
      Go back and read again. He's not saying anything that free markets are an imperfect way of delivering what people want, but they're better than anything else we've come up with. He's saying that free markets tell us what people want, and if you disagree with the "free market" (which is an abstraction, I don't think most things people refer to as free markets actually are the "free markets" of economic textbooks), you're disagreeing with what people actually want. That makes free markets right by tautology; the best is what people want, and what people want is what they buy on free markets. Which is fine if you want to short-circuit debate, but it doesn't actually let us ask the important questions.
      - dragonwriter 12y ago
gfodor 12y ago
Yes, I believed you missed the point. Someone lamenting the fact that smart people are working on stupid problems is not the same thing as them saying that smart people should be forced to work on hard problems. Hamming put it best: "Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, ``Do you mind if I join you?'' They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, ``What are the important problems of your field?'' And after a week or so, ``What important problems are you working on?'' And after some more time I came in one day and said, ``If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?'' I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring." http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html Yo's developers getting more than a million in funding at least makes it pretty clear at least in part why this happens.
- digz 12y ago
  While I have some sympathy for your point of view (after all the guy is free to say what he wants) I still think the argument is facile. A few thoughts: - As others have pointed out, talent is not fungible. Just because you can program Yo, doesn't mean to can solve other issues. - If everyone is so convinced that Yo is such a dumb idea, do you really want the founder who's "capable" of doing something so stupid working on serious issues? - What is worthwhile? If you view Yo as art (in the modern sense) it's pretty effective! Seems to have made the entire tech community collectively think. That's a hard thing to do. We don't mock the choices made by Banksy (who on the surface is a vandal)... Perhaps Yo will be a godsend to folks with severe disabilities, allowing them to simply communicate with others nearby easily and effectively. Or perhaps it's just fun. Why is that bad? - Or maybe the whole thing fails and that's OK. Far more 'worthwhile' companies have failed.
  - phillmv 12y ago
    Skills are not fungible - just because I can make a web app doesn't necessarily mean I can learn how to perform surgery - but most people with certain skillsets certainly are. How else would people build products by hiring more developers? So, in so far that there are more socially useful problems that iOS developers can help resolve it remains a valid critique to say that those developers could have worked on something else.
jal278 12y ago
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." [0] The reason why this article resonates with many readers is that it expresses frustration with the triviality of how our economy allocates resources to start-ups. The promise of tech is huge, but following the money often leads to optimizing ads, machine learning algorithms competing with each other in HFT, or other applications with little net benefit to society. It's not that EVERYONE should be working on the big problems -- just that the incentive systems seem to lean towards triviality over deep human benefit. [0] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b4225060960537.htm http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b42250609...
- rfrey 12y ago
  That quote is dripping with hubris. There's a few high profile cases where it's true -- Ng at google and now Baidu, for example -- but I guarantee that the bulk of the "best minds" of the generation are not programmers at Google or Facebook.
  - jjoonathan 12y ago
    You have a point, but it's worth mentioning that the fundamental observation behind the complaint is still sound: incentives are rigged to guide smart people towards pursuits of dubious utility compared to what they would otherwise choose to work on. Let's look at a rough picture of incentives for a new graduate: 1. Helping the poor: $0 (maybe $12k if you count a fellowship) 2. Trying to Cure Cancer: $25k/yr, bump to $40k after 6 years 3. Engineering Medical Devices, Airplanes, etc: $60k/yr 4. Trying to Build the Next Twitter: $100k/yr-$150k/yr 5. Helping Rich People Game the System to Get Richer: $150k/yr, $300k/yr after a few years if successful I have placed these in decreasing order of social value per my own judgement. Note that salary has precisely the opposite trend. The probability of that particular relative order occurring by chance is 1 in 120. I could add other jobs to the list to drop the probability even further. In some cases the market is conveying valuable information. If we have enough !Software Engineers, it makes sense to depress their wages as a way of discouraging people from entering those fields. Similarly, it makes sense to encourage smart people to pursue roles with a lot of leverage (in the value creation sense, not the bargaining sense), which is a plausible excuse for sending smart people into finance (not one that I buy, but it's plausible). But in other cases we can identify the information that the market is conveying and pass judgement with the opposite conclusion. By design, the market rewards those who feed and clothe wealthy people and punishes those who feed and clothe the poor and penniless. In this instance the market's reasoning is transparent enough to judge and few would rule in its favor ("necessary evil" is the best I've heard, and then only in the context of the circular "it's the best system we've tried" argument). Another negative example would be medical research. Next time someone you care about is sick or dying and has run out of options, reconsider the wisdom of our system in spending ~3% of all medical expenditures on research. Also remember that much of that is governmental -- if the market had its way, that figure would be even lower. The market's reasoning is transparent: a doctor, insurance company, or drug company can threaten to withhold the service or good they provide in order to capture a fraction of the value they create. A researcher can't do that, at least not effectively (their product only appreciates in value once they no longer control it). So they are systematically undervalued and the options that your loved one has are artificially reduced as a result of this. Market-based incentives have huge problems. The million dollar question (many trillion dollar question) is how to fix them.
canvia 12y ago
Sometimes people need to be reminded that there is a lot happening in the world outside of the sphere of influence that they exist in. As a global society we are leaving segments of our population behind and it is unnecessary and cruel. Do we really need more distractions and toys if we can't fulfill basic needs like food and water? Put yourself in the shoes of someone that experiences real needs (not wants) for a while before you judge the author's criticisms of our self indulgent society.
acconrad 12y ago
I think the issue buckles down to someone saying "I'm working on this important thing and I can't raise $1MM, while this trivial, non-important app just raised $1MM, WTF?!" It just doesn't seem fair that a pointless app could raise 7 figures while others are struggling, but it does point back to the idea that fairness and judgment are human-made, and not absolute.
pg_is_a_butt 12y ago
the "yo" app took 8 hours to create. "we" have 8 hours to spare. "you" are nothing.
whybroke 12y ago
I was unaware that the mere suggestion that we should focus attention on the public good is now "totalitarian". Clearly I need lessons in the new English. That or there is such an aversion to any form of social responsibility that even mention of it is met with massive hyperbole. I'm sure it must just be the former.

mtdewcmu 12y ago

>energy, food, water, health, education The problem with those problems is that they are very hard. Much harder than starting a Yo. It's a false choice. Even if the founders of Yo were working on important problems, those problems might not get solved, because they are very hard. The world is big enough to have people working on big problems and people working on Yo.

collyw 12y ago
I would disagree. Sure the app itself does something ridiculously trivial. But setting up an app that is expected to scale is not (I assume it is, if they got 1.2 million). They must have some very good marketing, or something special to get that million. I do the database for a DNA sequencing centre. I guess some of these things are considered "important" problems (working towards curing cancer, or other diseases). But most of the bioinformaticians are second rate programmers (there are a couple of geniuses thrown into the mix as well). Their work generally helps, but to say they are doing something smarter that a scalable web app is a bit naive. Most of the stuff is 100 line scripts that count some numbers, and do some basic stats. Their software doesn't scale, it doesn't even have to be reliable, as often it will only be run on a couple of datasets. At the end of the day its a different set of knowledge and problems, the only similarity being that there is some programming involved.
- mtdewcmu 12y ago
  Ok, I didn't claim that starting Yo was easy, or that merely contributing to important problems is harder than starting Yo. I meant that, e.g., solving the energy problem is much harder than starting Yo. Basically, those big problems are so big that even if everyone at Yo devoted their careers to one of those problems, the chances of that being the difference in solving it is almost infinitesimal. There have been a lot of brilliant efforts at curing cancer. You could spend a large portion of a brilliant career following up on one lead. Odds are, that lead won't yield a cure. Cancer is that hard.

dionidium 12y ago

But I don't know many people who think that we need to spend all our time tackling the world's biggest problems. It's hard to see what the point of such a thing would even be. Isn't the whole point of solving the world's problems that we'll have more time to waste on frivolous pursuits like the Yo app?

dionidium 12y ago
Also, this attitude is an example of the well-debunked fallacy that time and effort are fungible and/or exchangeable goods (i.e. that the creators of Yo could just as easily have been solving more difficult problems instead).

sterculiusx 12y ago

"Totalitarian"? From the article: "We need to think big, see the real problems that are out there and go solve them. For my part, I hope to stick by this philosophy and play my part."

pdabbadabba 12y ago
Well, right. That's why I wrote the sentence prior to what you've quoted. I'm not sure I understand quite what the article's point is. The part you quoted sounds very live-and-let-live. But then there's this: > it saddens me that some of the worlds most driven, focused, intelligent and inspiring individuals don't focus their time on solving the real problems our society faces. It may well be that Yo has the user engagement and growth that justifies such an investment on purely those terms, but, to me, that is a narrow outlook. > I therefore find it difficult to see individuals who could focus their time and effort solving these problems, instead put their efforts into something like Yo. I grant that this is not exactly boot-on-the-throat language. But it's hard to read these remarks about what "saddens" McCann as anything other than (passive-aggressively) prescriptive.
- collyw 12y ago
  I think the point is that smart money / people are not being given the funding they ought to be in the world, when our wonderful market driven economy prioritises crap like Yo app. Mis-allocation of resources thanks to market forces. Though I am guessing the pro capitalist people on here won't like that and try to justify it.
- gfodor 12y ago
  Your analysis seems deliberately obtuse. The basic human emotion of empathy can explain sufficiently why someone can feel the way the OP does. You can question his assumptions (that in another world where incentives were aligned differently, Yo's creators would have been capable of contributing to alleviating human suffering) but to think there is some totalitarian undercurrent here is absurd when the more obvious explanation is frustration that people are suffering when they could be being helped.

saurik 12y ago

Also temporarily assuming his premise, I disagree with your conclusion that this article itself becomes a waste of time: if he convinces a couple people to work on those things he finds important by way of having written and published this article then it may be more beneficial by the stated metric of doing good for the world than directly working on those important problems. I'd instead try to question the value of the post (again, assuming the premise, so in the eyes of the author) by asking this question: "if someone actually finds Yo worthwhile enough of their time to work on, maybe they aren't the kind of person who would actually come up with useful solutions to actually important problems anyway". Then again, the cost of writing this article is so low that even if the potential reward has very low probability, it has sufficient value (the productive output of another individual working on important problems) that it is probably still worthwhile (again, if you agree with the basic premise).

atmosx 12y ago

> [...] "energy, food, water, health, education" [...] I guess 'food' stands for 'poverty', in this list. Seriously though, does anyone believe that these problems can be solved by an 'app'?

Killswitch 12y ago
GrubHub helped solve my food issues.
shiven 12y ago
Things more 'physical' than apps have been made and distributed in an attempt to solve a problem the wrong way, or even the wrong problem entirely. History is littered with examples of great aspirations and benign intent that either failed catastrophically or caused more harm than good, or frequently, both. A somewhat recent example that pops into mind is this PRI story about the Soccket... http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-04-08/impoverished-kids-love-soccer-ball-powers-lamp-until-it-breaks http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-04-08/impoverished-kids-love...
steveklabnik 12y ago
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist." - Hélder Pessoa Câmara

LunaSea 12y ago

Besides the argument of the potential that an app like Yo could have, it's also a business decision. Developers have a limited amount of time they can spare to write code so they have to be wise with their venture choices. At the end of the day, when you read that Yo was funded for $1M, bubble or not, it's a smarter decision after calculating the risk / benefit ratio to emulate Yo's model. If their would be more funding in the areas described in the blog post, I'm sure more developers would launch start-ups around them.

digz 12y ago

>> And, by the way, who appointed Christoph McCann arbiter of what it good and valuable in this world? This is such an important point, and why free markets work best. If people derive value out of Yo, then terrific. If they don't, it goes away. Don't need a moral crusader to decide what is worthy.

cwyers 12y ago
Well, except there's all kinds of economic theories about how this isn't true: the tragedy of the commons, negative externalities. There's also a lot of evidence that rational actor theory isn't as true as pure economics would suggest. And of course market inefficiencies will distort price signals. And truly free markets have a hard time remaining such in face of large incentives for rational actors to instead engage in rent seeking or other anti-competitive behavior. But yes, if you ignore all the problems both theoretical and practical with free markets, free markets work best.
- digz 12y ago
  Saying that free markets are best is not the same as saying free markets are perfect.
  - cwyers 12y ago
    Go back and read again. He's not saying anything that free markets are an imperfect way of delivering what people want, but they're better than anything else we've come up with. He's saying that free markets tell us what people want, and if you disagree with the "free market" (which is an abstraction, I don't think most things people refer to as free markets actually are the "free markets" of economic textbooks), you're disagreeing with what people actually want. That makes free markets right by tautology; the best is what people want, and what people want is what they buy on free markets. Which is fine if you want to short-circuit debate, but it doesn't actually let us ask the important questions.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago

gfodor 12y ago

Yes, I believed you missed the point. Someone lamenting the fact that smart people are working on stupid problems is not the same thing as them saying that smart people should be forced to work on hard problems. Hamming put it best: "Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, ``Do you mind if I join you?'' They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, ``What are the important problems of your field?'' And after a week or so, ``What important problems are you working on?'' And after some more time I came in one day and said, ``If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?'' I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring." http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html Yo's developers getting more than a million in funding at least makes it pretty clear at least in part why this happens.

digz 12y ago
While I have some sympathy for your point of view (after all the guy is free to say what he wants) I still think the argument is facile. A few thoughts: - As others have pointed out, talent is not fungible. Just because you can program Yo, doesn't mean to can solve other issues. - If everyone is so convinced that Yo is such a dumb idea, do you really want the founder who's "capable" of doing something so stupid working on serious issues? - What is worthwhile? If you view Yo as art (in the modern sense) it's pretty effective! Seems to have made the entire tech community collectively think. That's a hard thing to do. We don't mock the choices made by Banksy (who on the surface is a vandal)... Perhaps Yo will be a godsend to folks with severe disabilities, allowing them to simply communicate with others nearby easily and effectively. Or perhaps it's just fun. Why is that bad? - Or maybe the whole thing fails and that's OK. Far more 'worthwhile' companies have failed.
- phillmv 12y ago
  Skills are not fungible - just because I can make a web app doesn't necessarily mean I can learn how to perform surgery - but most people with certain skillsets certainly are. How else would people build products by hiring more developers? So, in so far that there are more socially useful problems that iOS developers can help resolve it remains a valid critique to say that those developers could have worked on something else.

jal278 12y ago

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." [0] The reason why this article resonates with many readers is that it expresses frustration with the triviality of how our economy allocates resources to start-ups. The promise of tech is huge, but following the money often leads to optimizing ads, machine learning algorithms competing with each other in HFT, or other applications with little net benefit to society. It's not that EVERYONE should be working on the big problems -- just that the incentive systems seem to lean towards triviality over deep human benefit. [0] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b4225060960537.htm http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b42250609...

rfrey 12y ago
That quote is dripping with hubris. There's a few high profile cases where it's true -- Ng at google and now Baidu, for example -- but I guarantee that the bulk of the "best minds" of the generation are not programmers at Google or Facebook.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  You have a point, but it's worth mentioning that the fundamental observation behind the complaint is still sound: incentives are rigged to guide smart people towards pursuits of dubious utility compared to what they would otherwise choose to work on. Let's look at a rough picture of incentives for a new graduate: 1. Helping the poor: $0 (maybe $12k if you count a fellowship) 2. Trying to Cure Cancer: $25k/yr, bump to $40k after 6 years 3. Engineering Medical Devices, Airplanes, etc: $60k/yr 4. Trying to Build the Next Twitter: $100k/yr-$150k/yr 5. Helping Rich People Game the System to Get Richer: $150k/yr, $300k/yr after a few years if successful I have placed these in decreasing order of social value per my own judgement. Note that salary has precisely the opposite trend. The probability of that particular relative order occurring by chance is 1 in 120. I could add other jobs to the list to drop the probability even further. In some cases the market is conveying valuable information. If we have enough !Software Engineers, it makes sense to depress their wages as a way of discouraging people from entering those fields. Similarly, it makes sense to encourage smart people to pursue roles with a lot of leverage (in the value creation sense, not the bargaining sense), which is a plausible excuse for sending smart people into finance (not one that I buy, but it's plausible). But in other cases we can identify the information that the market is conveying and pass judgement with the opposite conclusion. By design, the market rewards those who feed and clothe wealthy people and punishes those who feed and clothe the poor and penniless. In this instance the market's reasoning is transparent enough to judge and few would rule in its favor ("necessary evil" is the best I've heard, and then only in the context of the circular "it's the best system we've tried" argument). Another negative example would be medical research. Next time someone you care about is sick or dying and has run out of options, reconsider the wisdom of our system in spending ~3% of all medical expenditures on research. Also remember that much of that is governmental -- if the market had its way, that figure would be even lower. The market's reasoning is transparent: a doctor, insurance company, or drug company can threaten to withhold the service or good they provide in order to capture a fraction of the value they create. A researcher can't do that, at least not effectively (their product only appreciates in value once they no longer control it). So they are systematically undervalued and the options that your loved one has are artificially reduced as a result of this. Market-based incentives have huge problems. The million dollar question (many trillion dollar question) is how to fix them.

canvia 12y ago

Sometimes people need to be reminded that there is a lot happening in the world outside of the sphere of influence that they exist in. As a global society we are leaving segments of our population behind and it is unnecessary and cruel. Do we really need more distractions and toys if we can't fulfill basic needs like food and water? Put yourself in the shoes of someone that experiences real needs (not wants) for a while before you judge the author's criticisms of our self indulgent society.

acconrad 12y ago

I think the issue buckles down to someone saying "I'm working on this important thing and I can't raise $1MM, while this trivial, non-important app just raised $1MM, WTF?!" It just doesn't seem fair that a pointless app could raise 7 figures while others are struggling, but it does point back to the idea that fairness and judgment are human-made, and not absolute.

pg_is_a_butt 12y ago

the "yo" app took 8 hours to create. "we" have 8 hours to spare. "you" are nothing.

whybroke 12y ago

I was unaware that the mere suggestion that we should focus attention on the public good is now "totalitarian". Clearly I need lessons in the new English. That or there is such an aversion to any form of social responsibility that even mention of it is met with massive hyperbole. I'm sure it must just be the former.