
"Instead of cures for cancer we got Angry Birds" - buro9
http://peternixey.com/post/56867259886/instead-of-cures-for-cancer-we-got-angry-birds
======
napoleoncomplex
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
"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....

~~~
Ensorceled
I've developed for multiple medical companies and applications. This describes
exactly 0 of the doctors, radiologists, surgeons, or researchers I worked
with.

I quit the medical field because it's incredibly hard work and very difficult
to succeed because of the additional hurdles (regulation, entrenched
interests) unless you are a large corporation. And large corporations suck.

~~~
vacri
A friend of mine was a QA engineer for a famous children's hospital. He could
do absolutely nothing, because every doctor had their favourite vendor with
their favourite sales rep that gave them goodies, and they all hated the idea
of interoperating and making things more efficient. And once a doctor says "If
you change this system, _children will die_!", that's it, conversation is
over. It doesn't matter that everyone knows the doctor is covering themselves,
the point is that the only people that can override the doctor are the higher-
ups, of which there are few, and all of those are playing their own political
game.

My friend tells the story of being in one meeting with the various doctors,
and one of the elder ones made a snide comment about another doctor 'not being
here long enough to understand how things are done in this place' \- to which
the reply was 'I've been here for 17 years'.

Myself personally, I worked as a neurology tech for four years, and the
doctors I worked with were a broad mix. Some of them were the sweetest people
you could hope to meet. Others were such money-grubbers they directly said to
the pharmaceutical reps "don't give us 'gifts', just give us the money
directly". In that broad mix were doctors so awesome that they write their own
mouse drivers, to doctors that behaved just as xradionut mentioned.

Doctors are humans too, there are a lot of them, and they run the same kinds
of personalities as other humans.

~~~
Ensorceled
I don't doubt it. I just hated seeing "Doctors" tarred with that overly broad
brush when the ones I worked with were universally pleasant colleagues.

------
binarymax
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.

------
jballanc
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
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.

~~~
sergiosgc
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.

~~~
Ensorceled
All of these are the result of unregulated and unrestrained capitalism. I'm
confused that the majority has somehow been convinced that it is a good thing
that corporations are socipathic entities that will parasitically consume its
host (society) if allowed.

~~~
nikatwork
The idea that "the market will regulate itself" is right up there with "the
state will wither away".

------
mekoka
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.

------
eksith
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-
mo...](http://kotaku.com/5950834/in-japan-the-kinect-may-soon-be-more-common-
in-hospitals-than-in-homes)

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
Angry Birds may help Thwart Alzeihmer's: Study:
[http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/01/23/brain-games-
ma...](http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/01/23/brain-games-may-help-
thwart-alzheimers-study/)

------
rayiner
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
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).

------
zeteo
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
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-
ind...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/the-charitable-industrial-
complex.html?_r=0)

~~~
jessaustin
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"?

------
exratione
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.

~~~
rayiner
The total cost of the 2012 election was $6.3 billion, about half of which was
the Presidential election, so over a period of 4 years you're looking at
roughly 2.4 billion per year. That would do jack shit for curing aging or even
an important disease. The NIH spends $30 billion per year on those things.

We do the beer and circuses because they're cheaper than large-scale human
advancements. The Manhattan project was $30 billion. Apollo was about $135
billion. The interstate highway system was $400-500 billion. (Inflation
adjusted).

~~~
exratione
The cost of implementing SENS, a detailed research plan to demonstrate
rejuvenation in old mice, is between $1 to $2 billion over 20 years.

Of the NIH budget, much less than 1% goes towards ways to intervene in aging
I'm sorry to say. The NIA yearly budget is ~$1 billion, and of that very
little has anything to do with actually altering the course of aging.

~~~
gte910h
SENS is really fishy. Computer people I know love the idea. Biological
research people I know think the guy is talking out his ass and hand waving
most of it.

I do think aging based research is the future, I just worry that SENS is a
boondoggle that could put us off aging research permanently.

Organ printing is getting sizable investment right now. That will do a good
job at a lot of problems.

------
buro9
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
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
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.)

~~~
6d0debc071
How?

Making software for government is like a two year bidding process. The
barriers to entry are incredibly high when it should just be a case of, "Okay,
you want X Y and Z as your most critical features, let's keep the initial
product small, we can add features as we go along. It'll be done in two months
and then we'll iterate."

Instead it's more like, "We're going to have bids for two years for the
project and then we're going to want everything done in one pass."

The NHS tried to update their computer systems a while back, it cost them £12
billion and two contractors dropped out of the contract because they were
being too difficult to work with. It's still not, I believe, fully deployed.

The BBC tried updating their media management system.... DMI, I believe it was
called. And spent £98.5 million on it only to not get the product at the end
of the day....

All for things that a reasonable software company could probably have done by
iterating over features on a basic product fairly easily.

Then you have things like the Police computer system - which is laughable in
its antiquity and difficulty to use. I think there was an article on here
quite recently about the awful 911 system.

You know? Things need to change concerning regulation before I think we're
going to be able to adequately address those sorts of problems. Otherwise
you're going to get these monster projects that effectively have to be done
all in one go, which seems like a recipe for disaster.

~~~
patio11
_How?_

The not-so-subtle subtext was that "I, erm, actually sell software which does
pretty much exactly this." The how, in relevant fashion: create software which
does appointment reminding phone calls for, without loss of generality, HVAC
contractors. Read up on HIPAA requirements and talk to people who've done it
before. Do some very boring paperwork and not-all-that-impressive technical
work for ticking off the boxes. Start landing hospital clients, through a
combination of slackadaiscal meat-and-potatoes SEO and being a lot more hungry
for their business at the low end than the competition is.

I don't typically compete in or win two year bid cycles. I go after smaller
projects in the $X,000 to $X0,000 a year range. The sales process often
involves convincing a single nurse or office manager that I'm not some slick
sales guy from the big city who is going to sell her $10,000 of software where
she needs $2,000 and then never be there for her if it breaks.

Your mileage (kilometerage?) may vary in the United Kingdom.

~~~
thenomad
Mileage. We still use miles over here. :)

------
mechanical_fish
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-
rea...](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)

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
So... Angry Birds cures cancer?

~~~
mechanical_fish
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.

------
Spooky23
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.

------
jaggederest
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
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.

~~~
DougWebb
I've never understood the claim that "market makers" are providing a valuable
service in the stock market by providing liquidity and reducing spreads. If
this is a necessary service, why aren't there market makers in every market?

My local grocery wants to sell bananas for $1.50 a pound, but I only want to
pay $1.00. Why isn't there a market maker buying and selling these bananas
thousands of times per second to reduce the spread between me and my grocer so
we can meet in the middle?

oh right, it's because the market takes care of that for us. If others are
happy paying $1.50 the grocer will stay at that price and I'll have to accept
it or go without my bananas. If most buyers agree with me the grocer will have
to lower their price if they want to sell the bananas. No market maker is
needed.

~~~
maxerickson
Your grocer is a market maker!

To the point that the word market is often used for small stores.

If you had to buy bananas off a truck when it happened to be in town, you'd
get a lot less bananas and you'd pay more for them.

~~~
DougWebb
I don't think that's true. It's certainly more convenient for me to go the
grocer and know that, usually, they'll have bananas for sale. However, during
the summer in my town there is a farmers market every week, where I actually
_can_ go and buy produce off the back of a truck. The prices are often cheaper
and the products are often better. (Sometimes the prices are higher, but
that's because the products are better: organic, varieties that don't ship
well, etc.)

I can take this one step further, and actually go to many of the farms around
here to buy produce right off the plants, by picking it myself. Even less
convenient, but it makes for a nice weekend outing, and the prices are even
cheaper.

Note that in both cases the prices _drop_ for me and stay _the same_ for the
farmer by cutting out middle-men: the shippers, the grocer. By your terms,
those are the market makers, and while they make produce commerce more
convenient they're certainly not reducing costs for anyone. They're taking
profits out of the parties on the two ends of the transaction.

I'll grant you that, in my example, the middle-men provide an essential
service by giving me access to produce that is not produced locally, and by
making that access more convenient. Neither of those apply to the financial
markets though: as purely information-driven markets, they're accessible 24/7
from anyplace in the world. So again, what value are the market makers
actually providing to the buyers and sellers of financial products?

~~~
maxerickson
Fair enough, the words about cheaper are arguable. I wouldn't want to try to
buy bananas in a world where there was no one willing to take them off the
truck and hold them for a few days though.

As far as financial markets, reliable prices are worth something (even though
a reliable price is 'just information'). I agree that in heavily traded
instruments, providing liquidity becomes a fairly abstract value, but if you
are a large institution, having someone that will readily purchase enormous
amounts of shares is a valuable service. For a lightly traded instrument,
being able to sell it is also a valuable service.

I don't see enormous value in having lots of people spending lots of money
chasing pennies, but I have trouble getting worked up about it. I suppose what
it comes down to is that I am skeptical that rules designating who gets the
tiny bit of slop available in financial transactions will be any more fair
than the present system (where various HFTs are competing for the slop, often
by essentially offering some of it to the parties in the transaction...).

~~~
DougWebb
If you're a large institution, and you want to sell an enormous amount of
shares in some stock, the price of that stock _should_ plummet if there aren't
buyers available at the price you want to sell. Having a market maker buy
those shares is hiding the fact that a huge position in the stock was just
dumped and no one wanted to buy. Sucks for the company, but if you're not
attractive to buyers or to the seller, then your market valuation was already
wrong.

This would also curb the behavior of the large institution. They shouldn't be
able to dump all of their holdings of a stock like that at a high price if
there aren't _real_ buyers at that price. The institution should be forced to
chase the price down to pick up enough buyers for the whole position. If they
still can't move it all, then they're holding a worthless stock. Sucks for
them, but investing is a gamble and sometimes you lose your investment. You
should've invested in a more valuable company.

The theme I'm getting at is that I think that market makers definitely alter
the dynamics of the market, as they claim to, but contrary to their claims
they do it in a way that benefits themselves and other financial institutions
to the detriment of non-financial-industry investors and the companies and
other real-value instruments (bond originators, mortgage borrowers, etc) being
traded.

~~~
maxerickson
What is not real about the automated system? As far as I know, they pay real
dollars. Is it the fact that the bet on the shares is short term?

There are some issues with HFT that I don't like, where different players are
getting different access to information. Beyond that, I have trouble with the
argument that parties that aren't me should have to engage in transactions
that I like the shape of (or the other way around, should be prevented from
engaging in transactions that I don't like. I'm using transaction here in the
sense that both parties are acting freely...).

------
TimSAstro
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>

------
henryaj
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).

------
tcbawo
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
True, but just as often they're wretched parents and citizens who never
volunteer or donate.

------
apitaru
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.

------
nicholassmith
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
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.

~~~
xaa
I agree that there are boundless opportunities for skilled developers in
bioinformatics --- _IF_ they are willing to work for free or a substantial pay
cut.

The problem is that there is a big mismatch in expectations between developers
and researchers: researchers are not accustomed to paying for software. Most
developers in bioinformatics are other researchers, who are self-taught
programmers paid by their grant funding or university, not by software sales.
The quality of software is usually quite low, but it is at least free.

But I still think there is a large pool of developers out there who may work
for BigCo during the day, but want to tinker on something meaningful in the
evenings or weekends. Biologists and bioinformaticians need to get better at
advertising needs and harnessing the kind of community involvement that has
made Linux/Apache/etc so successful.

------
rmc
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
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
_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
> 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.

------
16s
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
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
> 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.

------
ttflee
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)

------
Legogris
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.

------
cheez
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=cuc...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=cucj4ipzV8k&t=88)

"(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
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
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
Wait, what's so bad about buses?

Also, "anyone" != "everyone".

------
louwrentius
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
Elon Musk too. Remember he started with PayPal, not SpaceX and Tesla.

------
VLM
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.

------
ivv
"The Valley’s brightest minds once invented things of immense significance
like the first PC"

Weren't the first PCs mostly toys for hobbyists?

------
rational_indian
False dichotomy much?

~~~
James_Duval
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.

~~~
theorique
_Either personal computing was a great idea or it 's a platform for the
trivial and banal, you can't have it both ways._

Well, you can. Cheap personal computers unleashed an amazing amount of
creativity in _all_ areas of human endeavor

 _and_

they also enabled that power and creativity to be used for trivial, disposable
things, as well as scams and harmful things.

Human life went online, with both the good and the bad.

~~~
James_Duval
I should have said:

>Either personal computing was a great idea or it's _solely_ a platform for
the trivial and banal, you can't have it both ways.

Even then I concede that this was a straw man for the Telegraph journalist's
position. How embarrassing.

------
teilo
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
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.

------
nsxwolf
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
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.

------
cell303
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
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.

------
nsxwolf
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.

------
bayesianhorse
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.

------
nkuttler
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
Well then you share the same feelings with the author of this article.

------
zindlerb
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?

------
Maro
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)

------
crb002
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.

------
lcedp
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.

------
ttflee
> 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.

------
lifeformed
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.

------
300bps
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
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
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
An old Macbook - someone stole all my other ones :(

------
znowi
I'm curious how many of HN readers have never played Angry Birds. Could it be
more than half? Or less than 1%?

~~~
MrBra
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.

------
lotsofcows
"Instead of"? One does not preclude the other.

We slowly advance in all areas, whether that be beating cancer or boredom.

------
ghostdiver
Cancer has been around for tens of thousands of years, yet human kind did just
fine.

------
amerika_blog
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.

------
michaelochurch
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.

------
Dewie
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?

------
workbench
Nice linkbait headline

------
_pmf_
Instead of intellectually stimulating discussions we got Reddit, Facebook and
HN.

