

Supporting Non-trivial Science & Technology Development - 8iterations
http://petridishtalk.com/2012/05/26/what-are-you-waiting-for-a-certain-shade-of-green-core-science-tech-development/

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pg
That graph does not imply anything about long term trends. It shows that there
was a bubble in the late 90s, during which valuations spiked, and that the
bubble caused a lot of lame people to start VC funds, which brought down
average returns.

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demian
I wonder if the investors that got in the wagon of social media would invest
in long-term cancer research instead.

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ne0codex
This is definitely an interesting point of view on the recent Wall Street
interest on social media. I am glad someone brought it up, I do see the use
and how social media and related innovations are convenient, but is a company
that adds a vintage filter to a photo really progress in the long term? This
is the question the author is suggesting. Personally I just roll my eyes over
the next cutesy named "start up" that uses Bootstrap for their website. It
seems like most of it is just an extension of social media or it's something
that just causes more fragmentation in coding. Personally, VC investment
should be focused on scientific and technological progress, personally I see
that investment in Facebook is just misallocation of resources when it could
be invested in scientific research into microprocessors or circuits or other
real innovations. We need to promote the ideals and innovations of the next
Steve Jobs, not the next Zuckerberg.

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mukaiji
I like social and other vanity-in-appearance like companies. I think we are
quick to discard them as trivial and non-beneficial, and quick to forget that
they further accelerate the dissemination of information whether that
information is useless (e.g. most memes) or fundamental to human development
(e.g. arab springs). What does bug me is that a lot of the "innovation" in
social is similar to the "innovation" in finance, where it's a bit of a
stretch of the mind to accept that the "innovation" is truly beneficial for
society at large, or that the utility derived from it matches the utility that
could be derived from employing the technical talent behind it to other ends.
We need a balanced world, but we also need to push the "human race forward."

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demian
The Huxley reference could also be used to describe the '80 and the '90.
“Amusing Ourselves to Death” describes most of the second half of the XX
century.

Information Technology is in a core scientific plateau, I also believe that's
true, _but that does not mean the current development is trivial_. There are a
new set of problems that need to be solved, problems in engineering, managment
and law. Very important problems. And there _is_ an inmense amount of value
being created, and people with money want a piece of that. People that,
otherwise, wouldn't invest in tech.

There is "hype", but then again, we _are_ in the middle of a process that is
change society into something that has never been in the history of mankind.

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kylemaxwell
This apparently seems to equate VC returns with scientific progress. I think I
need to see more support for that link, and I'd like to have seen discussion
of (possible?) alternatives for supporting development, whether they exist now
or have been proposed.

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zerostar07
There is no such statement per se, the author claims that VCs provide "support
for fundamental technological developments". It's fair to say that this helps
scientific research, e.g. cheaper DNA sequencing devices make genetic studies
easier.

