
Solving All the Wrong Problems - joeyespo
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/opinion/sunday/solving-all-the-wrong-problems.html
======
vonnik
I was disappointed in this article when it was first published in July.
Whenever a newspaper columnist makes a plea to reset humanity's "moral
compass", you know that the article is basically worthless, an exercise in
futility. Usually, these posts are inspired by a sort of lazy annoyance that
results when they receive one too many press releases about startups they
don't want to cover.

But more importantly, writing like this makes a fundamental mistake about how
humanity moves forward. We don't do it efficiently, moving in a straight line.
We do it while wasting tons of effort. A bit like the media. We could turn
Allison's own criticism against her with an article about media coverage
entitled: Writing All the Wrong Articles.

If you look at any website, there is remarkably little news, and a whole lot
of speculation, various ill-informed opinion pieces and other forms of
clickbait. Waste is just part of human activity. You need to make mistakes
before you get them right.

Also, many startups create solutions that are appropriate for niches that any
given newspaper columnist may not occupy. They look useless from the outside,
but may serve their target well.

Finally, the author doesn't even address the fact that industries core to
human wellbeing, such as healthcare, are among the most heavily regulated.
Founding a healthcare startup is a good way to waste 10 years of your life
navigating obscure laws that impose a heavy compliance burden. And that is not
startups' fault, it's the fault of lawmakers and industry lobbyists.

~~~
matt4077
THere's the difference between aiming high and failing vs. aiming low and
glorifying it (and often still failing). Her argument is that there are a lot
of low-hanging fruit that have the potential to actually help people but that
the startup community is too homogenous to know or care about such project
domains. Some of the domains may be hard to tackle but even within the
software domain there are certainly classes od problems that are underserved
vs. the gaming/photos/music/sharing market. Indeed one of my favorite example
is visible right here: not a week passes without someone writing a new client
for Hacker News on (the cli|oculus|as a kernel module). These ate usually side
project to learn a new technology and it's completely legitimate to chose a
domain you're familiar with, but with a bit more effort I belive it'd be
possible to redirect that creative engery to projects that are both more
enjoyable and actually useful.

------
im_down_w_otp
_> "As one colleague in tech explained it to me recently, for most people
working on such projects, the goal is basically to provide for themselves
everything that their mothers no longer do."_

Ha! I've used the exact same characterization.

Anyway, this seems entirely predictable given a couple different
considerations.

1) People are most apt to effectively solve problems for which they have some
context.

2) People who are underserved or otherwise have "real problems" don't often
have much overlap with people who have discretionary money to pay for
solutions.

So you end up with a selection bias in the pool of problem solvers (and thus
the scope of addressable problems) and a selection bias in the expectation for
investment returns. Which results in the best minds of our generation
crunching all manner of machine learning models to make it so we don't have to
do something mundane like selecting an outfit to wear that's color and style
coordinated.

~~~
Swizec
Is this a problem or a good thing?

Washing machines, kitchen appliances and similar technological advances, freed
up our at home time so much that we can put a whole nother 50% of the
population through college. A whole 50% of the population that can get jobs,
have careers, and do cool shit, who was stuck wiping men's proverbial bottoms
until the 1950's.

Making free time free is a good thing. There's no telling what will come of
it.

Think of it this way: how much time saved on menial stuff will be freed up to
go solve the so called more pressing problems? If anything, the problem is
that we're thinking up wasteful ways of filling this time even faster than
we're freeing the time itself up.

~~~
im_down_w_otp
The calculus of the opportunity cost presented here isn't the tiny incremental
improvement attached to my already amply comfortable lifestyle, but rather the
aggregate full-time loss of many dozens or hundreds of engineers, data
scientists, and investment $$$ diverted to trivial pursuits. Or put more
simply. The lost problem-solving potential for 8-10 hours a day of a single
PhD in Applied Mathematics massively dwarfs the 10 minutes that person saved
having their car parked for them.

~~~
Swizec
But what about the time cost/opportunity of a single full-time phd versus 10
minutes a day for the 253 million cars on US roads today? Globally?

Assuming parking only once a week for each vehicle, that's over 60,000 hours
of saved time per day. That engineer's time investment is virtually free in
comparison.

Of course these savings will only materialize after parking technology becomes
commoditized. Commoditization is part of tech progress.

~~~
nickpsecurity
"Assuming parking only once a week for each vehicle, that's over 60,000 hours
of saved time per day"

That complicated stuff with associated costs might benefit middle class and
up. The few who buy it among them. Many will also want the pride of parking
themselves, distrust the technology, and so on. You're not saving 60,000 hours
a day so much as a tiny faction of it. _If_ you succeed where others failed
for a few decades worth of PhD hours on computer vision, pathfinding,
robotics, etc.

Simplifications in this thread are way off. The real world involves interplay
of the technical capabilities, whatever regulations will be, finances, and
social factors.

------
dasil003
None of this is going to change unless capital miraculously grows a
conscience. As an entrepreneur seeking funding you can't afford to solve
problems for the poor because there's no way to raise money for that, and
there's certainly not a lot of disposable income available to bootstrap from.

The problem with this type of article is that it conflates all the struggling
little startups with the unicorns who are actually making a lot of money.
These big companies probably _should_ grow a conscience, but it's not really
in their DNA, because if they had been socially conscious from the beginning
they never would have succeeded. Meanwhile, all these little companies are in
a life or death struggle on a daily basis, so they have to do the thing which
gives them a chance to survive til tomorrow. Don't get me wrong, I recognize
the privilege of people who get to join a high-risk startup, but just because
they are individually privileged with that freedom does not mean that they
have the power to actually push our culture to a more socialist mentality. I
don't use the word "socialist" as an epithet here BTW, despite American
political dog whistles, I think the growing income gap is evidence that we
have a real lack of social conscience throughout society.

~~~
jdoliner
There are plenty of companies who raise money to solve problems for the poor.
Although if you want to be cynical you could dismiss it as them just trying to
make money off the poor, they are businesses after all. Lendup is a good
example of this, their goal is to provide loans to poor people that are better
than pay day loans. Pretty impactful stuff if you ask me, but it doesn't seem
to count in this article or in your comment. The article would much rather
focus on an incredibly narrow band of startups that are easy to poke fun at
and prove the point.

~~~
nickpsecurity
I counterpointed this comment, too, but you might be going too far here:

"The article would much rather focus on an incredibly narrow band of startups
that are easy to poke fun at and prove the point."

The article does narrow it a bit but it's overall claim appears to be true.
Most startups seem to target either frivilous stuff, stuff useful for
businesses, or stuff appealing to middle class and up. That's almost
everything I see here and with other sites. That poor are a smaller,
troublesome market might be decent reason for many to focus on another
segment. It seems that they do from what sample of startups I've seen.

I don't have hard data on the subject, though. I'm not sure how I'd even
measure it outside maybe a survey of various startups' demographics of
customers tracking what percent sell significantly to the poor. Success might
be that hitting a certain percentage or going up over time.

~~~
jdoliner
> Most startups seem to target either frivolous stuff, stuff useful for
> businesses or stuff appealing to the middle class and up.

This is drifting pretty far from the article in my opinion which focussed
almost entirely on frivolous stuff. The article only obliquely lamented that
lower classes don't have enough focus put on them. It mostly seemed to be
claiming that it's all frivolous stuff, these last 2 categories are the things
I think the article narrowed it's sites to avoid.

------
jdoliner
I find articles like this pretty frustrating. There's tons of companies in
Silicon Valley that are trying to do audacious things that people's mothers
never did for them. They don't get much press coverage and that's fine, media
outlets are businesses too so they need to write about companies that their
readership wants to read about. But the fact that they then turn around and
complain about the fact that all the companies on their radar are the same is
outrageous. They're all the same because there's this huge selection bias
applied by the fact that they only cover companies they think their average
reader can understand. Which isn't a very wide variety.

~~~
gk1
I fail to see a single original thought in this article. This same article
could have been written 10, 20, 100 years ago, about the stupid ideas from
those times. There is no shortage of stupid ideas and there never has been.
(If you think those periods didn't have as many stupid ideas, it's only
because of survivor bias.)

~~~
Chinjut
Perhaps 10, 20, and 100 years ago, it was also a tragedy that so much effort
was directed toward the minor desires of the reasonably well-off and so
comparatively little into addressing the needs of those with little disposable
income.

------
saturdaysaint
She's free to get away with a smear like this because it's impossible to
quantify or predict the amazing things that can arise from instant access to
information or from every human saving hundreds of hours a year and getting
better products and services shopping online. Even when things inarguably
improve - like when society suddenly decides to embrace and defend the rights
of new categories of minorities - it's impossible to establish a definitive
cause.

I'm sure some variant of this story could have been written at any time during
the rise of global capitalism, yet the world has, by just about any measure,
become a radically better place during just about any 25 year time frime. Show
me a chart on [https://ourworldindata.org/](https://ourworldindata.org/) where
anything has gotten worse - from America to places once considered
irredeemably "third world", just about anything we can measure is improving.
We don't need concern trolls on high horses to make the world a better place.

~~~
pron
What does this have to do with the article? Her criticism is very specific and
is about something very recent.

------
enjo
_sighs_ Another one of these articles.

The whole article is a fantastic example of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. It
finds a bunch of ideas that fit the authors thesis and ignores the thousands
of companies working on hard problems that impact nearly everybody.

Even the examples in the article are sharpshooters. They drew a circle around
a set of people and held them out as support for the idea that tech startups
are solely focused one demographic. It's bad logic, but it's also wrong.

Single mothers? There's a whole litany of apps targeted at them. Like
SupportPay ([https://supportpay.com](https://supportpay.com)) for child
support collections. Or CareLulu ([http://carelulu.com](http://carelulu.com))
for finding child care options. The rest of the list (rural poor, out of work
Americans over 50, and veterans) can all very much benefit from the huge
number of startups trying to make educational accessible over the Internet.

Energy startups are out there trying to help folks shave dollars off their
energy bills (shamless plug: I work for Gridium at
[https://gridium.com](https://gridium.com) \- check us out!). Healthcare
startups are out there trying to solve hard problems with medical record
keeping and information access.

Hell those inwardly focused tech companies like Stripe and Gusto have made
starting a small business the easiest it's ever been. Want to solve problems
for veterans and the out of work over 50 crowd? Remove the friction around
starting a small business and let them put a lifetime of experience and
knowledge to work.

So ya some people are out there trying to solve the small problems. That's
great, because sometimes solving a small problem leads to a big one. Amazon
went from selling books to completely redefining how commerce happens for a
large number of people. Solving those small problems also creates a class of
person with experience in company building. Maybe they'll put that towards
solving those generational problems in a couple of years.

~~~
cycomachead
I think there are plenty of startups working on valuable things, but since you
mentioned education...

Typically, the largest group of students in open online courses like MOOCs are
those from privileged backgrounds, like white males, and those who already
have high or relatively high levels of education. Certainly, I still believe
that these online courses are an amazing resource but they haven't been shown
to increase access in ways that people hoped. There are dozens of reasons for
this.

I think the real problem is that some startups are unable to recognize exactly
what problems they are solving and for whom they are solving them. Extra
disposable income from driveways is good, as are promoting healthy drinking
habits. However, there's a very real chance that these potentially useful
tools never reach the audiences where they would be most impactful.

For example, it seems like the people who could most benefit from extra income
from rentable driveways are most likely to live in areas that are less
desirable (high crime rates), are not even likely to have a driveway
(apartments). Now, I have no idea what app this even is referring to, to be
clear. This is just a potential situation.

------
outsideline
It's cyclical. Warren buffet classically highlighted the nature of the cycle
some time ago : \- The innovator, the imitator, and the idiot..

"At one point, his interviewer asked the question that is on all our minds:
“Should wise people have known better?” Of course, they should have, Buffett
replied, but there’s a “natural progression” to how good new ideas go wrong.
He called this progression the “three I’s.” First come the innovators, who see
opportunities that others don’t. Then come the imitators, who copy what the
innovators have done. And then come the idiots, whose avarice undoes the very
innovations they are trying to use to get rich."

Source : [https://hbr.org/2008/10/wisdom-of-warren-buffet-on-
imi](https://hbr.org/2008/10/wisdom-of-warren-buffet-on-imi)

Cloud computing, big data, social media, and most of tech is in a prolonged
idiot phase. A new paradigm will be ushered in and the cycle will begin again.
Any more detail just highlights or attempts to justify the idiocy.

------
forrestbrazeal
"I’m concerned that such a focus on comfort and instant gratification will
reduce us all to those characters in “Wall-E,” bound to their recliners, Big
Gulps in hand, interacting with the world exclusively through their remotes."

I found this quote puzzling in light of the rest of the article. The author's
main argument seems to be that tech "innovators" are focused on providing
frivolous solutions to imaginary problems, while society crumbles in the
background. But this quote -unless I'm misunderstanding it - ascribes a hugely
far-reaching, dystopian power to technology that undercuts her overall point.

You can't have it both ways. Either tech products are mostly irrelevant, or
they are fundamentally changing the most basic aspects of our existence. Which
is it?

~~~
throwanem
You certainly can have it both ways. Tech products _are_ mostly irrelevant;
those which are _not_ irrelevant are fundamentally changing the most basic
aspects of our existence.

Hundreds of millions of people, at least, now experience a social world whose
existence and interactions are mediated by a single, rather secretive,
advertising company. I'd call that both a relevant and a fundamental change.

------
scandox
I think if you take into account the target audience for this article, then
she has a fair point to make which is simply the mismatch between the
hubristic talk and the reality. That's something non-tech people probably
should have brought to their attention. At the same time it's obviously
frustrating that she uses such a basic hook at the beginning to get her point
across.

Perhaps I'm living under a rock but it seems to me that the great majority of
tech companies and their employees (including me) are working on things that
aren't very important in the scheme of things. Which is fine.

What isn't fine are the delusions of grandeur. Especially when people are
actually buying into it. I hadn't realized how crazy stuff had got until I
read this, from one of our own homegrown entrepreneurs:

[https://blog.websummit.net/maths-and-conferences-lanyards-
an...](https://blog.websummit.net/maths-and-conferences-lanyards-and-
legibility/)

Maybe I should have been watching Silicon Valley on TV.

------
dkural
A large portion of the world has no access to basics - food, clean water,
basic healthcare (i.e. essential medication, antibiotics, etc.), electricity,
being able to read&write. The resources and technology we have are unevenly
distributed. There are ways to distribute them more evenly: Volunteer for
Doctors Without Borders, go teach abroad, document the plight of refugees by
visiting refuge camps, learn the language of a poorer country, be politically
active in your own community to ask for more equitable distribution and making
sure things like Pepfar continue.

------
BadassFractal
We have a broad spectrum of people working on all sorts of different problems,
what's the issue here? There are companies out there making luxury watches and
there are companies out there making life-saving medications. Should the
former experience constant shame for the professional direction they chose?

------
objectivistbrit
"Every day, innovative companies promise to make the world a better place. Are
they succeeding?"

Companies promise to make money by offering valuable goods and services to
customers. "Making the world a better place" is just Silicon Valley hype.
Companies aren't non-profits.

------
SonicSoul
_> Here is just a sampling of the products, apps and services that have come
across my radar_

I don't know about your radar but my world is a pretty great place.

I can summon an Uber for myself or anyone else, get packages the next day at a
fixed cost, live in a cash-less, paper-less world if I choose to, download a
book 1 minute after learning about it while on the subway and have someone
read it to me in a soothing tone, listen to my favorite writers and journalist
on demand as they give away their wisdom for free all queued up on my infinite
storage phone.

why pick and choose small niche startups for this article? what about self
driving cars, 3d printing, VR, crypto currency or machine learning?

------
aetherson
It's pretty un-self-aware for someone to simultaneously bitch that:

1\. Some populations are underserved because they aren't sexy and high profile
and interesting.

2\. Some apps are solving small problems instead of tackling global warming.

The truth is that many (perhaps all) of those apps will fail, and if any
succeed, most of the successes will be kind of marginal successes that don't
upend the world. So what? That's how it works most of the time -- small
incremental improvements to people's lives.

~~~
calbear81
It's okay that the marginal successes don't upend the world, the writer simply
is asking if those of us in the valley are "disrupting" the right problems for
the right populations. A marginal amount of time-savings for a high-income
earner in having their car parking woes solved might be economically more
viable than working on a problem that is less sexy but potentially has
significantly less impact on actual improvement to people's lives.

~~~
aetherson
The "right" problems for the "right" populations is a silly formulation.

First of all, the implicit idea that the founders of these companies are all
like, "Oh, hey, I have ten really highly functional business plans for
bringing an app to profitability, and I'll reject the ones serving population
X because I think it's 5% less profitable than the ones serving population Y"
is dumb.

Second, the idea that that writer can identify the "right" populations and
problems is risible.

And, to be clear, she absolutely is complaining that people are attacking
small problems instead of global warming. She explicitly calls out rising sea
levels.

And while a few of the services he identifies are targeted to a rich userbase
(such as: locating rentable yachts, and probably the drone filming service,
and the valet parking one), plenty of others aren't. The one about renting
driveways is probably mostly enabling people who are relatively low-income for
the area they live in to monetize an unused asset. Getting a new toothbrush
addresses a need everyone has. Getting killed by the police is a problem faced
disproportionately by lower-income people and minorities.

There are lots of false steps towards progress, and like I said, probably most
or all of those will fail. But we've seen time and time again that top down
direction to only focus on what some member of the cultural elite deems
important is a recipe for disaster.

~~~
Apocryphon
_First of all, the implicit idea that the founders of these companies are all
like, "Oh, hey, I have ten really highly functional business plans for
bringing an app to profitability, and I'll reject the ones serving population
X because I think it's 5% less profitable than the ones serving population Y"
is dumb._

Isn't that precisely what VCs do when assessing the viability of a startup?

 _But we 've seen time and time again that top down direction to only focus on
what some member of the cultural elite deems important is a recipe for
disaster._

NYT writers may be part of the cultural elite, but software engineers in San
Francisco, by dint of their economic power and education levels, are arguably
part of it as well. The VCs and startup financial and management classes are
definitely so.

~~~
aetherson
No, what VCs do is try to figure out "Does this thing have any chance of
making a big business." And they're mostly wrong.

And not every tech idea is or should be VC-backed.

Software engineers are clearly in the cultural elite. And if any software
engineer was in the business of telling people "I know what the right
population and right problems are," they'd be idiots, too.

Note that that's distinct from, "I have AN idea that I think I can turn into a
successful business, by targeting problem X of population Y" which says
nothing about the universe of ideas.

------
panglott
Maybe we can try to solve small problems as well as big ones?

It would be as easy to deride the early plans of Google, Facebook, and
Wikipedia as what the author does here (finding better kitten pictures,
sharing kitten pictures with your sorority, peddling misinformation to your
middle school teacher).

------
anotheryou
It's very difficult, sometimes even dangerous to try to solve problems that
are not yours. I think it would be important to do it _with_ the effected
people, but certainly not just for them.

------
ixtli
I believe the salient point that "the goal is basically to provide for
themselves everything that their mothers no longer do" is a direct effect of
lack of diversity in our field. Homogenous, largely white, largely male,
largely safe people are not going to detect the problems the author appears to
be implying are going untreated.

~~~
mzw_mzw
Please don't use racist language on HN.

~~~
ixtli
Sorry, I'm unclear how what I said was racist :/

Edit: To be clear I used those examples because they are the majority in
America (which I should have been more clear about) in an effort to point out
that the majority often does not pay as close attention to the problems that
arise from being in a minority.

~~~
ebcode
>Homogenous, largely white, largely male, largely safe people are not going to
detect the problems the author appears to be implying are going untreated.

What you said was both racist and sexist. You're saying that a group of people
(based on race and sex) are "not going to ..." do something. Speaking in
generalizations using these classifications is generally regarded by most
folks as racist/sexist.

It can be tricky though. You might be _right_ , but you'll still be called out
for it. For example, the peoples of eastern asia are statistically less tall
than their counterparts in western europe. Nevertheless, "asians are shorter
than europeans", is still a racist statement.

Unless you can see, as well as explain, how the generalizations you're making
benefit the conversation, it's probably best to avoid making those types of
statements in the first place.

Racism itself might be "wrong", but that doesn't mean you can't be racist and
still be "right" in your assertions. That's the tricky part.

~~~
perrygeo
No. There is nothing "racist" in that comment. That comment exhibits
"prejudice". Prejudice _may_ co-exist with discriminatory actions ("bigotry")
or become institutionalized ("racism") but making comments about an ethnic
group is not by itself racist.

"Racism" (note the -ism to denote a system) requires a social, political
and/or economic system by which a dominant group retains power over other
groups. By that widely-held definition, it's literally impossible for a non-
member of the dominant group to exhibit racism.

~~~
ixtli
Thanks. This is what I was going to try to explain but was too tired to
bother. Also, as a member of the white male american engineer group, I will
100% cop to this sort of prejudice when dealing with generalizations as in the
parent article.

~~~
mzw_mzw
Sorry, but you can't plead guilty on behalf of other people you don't even
know. If you state that you are prejudiced, that's not evidence that other
people with a similar skin color are prejudiced; it's only evidence that you,
personally, are prejudiced.

~~~
ixtli
I don't think you're responding to what I actually said. Perhaps it was poorly
worded but what I intended to say was twofold: I am a member of the group (the
privileged class in america) and that I exhibited prejudice. I made no further
claims.

------
davidivadavid
This old saw gets trotted out every other day without fail.

Look, it's simple.

The "right" problems tend to be hard problems, otherwise they wouldn't be
problems anymore.

Hard problems are hard to solve not because they require a lot of focus,
otherwise spending more money on solving cancer would have solved the problem
a long time ago.

Hard problems are hard to solve because the solutions are not obvious, and
they require serendipity. Quote from Matt Ridley:

"Gutenberg made printed books cheap, which triggered a rise in literacy, which
created a market for spectacles, which led to the invention of microscopes and
telescopes, which led to the discovery that the earth went round the sun."

If the path to the solution to those problems was obvious, yeah, it would make
sense to criticize "superfluous" stuff.

Until then, find more interesting subjects for your op-eds.

------
sergioisidoro
Developed world is dying of obesity, diabetes, suicide and depression. Are
those problems less severe than under developed countries, without access to
vaccination, medical care and nutrition?

All problems are relative to your frame of reference. For someone who always
lived with access to basic needs, some problems might be crippling enough to
cause significant impact.

Yeah you can have food, medical care, and a house, but if you take 2h
commuting each way to work you'll probably feel miserable. If you have a
crippled or distant social network, despite having all physical basic needs,
Social Networking tools might be lifesaving for you (eg. depression,
isolation).

And I've heard this quite some times: "Todays developed world problems, are
going to be tomorrows developing world problems."

------
mattnewton
It's true that there are large underserved populations of lower economic
status. But this isn't because they are "uninteresting" in my view; helping
single mothers is much more interesting than coming up with a CRM for all but
the most heartless. The rub in my view is people without means don't have the
means to fund your startup over food and shelter, and those two segments have
some pretty fierce competition.

Perhaps universal basic income or other stimulus programs that will put
dollars in the hands of those people, and then companies can compete for those
dollars.

~~~
colmvp
To add to your point, some projects are simply not going to be profitable, but
will certainly have a benefit to society nonetheless. A lot of civic tech
projects help increase awareness to certain issues or aim to empower
disenfranchised groups, but don't have have a profitable revenue model.

I'm lucky enough to be well-off in many regards that I can freely spend 20-30
hours a week to design/code projects that will hopefully have a meaningful
impact to people in my city, specifically increasing awareness of mental
health and injustice towards people of color. But I'm not being paid for it,
nor is anyone here capable of giving me a salary/donation that comes even
close to what I'd earn at a tech startup. The government is also pretty
limited to how much they'd provide as a grant.

I'm reminded of an organization here that created a platform to enable non-
profits find and manage volunteers, which has clear efficiency benefits for
organizations since the process can be very messy. But because organizations
can't really pay them that much, they are limited as to how quickly they can
expand the team and add new features. Given the limits of their market, no
'investor' is going to invest in them in the hopes of expecting a meaningful
financial return.

I'm not sure where I'm going with my train of thought. Maybe something like
it'd be nice if there were a non-VC model that enabled groups to work on
projects that had no clear profit model? I know the U.S. has organizations
that give grants to transformative projects, like the Sunlight and Knight
Foundation. Sadly, not every country is lucky enough to have something like
that.

------
giglamesh
I fail to see how "And a new proposal to create an app designed to stop police
killings." fits on the list of problems that don't need to be solved. Am I
missing something?

~~~
otoburb
My interpretation from the article is that app was included to emphasize just
how many frivolous apps crossed her radar except for that particular one that
was truly solving a meaningful problem.

~~~
throwanem
Although I would argue that it's worth asking whether or not that's a problem
best addressed by means of an app. I'm not going to presume that that's why
the author included it in the list, but it does seem a worthy question
nonetheless.

------
microcolonel
I don't see what's wrong with building businesses which serve niche desires.
Does she not understand that surely there's somebody somewhere who desperately
needs their car parked, that without the internet people already had beer
delivered to their door?

She just seems to have such a curmudgeonly attitude, where all people must be
working to solve her favourite enormous issues and never to slightly enhance
the lives of some customers.

------
tmptmp
This article is full of personal bias and seems to have been written by a
person who doesn't understand how technology progresses.

I know there is some truth to the criticism of current tech-startup scene in
SV. Most startups are without much potential or without much creative juice
(e.g. "we will fill your car's tank for you" type). But there are some which
have very large disruptive and creative potential. Elon Musk comes to my mind,
to begin with. Boston Dynamics is another.

This article also reminds me a personality trait that makes some people always
complain with "whatever happened to good old days". Seems that people like
this article author, want us to prepare our meals the way you see a person is
seen doing in this video [1].

(Disclaimer: I have no disrespect to the person in that video [1], I just want
to point out that I don't want to live like that and I wish to point out a
fallacy in the article.)

Such people always seem to complain: Whatever happened to the good old days
and good old ways of doing things? All the while, seemingly unaware of the
fact that they themselves have become so much used to the technology.

Of course, it is apparent that she doesn't realize that without the very
technology and the very technology creators she is so happy to criticize, she
would not have been able to put her photo along with the article she has
written/typed.

Since when and why has the ability to publish our photos along with articles
become so critical for us? and for such writers? So much for the person
criticizing the technology creators from self-assumed higher moral ground.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvQttEjfYtM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvQttEjfYtM)

------
SwellJoe
The interesting thing about technology is that it has proven to be _so
powerful_ that when people do mundane things with it, it is viewed as a
failure (maybe rightly so, to some degree).

But, and this is a big but, the vast majority of people go to work every day
and do _very little of importance_. 99% of people are not changing the world,
for the better or otherwise. All the people making coffee, serving food,
pushing paper at the DMV, driving trucks, driving cabs, trimming trees and
mowing lawns, writing articles for the NYTimes, etc. they aren't changing the
world and they aren't making a significant difference in the lives of the
least privileged (except maybe themselves and their own families, if they're
in that category).

No one writes articles lamenting the fact that a barista isn't changing the
world. So, why do techies get blamed for lack of world-changing work?

I'm not saying I disagree, per se. I just wonder what makes us (in the broad
use of "us" here, to mean anyone who builds technology for a living) that we
get tasked with fixing the world? Maybe it's the way tech entrepreneurs often
hype the products of their labor as being world-changing...even while probably
knowing it's merely a historical footnote, if even that, in the grand scheme
of things.

I _want_ to make a positive impact on the world with my work, sure, but I also
find I have to make economic decisions not unlike people who go to a regular
job every day. I have to work on problems that I don't consider important,
sometimes, just because I know it will keep my rent paid and food on my table
this month. I'm not gonna feel guilty for that, but I also would love to know
what the author proposes be done to make it so I don't have to worry about
stuff like that and can go back to important but not profitable problems.

~~~
Apocryphon
_So, why do techies get blamed for lack of world-changing work?_

Because there's a visceral, emotional response people get when they see the
amount that we're being paid to work and the capital that's being poured into
what looks like frivolous trivialities. Artless commerce. If we weren't here
the focus would remain on Wall Street, except CDOs and complex financial
instruments are trickier to reduce to absurdity in the NYT op-eds.

~~~
BWStearns
Or because "we" keep insisting that our work "makes the world a better place"
and "changes the world". I'm sure there's at least one barista in soho who
claims that (and frankly I've had more than one barista or bartender greatly
improve my little corner of the world) but it's not constantly used to justify
mind boggling financial returns or to write off the negative externalities of
their work.

None of this is to say that tech can't change the world for the better but
that the tech community gets a lot of monetary and prestige benefits that
derive from these arguments so we shouldn't be surprised when people want to
see results.

Edited to add: Wall Street never tried to get the mileage we get out of "no
really, we might get rich but the whole world is a better place for it".

------
inputcoffee
Point taken.

The most important thing in the world is love.

The most cherished thing in the world is a memory of a loved one.

Idea! I must make an app that helps me take pictures of loved ones, and share
them with other loved ones.

~~~
wolfgke
> The most important thing in the world is love.

If you hint at dating startups, here two texts why this is difficult:

>
> [http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html](http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html)

> [http://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-
> dating/](http://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/)

~~~
jaredsohn
FWIW, based on the following sentences it doesn't look like the GP is hinting
at that.

~~~
inputcoffee
I was basically joking.

The joke is (I hate explaining these): the most overdone app, exemplifying the
NYtimes article, that I can think of is a photosharing app.

And then I worked back into how a photosharing app is what the article is
encouraging us to create.

Although a dating app joke would have worked just as well, and I suspect
wolfgke was implying that.

------
booleandilemma
The author's examples focus on companies that provide services to individuals,
which is a subset of all the companies out there.

I'm sure there are many innovative companies silently changing the world in
their own small way, we just don't see them because they're not marketing
themselves towards individual consumers through tv commercials, online ads,
etc.

------
kozikow
Every SV company have the grandiose "mission" or claims like "we are making
world a better place" mentioned in the article. Those claims usually get
ignored if they become a minor hindrance for projected profits.

If you think about it, this moral duplicity is behind majority of SV mockery,
like the TV show or this article.

------
alanwatts
"We are still looking at the computer as if it were a means of doing what we
were already doing."

-Marshall McLuhan

------
AznHisoka
"A service that sends someone to fill your car with gas."

Yes please. So I can have more time to solve bigger, and more challenging
problems...

I don't understand how we can even tackle these harder problems if we're
spending so much time on mundane chores.. it all adds up.

------
wolfgke
> " Products and services are designed to “disrupt” market sectors (a.k.a.
> bringing to market things no one really needs) more than to solve actual
> problems, especially those problems experienced by what the writer C. Z.
> Nnaemeka has described as “the unexotic underclass” — single mothers, the
> white rural poor, veterans, out-of-work Americans over 50 — who, she
> explains, have the “misfortune of being insufficiently interesting.”"

The problem is: According to Malcolm Gladwell - The Tipping Point
([https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Tipping_Point...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Tipping_Point&oldid=737360462))
there are three kind of people that one have to reach to become viral (cf.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Tipping_Point...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Tipping_Point&oldid=737360462#The_Law_of_the_Few)):

" _Connectors_ are the people in a community who know large numbers of people
and who are in the habit of making introductions. A connector is essentially
the social equivalent of a computer network hub. They usually know people
across an array of social, cultural, professional, and economic circles, and
make a habit of introducing people who work or live in different circles.
[...]"

" _Mavens_ are "information specialists", or "people we rely upon to connect
us with new information".[4] They accumulate knowledge, especially about the
marketplace, and know how to share it with others."

" _Salesmen_ are "persuaders", charismatic people with powerful negotiation
skills. They tend to have an indefinable trait that goes beyond what they say,
which makes others want to agree with them."

Unluckily the groups in the quote above do not fall into these three classes.
The problem really is if you start a startup you make a bet that in a rather
short time (until money runs out) you will reach a critical mass of people for
the startup to become self-sustained (or at least get enough customers such
that you can get further funding). Obtaining such a critical mass in a short
time is much easier if you concentrate on Malcolm Gladwell's three classes of
people than on "single mothers, the white rural poor, veterans, out-of-work
Americans over 50". Also the opposite holds: If these groups want to stop the
"misfortune of being insufficiently interesting" they really should think how
they can become a member of the three groups.

~~~
bbctol
Why do you say that single mothers, the white rural poor, and veterans are not
definitely connectors, usually mavens, and plausibly salesmen? Out-of-work
Americans over 50 are the only group I can see as out of these classes.

------
spectrum1234
These "problems" are being solved because tech is super cheap now. The author
doesn't realize that true hard problems don't become much easier when tech
gets cheaper.

------
muzster
In case there is just one person in this world who desperately needs any one
of the said apps.. you can thank me later.

A service that sends someone to fill your car with gas.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-02/gas-
delive...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-02/gas-delivery-
startups-want-to-fill-up-your-car-anywhere-is-that-allowed)

A service that sends a valet on a scooter to you, wherever you are, to park
your car.

[http://luxe.com/](http://luxe.com/)

A service that will film anything you desire with a drone.

[http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/09/03/droners-is-a-
market...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/09/03/droners-is-a-marketplace-
where-you-can-hire-a-drone-and-operator-for-anything-you-want/#gref)

A service that will pack your suitcase — virtually.

[http://www.dufl.com/](http://www.dufl.com/)

A service that delivers a new toothbrush head to your mailbox every three
months.

[http://www.getquip.com/](http://www.getquip.com/)

A service that delivers your beer right to your door.

[https://sauceyapp.com/](https://sauceyapp.com/)

An app that analyzes the quality of your French kissing.

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ifrenchkiss-french-
kissing/i...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ifrenchkiss-french-
kissing/id321931020?mt=8)

A “smart” button and zipper that alerts you if your fly is down.

[https://www.fastcodesign.com/3060268/brilliant-this-
zipper-w...](https://www.fastcodesign.com/3060268/brilliant-this-zipper-warns-
you-when-your-fly-is-down)

An app with speaker that plays music from within a mother’s vaginal walls to
her unborn baby.

[https://www.babypod.net/en/babypod/](https://www.babypod.net/en/babypod/)

A sensor placed in your child’s diaper that sends you an alert when the diaper
needs changing.

[https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/advisor/smart-diaper-
ale...](https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/advisor/smart-diaper-alerts-
parents-baby-pees-145807261.html)

An app that lets us brew our coffee from anywhere.

[http://smarter.am/coffee/](http://smarter.am/coffee/)

A refrigerator advertised as “the Family Hub” that promises to act as a
personal assistant, message board, stereo and photo album.

[http://www.samsung.com/us/explore/family-hub-
refrigerator/](http://www.samsung.com/us/explore/family-hub-refrigerator/)

An app to locate rentable driveways for parking.

[https://www.justpark.com/rent-out-a-parking-
space/](https://www.justpark.com/rent-out-a-parking-space/)

An app to locate rentable yachts.

[https://getmyboat.com/](https://getmyboat.com/)

WTF? An app to help you understand “cause and effect in your life.”

An app that guides mindful meditation.

An app that imparts wisdom.

And a new proposal to create an app designed to stop police killings.

~~~
crawfordcomeaux
The app to help you understand "cause and effect in your life."

[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/zenta-stress-emotion-
mana...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/zenta-stress-emotion-management-
on-your-wrist#/)

It seems geared toward helping users become more aware of the impact their
habits have on their well-being & emotions. The description in the article
makes it easy to dismiss, but speaking from the standpoint of someone who's
been emotionally disconnected for 20 years through information addiction
(yep...it's a thing, complete with withdrawal symptoms) until earlier this
year, there's a huge market.

I'm only just starting to learn how to recognize my emotions in the moment.
Anxiety was so pervasive, it was my norm. Now, my struggle is to identify when
I'm getting anxious because it's a vital signal from my body telling me
there's a need of mine that I'm overlooking (another thing I'm just starting
to learn).

It's why I'm considering getting a Microsoft Band 2 to help monitor my heart
rate & sleeping habits.

------
tomc1985
But of course, all anyone here is going to do is talk about it, before
resuming work on useless "innovation" X

------
caseymarquis
Well, that solved nothing.

