
Stop building dumb stuff - kintan
http://www.obviouslywrong.org/2012/10/21/stop-building-dumb-stuff/
======
seagreen
If you want to help the developing world it's worth the time to take a look at
what has actually worked to get countries out of poverty and what hasn't. As
far as I can tell there are only two proven ways for countries to get out of
poverty:

(1) Kill a bunch of other people and take their stuff.

(2) Industry.

Notice that aid isn't on the list. So it seems that if you actually care about
a country you should spend your time helping them get better at (1) or (2).
May I humbly suggest (2)? Notice that (2) is going to involve building (or
investing, if you're a foreigner) in a lot of dumb stuff. China builds lots of
plastic widgets for Americans. China's also bringing tens of millions of
people out of poverty.

The problem with the big fix strategy (malaria vaccines, non-profits, etc --
basically non-dumb stuff) is that it always leaves the people in poverty
dependent on others. I'm sure you, Kushal, have the highest of motives.
Unfortunately not everyone does, which makes leaving the poor dependent on
others a very bad strategy for them.

Anyway, welcome to HN!

P.S. Can anyone think of a country that _has_ gotten out of poverty based on
aid? All the modern examples I can think of (Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore,
Latvia, Lithuania, etc.) haven't.

~~~
pooriaazimi
Afghanistan, maybe? U.S. and Societ completely ruined the country in the 60s,
70s, 80s and 90s (in the 90s Soviet were gone and U.S. involvement was passive
and indirect though, bu they "blessed" The Taliban as an ally nevertheless),
and in the past decade U.S. and Europe have helped kinda rebuild the country
_by technical and financial aid_.

I quite and completely agree with your comment; because that's exactly what I
think (I've spent a great deal thinking about that).

~~~
malkarouri
Does Afghanistan qualify as a _has gotten out of poverty_ country?

~~~
omra
I'd say no; the mean poverty fraction is 30.91%, with median 28.25% and
standard deviation 19.05%. [0] Afghanistan has a poverty rate of 36% (as of
2008). [1] So it's definitely above the average.

[0] <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=poverty+fraction>

[1]
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Afghanistan+poverty+rat...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Afghanistan+poverty+rate)

------
geuis
I disagree with this. It's essentially the same argument that there should be
a single societal focus on shipping all of our extra food to those who are
starving. True, in sheer numbers we have the gross resources to do just that.
We have the infrastructure in terms of ships, planes, and boots on the ground.
But there are other reasons we don't do this.

Capitalism doesn't work like this. Resources are allocated via crazy, unfair
market actions. 300 years ago, most of Europe resembled what we would call the
Third World now. Epidemics, warfare, starvation, etc. The big driving force
that changed Europe wasn't the generosity of kings, but the base-level trading
and investing among the poor and emerging middle classes.

There were a lot of resources being misspent back in those days. Anyone
remember a particular Dutch fascination with tulips? Money was spent on doomed
voyages of exploration, fake medicines, flower-based stock bubbles, and any
number of other "follies" that in hindsight could have been avoided.

But among all the mispenditure of resources over hundreds of years, hundreds
of millions of people were lifted out of poverty. We went from an average
lifespan of 40 years to over 80. We live in an actual age of marvels.

In our modern world, we have people building entire companies and fortunes
around what are the silliest things. We have even more people copying the
first successes and failing. In amongst that, there are the smaller numbers of
people building companies that will laterally help those who's lives need
improving.

If we lived in a society where our resources could be marshaled enmasse
towards one goal or another, it wouldn't be the world we have now.

Telling entrepreneurs that one class of businesses is more socially correct
than others isn't how the world works. People will find opportunities in many
ways, and those will benefit the people in need. The poor will find edges in
the market to improve their own lives. What might seem worthless to you might
be valuable to someone else.

So if you have an idea for Bitly 4.0, do it. If you want to build cheap
rockets to space, do it. If you want to build a social networking app that
uses cheap cell phones to let goat herders in sub-Saharan Africa poke each
other over hundreds of miles, do it. You never know how or when your product
will be used, or who it will help.

~~~
feral
>Telling entrepreneurs that one class of businesses is more socially correct
than others isn't how the world works.

Start a company selling assassinations, and the wider world will quickly tell
you your business isn't socially correct - you will be shut down. Pyramid
schemes are another illegal class of business.

There are also businesses that, while legal, do not appear socially useful.
There's nothing wrong with disapproving of such businesses.

>You never know how or when your product will be used, or who it will help.

Your argument is: because businesses can yield unanticipated utility, there is
no point reasoning about which business is best to spend time on.

Sure, perhaps the cat-pictures business will, through some unexpected turn of
events, yield greater social utility than an education startup: Our models of
the world are imperfect, and sometimes we mis-predict which actions will be
most beneficial.

But that doesn't mean we should give up reasoning about what the most
beneficial thing to do is. We should still attempt to reason about relative
benefits, and act to maximise our expected future utility.

Which is not to say we should always "focus on shipping all of extra food to
those who are starving". Indeed, maybe some technology that looks trivial will
yield huge benefits. So we should definitely spend some time exploring new
technologies, to try and catch unexpected windfalls. In order words, we have
an explore/exploit tradeoff to make.

But: Trading off exploration/exploitation is not the same as just throwing up
our hands and saying "do whatever you want, don't attempt to reason about
relative utilities".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit>

~~~
imgabe
There's an implicit assumption here that entrepreneurial motivation is
fungible, that a person who could found a successful cat picture business
could also found a successful education startup just as easily. I don't think
that's the case. In turning someone away from something they're truly
interested in and guilting them into working on a more "serious" business, the
most likely result is a failed education startup in place of a successful cat
pictures business. In terms of relative utility, a successful business is
almost always going to be more beneficial to the world than a failed one.

~~~
feral
Right, there's a simplifying assumption of fungibility in my post. In your
counter example, you go to the other extreme, where its either a successful
but low-social-utility business, or an unsuccessful high-social-utility one.

In reality, the entrepreneur is going to have to make some tradeoff between
likelihood of success (given motivation) and utility of success.

But entrepreneurs intuitively make these sort of tradeoffs all the time. This
is just another judgement to make.

------
endianswap
It surprises me that the author holds Myrvhold to such high esteem when his
company, Intellectual Ventures, is working pretty hard to stifle innovation.

~~~
notatoad
"Stop building dumb stuff. Actually, just stop building anything and instead
sue people who do"

~~~
055static
He knows most ideas will fail when they are executed.

So the "logical" thing to do is to stop executing and just acquire existing
patents and file for new ones. Then wait for others who want to execute or who
try to execute. Then, if it looks like they have, or will have, the money to
pay, threaten to sue them.

Brilliant!

A true innovator.

------
bravura
Seriously?

An article about "make meaning, not money".

Which lionizes Nathan Myhrvold, the world's largest patent troll.

Seriously?

~~~
irollboozers
Myhrvold just happened to be there. It also happens that he does spend a lot
of time on tackling 'global good' problems. For example, they spent a great
deal of money and time developing cheaper and more efficient refrigerators for
transferring drugs, because surprisingly drugs go bad and poor underserved
areas tend not to have refrigerators. They spent a lot of RND, and went
against several WHO regulations which forced unnecessary extra costs, just to
get to their goal.

Regardless, I think you're attacking a man mentioned in the article for
something little related to the message of this article.

------
mistercow
There's something that rubs me the wrong way about this article, and I think
it's the false dichotomy. On the one hand we have safe conveniences like
"another link shortener" and "Facebook for X" which do not involve any
innovation. On the other, we have risky humanitarian projects which require
huge innovation.

So there are three differences here: safe vs. risky, easy vs. innovative, and
luxury vs. necessity. I feel like the author is trying to bolster our
valuations of each difference by associating them with our valuations of the
others.

So we start out with this true but completely obvious idea that it's not the
best use of our time to build safe and easy luxuries, yet the alternatives
we're pushed to are risky and difficult necessities. And I suppose if you want
to point to that as an _ideal_ , then that's one thing.

But then we get to the quote about "faster aliens", and I start to wonder what
universe we're talking about. Much of the research that went into making those
aliens faster? Directly applicable to a ton of other fields! Is the author
suggesting that we should take the engineers off of the teams that are working
to build more powerful GPUs and CPUs, and instead get them working on a
malaria vaccine? Should we send them back to school first, or just plop them
in a bio lab and tell them to get crackin'? Or instead, we could let them just
keep doing what they're good at, since faster computers will also help us find
a vaccine for malaria.

If you want to attack something out of the safe/easy/luxury group, attack
"easy". Safe luxuries have proven to be absolutely amazing for driving
innovation, and then we get to use that innovation for the really important
stuff.

------
danso
see, here's a problem: in the time it takes to find a malaria vaccine,
thousands of lives could be saved by things as simple as a mosquito net. In
the time it takes to perfect cold fusion, the greatest energy savings will
come from industrialized nations turning their A/C down a couple of degrees.

Humanity is served by both the incremental steps and the big dreamers. Let's
not create a false dichotomy and end up discarding the lives of millions just
because it's hip to be the next Nobel prize winner

~~~
irollboozers
All the comments in this thread, this is the only one that is actually a good
starting point for discussion and doesn't latch onto the "LOL MYRHVOLD GO
AWAY".

The problem with the tech industry, as the article highlights, is that the
focus is on building stuff for the sake of building it. A nyan cat generator?
A social network for your dog's dog? Sure, throw 100+ hours into it, and maybe
you'll get acquired by the 'social network for nyan cat generators'. The issue
is that the tech industry more and more just serves itself, not because of the
culture of funding but what I would think of is just familiarity. 100+ hours
can go further elsewhere, but it's not necessarily the personal goal of that
little coder.

Incremental steps only come when the larger incentives are in place. If you
could flip a social enterprise (and not Facebook social, I mean for-a-better-
world social), then people would be willing to spend 100 hours building apps
for good.

The big dreamers are the ones who do it regardless of the fame, money, or
glory.

------
NathanKP
Cached version:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.obviouslywrong.org/2012/10/21/stop-
building-dumb-stuff/&hl=en&prmd=imvns&strip=1)

With regard to the article I agree that it is noble (and probably more
profitable) to build new products and ideas rather than clones of existing
ideas, just as it is noble (and doubtlessly more profitable if you are
successful) to develop a new vaccine for malaria rather than just distributing
mosquito nets.

But mosquito nets are what people need now to save lives. A promise of future
vaccine doesn't save lives. Likewise people want facebook for dogs now, and
other crap clones, and where the money and demand is the market follows.

------
paulgb
The article about Doggyspace is from 2008 and their twitter account has been
inactive for almost two years. So apparently they did stop building dumb
stuff. It was probably the invisible hand that made them stop, not a blog
post.

------
brentashley
How can this guy get all the way through this article without mentioning that
not only is Nathan Myhrvold "former CTO of Microsoft", but that as owner of
Intellectual Ventures, the most powerful non- practising patent troll in
existence, he is perhaps the world's biggest example of what is wrong with the
patent system and why ideas, innovative or not, are almost impossible to turn
into reality without the threat of litigation.

The fact that he would avoid mentioning this shows that anything else said in
this piece can be assumed to be utter bullshit and spin.

~~~
kushalc
You know, I was really trying hard to avoid the debate on patents since it
wasn't very related to what I was trying to say. That apparently backfired. :)

I'm pretty familiar with the issues, both on the closed (often corporate) and
open (often research, open source) sides -- it just wasn't a place I wanted to
go.

I also don't really have an agenda, either with Nathan or anyone else -- you
can find me online, I'm pretty much an open book.

The only thing I really do care about here? Building stuff, for- or non-
profit, that adds value to humanity.

------
aaronbasssett
Because the guys building Facebook for dogs, or working on faster games have
the transferable skills required to work on a Malaria vaccine.

~~~
irollboozers
If you can make another meme generator, then you can probably make a good dent
in the world.

That's a shamefully bad cop-out to say you couldn't do any of these things:

<http://freerice.com/> <http://www.donorschoose.org/>
<http://www.shiftlabs.org/> <http://www.sparked.com/>

~~~
aaronbasssett
Correct, and that is why they are much better examples than curing Malaria.
That was my point about the blog post, it says "Be like these guys!" and then
presents problems which the target audience has no realistic chance of fixing,
so they simply switch off.

------
guscost
Fighting malaria is the example, but no mention of a political campaign
against DDT? According to this comfortable American, the two available options
are mosquito nets and a subsidized vaccine?

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ddt-use-
to-...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ddt-use-to-combat-
malaria) <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124303288779048569.html>

Next!

------
jt2190
I'm in agreement with his thesis (that there should be an increase in the
funding of riskier projects by non-profits) but I dislike his examples of
"useless" tech. Technology often starts off in toys and novelties until it can
be made with greater reliability at a lower cost. Tech may be "useless" simply
because we haven't explored it enough to find all of its applications.

~~~
pbiggar
There are many parts of Maslow's hierarchy. Curing malaria allows more people
at the low end of the hierarchy move up. Obviously, this is incredibly worthy.

I don't know about Facebook for dogs, but there is an AirBnB for dogs called
<http://dogvacay.com> which lets you board dogs in other people's homes. This
allows dog owners more freedom, and allows people without dogs to hang with
dogs for a few days a week. Since pet ownership reduces stress and increases
people's happiness, "dumb ideas" like this move people like me slightly higher
in Maslow's hierarchy.

Long story short, the OP should pick better "useless" examples.

------
055static
That quote from the ex-Microsoftie is the classic. Most ideas will fail.
Right. Let's attribute brilliance to a master of the obvious. But the one idea
that succeeds, even if it's "a way to kill aliens faster", will undoubtedly
hear from a patent troll, like IV. Are you "OK with that"?

They will go after whoever is making money. And what do they contribute?
Nothing.

------
milesokeefe
What exactly is the point of this? That non humanitarian efforts are useless?

~~~
kushalc
No, my point was to make meaning -- not trivial stuff.

There's lots of non-humanitarian efforts that create lots of meaning:

* Facebook, helps me stay connected to my friends

* Etsy & Kickstarter, empowers artists around the world

* Reddit & HackerNews, lets me find stuff about topics I like

There's also lots of humanitarian stuff that's just pretty pointless.

But folks can build some pretty amazing things and I wanted to poke the
emperor on that.

~~~
GuiA
"Meaning" is arbitrary and can be extrapolated out of pretty much anything.

A multiplayer video game where you shoot aliens (to quote the posted article)
can be a way for some people to find a sense of community they wouldn't find
in real life for whatever reason, or a way for some kids to protect themselves
from the world around them (parents divorcing, illnesses, etc.).

You cite Facebook as a product that's not humanitarian but has "meaning".
Facebook was essentially started as a way for privileged ivy-league kids to
talk about their college life and hookup. It may have become something bigger,
but by your metrics it probably didn't start as something with "meaning".

"Make meaning— not trivial stuff" is a superficial, empty sentence which only
achieves the goal of sounding good and making its writer feel good about
himself.

------
electic
Seems the website is down. Maybe obviouslywrong.org shouldn't have been built
:| Does anyone have the article they can paste here?

~~~
kushalc
Am the author -- wasn't expecting HN frontage, yikes! ;) The site just went up
a few days ago and is crashing. I'm on it.

------
nicklovescode
Reminds me of <http://stopbuildingbullshit.com/>

------
rerere
Nathan Myrhvold is a grossly obese man who owns a large patent portfolio,
managed through thousands of shell companies under the umbrella of
"Intellectual Ventures." He first made his bones as was CTO of Microsoft.
However, unlike a lot of the original founders, he wasn't satisfied with what
he got, so he moved into the patent trolling business. These days, he makes
his money by extorting technology companies, usually behind closed doors.

To make himself feel better about what he does, he tries to minimize the
importance of what those technology companies are doing-- they're just
building "stupid stuff," after all. He also sponsors research into vaccines
and technologies to help the third world. Like Bill G himself, he views this
as his way of doing penance for the bad things he's done to get where he is.

The truth is, though, it doesn't work like that. Most of the problems in the
third world are the result of bad government. Unless we want to bring back
colonialism, trying to "fix" the third world with aid is just putting a band-
aid on a broken leg. In the long term, there are only two final destinies for
humanity-- extinction, and the singularity. People like Mr. Myrhvold make the
first outcome more likely.

