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Comment by jamiequint | Hacker News Reader

Which had a bigger impact? Almost certainly social media over any kind of liver transplant research. There are 20k liver transplants a year.

You realize that social media has created tens to hundreds of billions of dollars of economic value right? Even Twitter, which has struggled has created billions of dollars of economic value. From a utilitarian perspective that is worth far more.

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Your opinion would change if someone you cared about needed a new liver.

I'm certain that if I knew someone who needed a liver transplant that I would then personally value liver transplant tech over social media, that's completely beside the point though. My feelings in a given scenario don't make work on liver transplants more important than work on social media. What matters is net impact.

Jumping in late, but no. High quality problems solved make a stable future where things like like transplants are just "solved." You cannot say the same for social networks, which are actually much more reflective of the current culture. We will not look back 50 years from now and say "oh man, thank god Snapchat came along" the way we'll be saying "thank god we pioneered that medical tech which continues to save lives to this day"

There are compounding effects with economic progress as well that are effectively immeasurable due to complexity. The availability heuristic biases people to think that obviously identifiable benefits are more important than pursuits with less identifiable benefits.

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