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Comment by giardini | Hacker News Reader

Its always the same story: "We're on the brink of X, but we need more money." where X is:

- a cure for cancer (one of the oldest and still working), a testable string theory, nuclear fusion, genetic engineering, flying cars, a cure for AIDS, for addiction, for cellulite, or for that fungus that's been festering in your crotch for 10 years now, [insert your favorite here], ..., etc.

Never, never, never will you hear:

"We've got enough money, please don't send more!"

"We have the solution, it has been validated by an independent group and it works! You can get it today!"

Which reminds me of an old joke:

Bob: "Hey, didja hear? They finally found a cure for marital infidelity!"

Fred: "You don't say? What is it?"

Bob: "Nudity!"

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A hell of a lot more people survive cancer now than 50 years ago.

Make the same list 100 years ago or 100 years from now and it's a different list... Because progress happens, some things are just more complex than SV style innovation and this weeks next big thing.

What do you mean by "survive"?

My experience is that no one survives a confirmed diagnosis of cancer. By "survive" _I_ mean that their life is unaffected and they die of something else and that their death is not sped by cancer.

Oh, there's the occasional "miracle" out there, but no one's paying attention to potential false positive diagnoses (i.e., person was diagnosed with cancer, is treated, later turns out to not be cancer at all, he's a "miracle", thank you Jesus, thank you Lord!)

Your redefining the term. If someone survives a car crash they may have suffered massive trauma they are just not dead.

The odds of being alive 20 years after a cancer diagnosis are not nearly as bad is you might think. Around 2x as many people are diagnosed with cancer every year as die from it.

I'm asking you how you define "survive" and you haven't answered. Sounds like you're using the usual "5-year survival" of cancer research which means that, 5 years later, the person still has a heartbeat.

You know, we've gotten really far with cancer. Turns out, it is a really complicated thing. Heck, some of it has turned to prevention (HPV vaccine, for example). Aids is no longer the death bringer it once was. It is pretty amazing, really. We understand addiction better now, but politics gets in the way. Who knows what we could do otherwise. Heck, even the joke could be cured by simply being honest enough to admit divorce or an open marriage might be a better option than staying married.

It seems to me that you are dismissing all the work we've actually done on these fronts. Of course there needs more money, as the research isn't finished. SOme of this is really complicated, and we didn't realize it was so much at first. Putting the same effort into this energy might not bring us what we dream, but similar improvements can be made.

We would still be better off for having tried this stuff, I think.

Broken_Hippo sez: "Heck, even the joke could be cured by simply being honest enough to admit divorce or an open marriage might be a better option than staying married."

No, the point of the joke is that most people are not in fact as appealing when nude as we _imagine_ they might be beforehand. The joke is a poke at the optimism of imagination.

As for cancer:

- Certainly its complicated. But I question the value of and wisdom of the history of cancer "research", and especially chemotherapy, where people become essentially lab rats. And this has gone on for generations.

Broken_Hippo sez: "It seems to me that you are dismissing all the work we've actually done on these fronts. Of course there needs more money, as the research isn't finished."

Spoken like a true advertising shill for a cancer institute. Considering the amount of money spent, the actual _results_ are disappointing, to say the least. And money? Well, money! "Of course there needs more money, as the research isn't finished." [and one almost hears "... with luck, never _will_ be finished. We can milk this cash cow forever!"]

Considering the money spent, the war on cancer is a black hole that pays, pays, pays for institutions, laboratories, inflated salaries for doctors, big pharma, and mostly useless research.

http://www.newsweek.com/cancer-breakthroughs-cost-too-much-a...

How much will you pay to keep your child alive? [usual answer: everything you have and everything you can mortgage or steal.]

Who benefits? [Ans. cancer institutes, cancer hospitals, cancer doctors, big pharma, and their wives and families.]

Want to buy a new Mercedes for an ontologist? Contribute to one of the cancer charities/hospitals/institutes.

Progress has a way of creeping up on you. This list would've contained "heavier than air flight" in the 1700s but look where we are now. Consider that hilarious Wright Brothers contraption in 1903 and then the landing on the moon in 1969, a span of only 66 years where everything changed.

I think WW1 and WW2 had a great impact on rocketry and aeronautics research specifically though. I mean it's not like it was business as usual and those 66 years where just standard, they had a huge segment of the scientific population focusing on ways to improve those fields, so much much much more progress was made than usual.

You say that like such a thing couldn't possibly happen in the future. We're an ill-advised tweet away from yet another military engagement that could drag on for decades.

There's also the possibility that the collective world will finally commit to action on climate change and start dumping money into technology, any technology, that could tilt things in our favour.

It's astonishing to me that during the Manhattan Project they tried every possible thing, both methods for uranium enrichment, both fundamental types of weapon, explored all possible avenues, and yet today the US can't be arsed to spend a dime on preventing climate change.

> "We have the solution, it has been validated by an independent group and it works! You can get it today!"

They don't? How would you describe literally any invention that comes to market. It seems like people say that sentence all the time.

As others have mentioned, heavier than air flight seems to fit that category. So does recorded video and film. So does distributing video over the internet.

GPS, rocket launches, cell phones, etc.

Sure, you can use a selection bias and query for the problems that remain unresolved, but if you look at the universe of inventions and scientific inquiry it definitely looks like problems get resolved and to market all the time.

I was speaking about long-lived unsolved problems that have almost equally long-lived official or semi-official "plans" or "wars" to provide a solution but have not arrived at any true solution.

I wasn't speaking of all problems that exist.

> I was speaking about long-lived unsolved problems

Yes, and the word "unsolved" in there is the exact selection bias I was referring to.

Of course if you look at the universe of "unsolved" problems you don't see any verified solutions! It's a tautological statement. If you were looking specifically at unsolved problems, of _course_ there are no solutions yet. That was the definition of the term!

> Never, never, never will you hear:

> "We've got enough money, please don't send more!"

Well, research problems (such as the ones you quoted) can only be solved by substained effort and that requires substained cash flow. And there has been progress in all of them.

Real-life research is not like in Civ., where you can exchange $10000 for the invention of electricity. There are unknown costs that pop up all the time.

> for that fungus that's been festering in your crotch for 10 years now

I'm less familiar with that research (doesn't come up on HN a lot) but very interested. The itch is killing me.

Just apply oil of plutonium liberally. A nice perk is that you don't have to switch on the bathroom light when relieving yourself in the early morning hours.

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