War on drugs: fail
War on cancer: fail
War on poverty: fail
As far as global poverty is concerned, between 1990-2013 more than a billion people were lifted out of poverty according to the World Bank. I'm sure you can point to local and anecdotal evidence that does not correlate, but to say efforts to reduce poverty have failed are just flat wrong.
Cancer is an intractably complex disease, but to dismiss all efforts and advancements is also off the mark. Life expectancy for many types of cancers has improved significantly. Oncolytic viruses have been shown to treat some very advanced forms of cancer with profound results.
I wish I could be more optimistic about the war on drugs, so I'll concede that one to you.
If you think the branding of the effort is that terrible and counter productive, I'd love to hear your ideas on how we should brand the effort.
Those "war on" phrases refer to specific projects in the US. For that one I wasn't too familiar but quickly looked it up and didn't see anyone claiming success: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty
Regarding cancer, I responded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17698877
Think about it. The "War on Poverty" was Lyndon Johnson's campaign to expand Roosevelt's New Deal. Does that sound like something that would prosper under the Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton (consider the congress), and Bush Jr administrations? Unlike the "War on Drugs", which was actually a never-ending boondoggle that received ample bi-partisan and financial support, Johnson's programs were in the political cross-hairs since day one.
In other words, these two programs were failures for very different reasons. The comparison of the "War on Drugs" to the "War on Poverty" is incredibly superficial insofar as the only real thing they have in common are their names.
They are names for efforts by the US government to achieve some goal that it never achieves. I don't see what difference the detailed reasons for failure are, I am sure there are many.
The real takeaway here is they were doomed to failure because the US government chose similar bad names.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Millions of people pouring into 1st world countries and consuming more is surely bad for climate change.
Let me ask you a question: How do you incorporate the concept of efficiency when you talk about wealth? Is wealth and not being impoverished defined by how much you can consume?
I'd argue that the history of technology shows us that we tend to value things that provide more value using fewer resources over a the long term. Most wealth is derived from extracting more value from the same resources and not simple resource consumption.
Let's take light for example. There was an article written by Tim Harford discussed the economic history of producing light and how price per lumen has dropped by a factor of 500,000. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38650976
Obviously, not all consumables can enjoy those tremendous gains in efficiencies, but there are technologies today whose price/performance is improving at a rate far faster than inflation. That's what we should invest in and accelerate.
In my lifetime, I've watched the cell phone and laptop replace the need to buy dozens of other things, not just in the home, but in the office too. Cheap/viable/comfortable augmented reality will only push this trend further.
A billion people consuming more natural resources, non-renewable resources and carbon emitting resources at the levels we consume them would be bad for our environment.
A billion people having access to cheap/free sources of energy, a quality education, an inexpensive digital infrastructure and devices, and knowing how to use their land efficiently is magnitudes better than a billion people simply living in poverty. Poverty isn't cheap, nor is it good for the environment, especially if it leads to wars destroying wealth and raping natural resources.
My hope is the markets in developing countries will be a huge opportunity for producers of efficient technology, providing those technologies a space where they can incubate until their quality begins to match their less-than-efficient competition. In some circumstances, this is true today.
Also, I find "War on poverty" hilarious. Like a country saying it's "making crime illegal".
But realistically, this is not a war I think we can win in my lifetime. It's much bigger than people may have originally thought.
https://www.nature.com/news/cancer-reproducibility-project-s...
Every disease can be arbitrarily split or combined into multiple categories. It doesnt mean anything. Here is a cure for cancer:
1) Detect aneuploid cells that fail to show the initial steps of the response to extracellular apoptosis signals, and have been dividing more often than usual for that tissue/environment (eg you have to take into account wound healing, etc).
2) Kill those cells.
This is technological problem, not a "cancer is many diseases" problem. Every problem can manifest in many ways and have multiple solutions.
EDIT:
Ref for "10% replication rate":
>"scientific findings were confirmed in only 6 (11%) cases." https://www.nature.com/articles/483531a
More info in this (short) thread from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10687879
The next two were spent attempting to save the project by working 18 hour days almost constantly. In the end, despite what they claimed about doing it the usual way because "its so complicated, no one can come up with mathematical/computational models or actual predictions to test, no one can describe this or that in so much detail, etc", the actual truth was that it wasnt "too hard". It was that no one really cared about that. Instead they just wanted to know whether there were statistically significant differences anyway...
From what I've read of the cancer literature it looks exactly the same, probably worse. And guess what, there's been no real progress made for decades on the topic I was studying either.
>"A large effort to reproduce high-impact cancer research has scaled down the number of studies it plans to replicate from 50 to 18, Science reported yesterday (July 31).
[...]
Hurdles to replicating experiments included a lack of detailed protocols and easily obtainable reagents. “Communication and sharing are low-hanging fruit that we can work on to improve,” Elizabeth Iorns, the president of Science Exchange, tells Science." https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/effort-to-reprodu...
Yup, the entire system is set up for an environment of no replication. How do you expect to cure cancer without making reproducibility a priority? I'd expect people who don't do that will end up thinking everything is "so complicated" due to all the conflicting results they generate, eg "one disease" becomes "many diseases".
The way I read it is that they were so far from a cure that they didn't even know what they were trying to achieve.