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Comment by uniformlyrandom | Hacker News Reader

The article makes a good argument against simplifying Silicon Valley down to its faults:

> stop talking about how Silicon Valley only makes ridiculous overpriced juicers

But who are those people who simplify Silicon Valley, and mock the useless innovation?

I feel like the author falls victim to the same blind-men-and-elephant problem: he somehow reads all the 'thinkpieces' (whatever that means) that focus on strange things SV does. I personally do not see this phenomenon, probably because I get my news from aggregators with different bias. The (successfully defeated) strawman is just that, a strawman.

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The article makes a good argument against simplifying Silicon Valley down to its faults

The article makes a good argument against taking media spin at face value. (Including that within the article. Including that within this comment!)

I feel like the author falls victim to the same blind-men-and-elephant problem: he somehow reads all the 'thinkpieces' (whatever that means) that focus on strange things...

We all fall victim to all the media [X] that focus on strange things. In Manufacturing Consent we see how it worked in the 80's with newspapers and television mergers in the context of the west vs. the Soviet bloc. In 2019, it's Left vs. Right and new media vs. old media.

I personally do not see this phenomenon, probably because I get my news from aggregators with different bias.

Then you do suffer from an analogous phenomenon, modulo your own biases.

The (successfully defeated) strawman is just that, a strawman.

If only it were a strawman. At this point, it's more like a miasma we are all living in and breathing in.

>But who are those people who simplify Silicon Valley, and mock the useless innovation?

Isn't listing "those people" the very first thing he does at the top of the essay? WaPo, TechCrunch, Slate, etc.

> But who are those people who simplify Silicon Valley, and mock the useless innovation?

In my obviously very much less than completely thorough experience, they're often people with clear goals who want them advanced. They're frustrated with useless innovation, seeing it mainly as resources that could have been used to advance a more worthy goal. They lament the waste of resources and the failures of vision to bring those resource to bear on the proper goals and problems. All the solvable problems that so many smart, driven people and so much money could hardly fail to solve. The lives that could be enabled, the societies that could be changed.

I've known a number of such people. I've seen a series of such pieces over time, no few of which pass through HN.

Who I am to judge what innovations are useful or useless to society? In a sense, one could very well argue that the market cap or valuation of a company is at least a decent proxy for "usefulness".

With that said, however, my personal opinion is different. Although I think innovation of any kind is great for society, what I'm frustrated by is the relative mindshare of where we focus our attention on.

I like to use the term "farsighted" - many people in SV are able to see very far distances into the future, but ignore some of the immediate problems that are right under our noses. That's what I'm frustrated by.

One thing I've always found useful is asking the people I think of as having mis-allocated their attention. Very often they have good reasons for their decisions. It's surprisingly rare that they're actually ignoring the immediate problems right under their noses. It is very common that they don't share my assessment of what the resources they command could do if applied elsewhere, and understanding why is educational for me.

The other tool I find useful is to remember that my perception of where our collective mindshare is going is necessarily going to be less than fully informed. It can easily be quite far off the mark, leaving me thinking that a major problem is going completely unaddressed when there are in fact vast resources being directed at it without any visibility to me.

When you're focused on immediate problems that are right under your nose, you tend to produce solutions that are band aid solutions.

When you're more farsighted, you tend to look at the root cause of problems and try to find solutions that cure problems once and for all.

They do tend to take longer to come about, for sure. But which approach produces the most utility is very hard to prove. Is it better to equip people with mosquito nets, or to create better malaria vaccines?

We probably need both approaches in the end, but only having the immediate problem approach is guaranteed to lead to local maxima.

>They're frustrated with useless innovation, seeing it mainly as resources that could have been used to advance a more worthy goal. They lament the waste of resources and the failures of vision to bring those resource to bear on the proper goals and problems.

If that's truly their concern, why focus on Silicon Valley and not on Hollywood or professional sports?

Why would that person be bothered that some SV company spent a few million making a fancy juicer, but not care that some billionaire is spending orders of magnitude more money (often taxpayer money) building a new stadium which is only slightly different than ones that already exist?

It's often not just misdirected money that they see. It's a huge amount of misdirected money coupled with incredibly smart, intelligent, driven people who seem to genuinely want to change the world... and who seem to succeed once in a while.

If you imagine all that money, energy, brains, and change going towards something you deem more worthy, I can see how someone might deem it a massive waste of everything. It's understandable.

Though, I believe, perhaps occasionally a bit naive.

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