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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

As a kid who grew up in the 1990s, I consider this the biggest technological advance in my lifetime. HIV was a death sentence back then. Arthur Ashe died of it in 1992, and Magic Johnson announced he had it in 1991. It was in our minds right up there with global warming and the hole in the ozone layer as a existential threat to humanity. And now... a 20-something who begins antiretroviral therapy today can expect to live into his or her late 70s. It's a scientific miracle.

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As a fellow 90's kid who read almost every book Isaac Asimov wrote, I was shocked to learn he died in 1992 from AIDS acquired previously from a blood transfusion.

The sooner humanity can mostly forget that HIV/AIDS was ever a thing, the better.

Woah, I didn't know about it till this comment! Never even a mention of it in his autobiography either (which is as delightful a book as his fiction)

His family didn't want it to be public for a long time in order to avoid the stigma.

Eventually, hearts changed, and it was decided it would be a powerful statement to come forth with the details surrounding his death.

I didn't know about it either until now. A true tragedy.

I agree with the positive sentiment, but disagree that AIDS should be forgotten. The bigotry and petty vindictiveness in th 90’s was disgusting and in some quarters it lives on. The earlier days were worse as I understand it, and there is a lesson in it all.

Can confirm. My eldest brother died of it via a blood transfusion. This was during the early days when it was little understood and all treatment was experimental.

The "popular" assumption was that catching it proved you were gay and highly promiscuous, or sharing heroin needles, therefore deserved it. Some of my brother's friends never spoke to him again from the moment of finding out. I think he found other's reactions as hard to deal with as the death sentence.

Mother did her utmost to never mention, and made me promise to always say he had cancer.

That bigotry still exists, and is far too common, as seen in some of this thread's comments.

One concern I have is the resurgence of other STDs as a result of curing HIV. The number of sexual partners adults have has been steadily rising and risky so transmission of other "regular" uncurable STDs like HPV and Herpes may spike.

Shouldn't you then question if treating syphilis with penicillin encourages risky habits? Or be concerned about the condom and contraceptive pill? People are always going to want to have sex. Safe sex and condoms aren't foolproof. People get drunk or horny.

The trouble with that apparently innocent concern over the increased risk of other STDs, is the victim blaming it leads to. "Well if only they'd not taken risks", eventually becomes "it's your own fault" and "you shouldn't wear a short skirt".

It was well over a year after my brother died that his widow got the letter admitting liability from the hospital. Until then, I have no doubt that of those who knew he was HIV+ (and that she wasn't) more than a few had doubts. That he had obviously been unfaithful, or was gay and in denial, and had brought it on himself, maybe even deserved it etc. Along with all the extremes of not wanting to breathe the same air, touch, catch it from a seat sat in an hour ago or visit such a dangerous hospital ward.

It was ugly, undeserved and whether gay or not, the popular mood was more of the dark ages than the 20th century. We haven't evolved as far as we like to think.

Safe sex practices have seen a decline in recent years but condoms don't prevent HPV or Herpes Simplex so even people who consistently use condoms because they're concerned about HIV are still risking exposure to HPV & HSV.

People also had the same concern about birth control pills but the social benefits of the pill[1] far outweigh any potential social costs from (alleged) "riskier" behavior. And considering 80% of adults already have HPV and more than 50% carry HSV I think you're concern is largely unwarranted.

[1]https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/so... [PDF]

Do you have the same concerns about curing smallpox?

They've still not had peer review of their work, but this does seem promising:

https://71republic.com/2019/02/13/mexican-scientists-cure-hp...

>The number of sexual partners adults have has been steadily rising

Got a cite for that? I was under the impression the opposite was true.

And even if it is the case, see the book "More Sex is Safer Sex" by Steven Landsburg:

"You’ve read elsewhere about the sin of promiscuity. Let me tell you about the sin of self-restraint.

Suppose you walk into a bar and find four potential sex partners. Two are highly promiscuous; the others venture out only once a year. The promiscuous ones are, of course, more likely to be HIV-positive. That gives you a 50-50 chance of finding a relatively safe match.

But suppose all once-a-year revelers could be transformed into twice-a-year revelers. Then, on any given night, you’d run into twice as many of them. Those two promiscuous bar patrons would be outnumbered by four of their more cautious rivals. Your odds of a relatively safe match just went up from 50-50 to four out of six."

https://slate.com/culture/1996/07/more-sex-is-safer-sex.html

The 90s were...an interesting time. I vividly remember two aunts arguing about AIDS research funding vs cancer research funding. "But only the fags get AIDS" vs "Cancer is preventable if you just stop smoking" hopefully give you an idea of the joys of growing up in the midwest.

I was in primary school in the 90s; I remember having to write a topical essay and present it in front of class. For some reason I chose AIDS, and I still remember that one of my key points was that you don't catch it through air or touch. Apparently it was common for people to be afraid of standing near a person with AIDS, or breathing the same air.

That said, "But only the fags get AIDS" vs "Cancer is preventable if you just stop smoking" doesn't seem like a thing of the past - this level of argumentation around AIDS, and about other topics - vaccines, GMOs, artificial sweeteners - is something I hear from most people I meet. I cherish the people in my life capable of deeper thought than that.

> Apparently it was common for people to be afraid of standing near a person with AIDS, or breathing the same air.

There was a catchy phrase wildly in used when and where I grew up (translation doesn't make it justice): "AIDS isn't caught, it's transmitted". Le SIDA ne s'attrape pas, il se transmet.

We had a flight of steps in the backyard that was made from reclaimed bricks from an old grandstand that had a toilet block in it. The neighbours kid wasn’t allowed around once they found this out. Imagine being scared of getting AIDS from a brick.

Wasn’t any better in here in London in the UK.

Two events really stand out in UK history to me

The first was Diana in 87, opening a new hiv/aids unit and shaking the hands of a patient.

The other was a character in a soap (watched by over 1/4 of the population - imagine a show with 90 million viewers in the U.S) becoming HIV, and all the various reactions both of him living with it, then later when the neighbourhood bigots found out, that was in the early 90s

> The other was a character in a soap becoming HIV

I know it wasn't your intention and this is a serious topic, but I did chuckle at the thought of this.

AIDS cannot be forgotten or ignored, even once a cure is discovered and is effective. AIDS wiped out an entire generation of LGBTQ people. It wiped out a generation of artists and creatives. It destroyed so many peoples lives. It would be hugely disrespectful and a dishonor to those people and their memory.

As important as a cure is, and I have a feeling it will happen in our lifetimes, I think the history of what AIDS destroyed is incredibly important. I rarely recommend a TV show, but Pose(on FX) did an incredible job of showing how everyone reacted and dealt with AIDS and death in the early 90's, especially in minority communities. It's truly heartbreaking and as a young LGBTQ person, it's such a stark contrast to how the world views these kinds of things today.

> The bigotry and petty vindictiveness in th 90’s was disgusting and in some quarters it lives on.

I get the sense that HIV/AIDS was very much a part of reducing bigotry. Once it turned out that we all have friends and relatives who are homosexual, it seemed to change the mood about what was acceptable to say about them. I've met an older homosexual couple who've said the same; they had to sort of pretend to be friends for decades until quite rapidly they could just be themselves.

> there is a lesson in it all.

There is, but it does not seem that we learned it. Being a simplistic and tribal species seems to be very deep in our nature, sadly.

These days we have gone too far in the other extreme.

My grandfather needing a blood transfusion in 1990 and was seen as a death sentence because of how little of the blood was tested then in Eastern Europe. It ended up that my father and uncle had to take turns donating blood to try and keep him alive.

When people talk about taking blood from high risk groups and call me a bigot for being absolutely against it I always remember my father fainting three days before my grandfather died because he had given too much blood.

I have read most, but not all of his work but did't know that's how he died.

I wasn't old enough in the 90s to understand HIV/AIDS completely but remember it being a death sentence (I remember a rumor that you could get it by using public toilets)

This is a pretty good time to remember Ryan White, who is a fairly under-appreciated contemporary hero. They called this the "gay plague" at one point, and in a derogatory way. To all of our collective shame, it probably would have killed far fewer if people didn't think it was exclusive to gay communities.

Reportedly his family didn't publicize the matter at the time, due to the prejudice it would have triggered. His auto biography also does not mention it. It was only made public by his family, several years after his death.

Those tissue paper toilet seat covers only really appeared in public bathrooms in the 90s. I still think about how ridiculous they are in the context of HIV/AIDS, every time I see them.

I am a huge fan of Asimov too. I didn't know he died of AIDS. That's unfortunate.

He and his family kept that fact private, I understand, until years after his passing, because of the enormous stigma around it. That stigma remains one of the most tragic consequences of the disease, as Randy Shilts so devastatingly documented.

I remember chatting with a friend who worked in the biochemical industry in the early 90's - he commented if you had had a blood transfusion in certain countries in the last 10-15 years " you're dead".

I am from East Africa, and I know dozens of people -- including several close relatives -- who have died from it or have the virus. Ours is a generation of orphans, and chances are 90% that an orphan lost their parent[s] to HIV/Aids. Death, in the council estate I grew up in, was a very common occurrence, and it was usually due to HIV/Aids. Even today it is still a threat; it might be less deadly, but people are hit pretty hard, mentally.

So, I hate it. A cure that can be scaled up will be the best thing ever.

(Some might say that our people are careless and whatnot. Maybe. But HIV's spread is also driven by economic and gender factors, ignorance, and sometimes bad healthcare. A high prevalence rate doesn't help either -- because I don't believe that Africans are more sexual than anyone else.)

n=1, but what happened in East Africa was tragic, and was not the fault of careless people. Anyone who says otherwise is not worthy of thought.

I was a kid in the 80s and HIV was terrifying back then. I'm Australian and this ad is burned into the memories of a lot of Australians.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U219eUIZ7Qo

"Stop Aids, love life" in switzerland was (and still is) a kind of funny https://www.lovelife.ch/en/campaign/archive/2004-1987/

Probably similar age as you. I now find this ad mildly amusing

Perhaps these most detailed account of the AIDS epidemic in the US is "And the Band Played On" by Randy Shilts. He too died of it.

My Uncle gave me a hardback copy of The Band Played On in 93 shortly before he died of AIDS. I’ve read it every 5ish years since his death and I cry every time.

Technology is rewriting the future of this virus and I can’t help but to think what might have been different had he contracted HIV in a different time.

You need only look at South Africa to see what could have happened if it came 20 years earlier.

Second recommendation for that book. It really captures the reality of AIDS at the time.

Also recommend the HBO movie version of the book.

And yet some of the brightest analytical minds are regularly drawn to the big dollar signs that comes with optimizing advertising tech at FAANG companies when they could be curing cancer.

I never understood this sentiment. I'm good at JavaScript, not biochemistry. How will I be curing cancer? Trick the cancer cells into calling undefined as a function?

It's not a criticism at your individual specialization. It's fucking hard to get into cancer research at this stage, though if you know the right people, you could maybe help scientists with some simulations or visualizations or whatever other tangential concern that requires JavaScript knowledge.

This is a complaint against the market at large. There is work to be done in things like curing cancer(s) and mitigating climate change, but the jobs are few, far between, and pay peanuts. Meanwhile advertising is a direct social negative (IMO a cancer on human society), but it offers plenty of positions with good wages. The choice thus becomes: take the hard road and a paycut to maybe help some unspecified amount of people you don't know, vs. take the easy road with good wages and hurt an unspecified amount of people you don't know.

This complaint is about the market, and it's essentially the same thing you may say during debugging some algorithm: "I understand the steps it make and they all look good, but the final result is wrong".

Hang in there. Things change. Society as a whole takes it's own sweet time to make hard choices. But we do.

Otherwise the market would still have slave ships running.

Is it possible to speed things up? History says no.

But scaling things fast is a very new thing.

Islam took a few hundred years to spread from Delhi to Lisbon. That was before the invention of the printing press. The Reformation after the printing press, took a hundred years of war before most not all got along with each other.

Today Fortnite or what the Kardashians are upto spreads through the globe in a few months.

This is a new thing. And sooner or later someone will figure out how to infect minds positively at the same rate.

> Otherwise the market would still have slave ships running.

I think the slavery ended mostly because its relative efficiency dropped as technology developed.

You'll see how fast acceptance of animal slaughtering will drop once we can get cheaper, provably healthier lab grown burger.

Slavery dropped due to European Enlightenment values in the inherent dignity of man finally taking root among educated people in power. The cotton gin and the steam engine only made slaves more efficient and ramped up their quotas, not reduced the worth of their labor.

> ... steam engine only made slaves more efficient ...

Yeah, because so many slaves were trained to be steam engine operators.

Slaves are only worthwhile if they do machine job and you don't have a machine and you don't have local population in deep poverty that you could just pay a little bit to do your thing and not care what they eat, where they sleep and whether they die or not. That's why slavery never realy caught on in Europe in industrial times. Europeans were cheper than slaves.

No, enlightenment values were and still are quite good at rationalizing the status quo. It was wealthy religious zealots that ended slavery, to the opposition of the businessmen and economic pragmatists.

I think maybe it's a hockey-stick like graph on the speed...

Think about cigarettes and tobacco. Fairly flat for a while, a few upticks, gradual rising, and then - in the last decade or so, this rapid increase in legislation and other means by consumers against it.

Part of it has to do with attitudes and understanding about harms, and getting the public to understand this. At some point it reaches this breaking point, but that also seems to correlate with technologies to allow for alternatives (witness in the case of tobacco the rise of vaping products, as well as tobacco-free nicotine products becoming OTC and cheaper).

While I think you are right that acceptance of "natural beef" or other similar protein will drop once a viable artificial alternative becomes available, it won't really take off until that alternative can replicate a good portion of the other products out there as well.

That is - for myself - all the artificial ground beef in the world won't get me to switch over and away from a proper well-marbled rib-eye steak, or a BBQ'd brisket or pork shoulder.

But if they could replicate those items as well, and do it at a comparable price, then I'm game for the change (which has been the downside to current analogues on the market - $12-15.00 USD per pound for artificial hamburger is not my idea of a financially sound choice).

I'm much the same for things like electric vehicles - just give me one that is off-road capable, 4WD, that I can lift and put on 30"-plus tires, and still give me a few hundred miles of driving range - and be inexpensive to purchase - then I'll do it.

Heck - even a cheap small 2WD pickup truck would be nice.

Not all of us want a sedan or sports car.

We could use markets to shape humanity based on our collective values but instead we let the markets shape us. Perhaps it’s a failure to coalesce around shared values; too much tribalism. Clearly some political regimes are better able to harness the power of the state to guide the invisible hand to do its work where it’s most needed. By delegating the “guiding” role to market participants themselves, those who control markets by lobbying and legislating, we forfeit our control.

> By delegating the “guiding” role to market participants themselves, those who control markets by lobbying and legislating, we forfeit our control.

This discussion is interesting; I was thinking something similar this morning, with the focus on our collective food choices.

It's an imperfect analogy, but there are many things that we as both a society and thru governments we have banned, or highly regulated, as having too many external negative issues to allow them to continue to be sold openly on the market.

You can think of any number of drugs (including more than a few that used to be OTC not long ago), stuff like "high test peroxide", cigarettes and tobacco products, etc.

For the vast majority of these, though, none have extreme externalities - that is, none cause death in society like certain foods that are easily available.

But those items don't have huge lobbying efforts around them, either.

For instance - we know that HFCS is a great contributor to obesity and heart disease/stroke - yet we don't ban it for commercial food usage. While there have been recent inroads from a consumer standpoint (next time you go shopping for food, note the number of ordinary items that have packaging marked as "contains no HFCS" or similar), it's unknown whether this will continue to be a trend, nor how long it will take to rid the majority of purchased food items of the substance. It is also unknown how long it will take for the effects of its removal to show up in the overall health levels of society.

But there again is a product that we freely allow in our foods that arguably is slowly killing all of us; one could say "well, you are free not to eat those foods" - but one could have argued the same about tobacco and cigarettes not too long back (and they did). There is actually a good parallel between both the tobacco industry and the corn/HFCS industry (the lobbying, hidden and such papers about the dangers, etc) - but even in the case of tobacco, there wasn't an outright ban; it's been more of a slow attrition via consumers and the public...

> Meanwhile advertising is a direct social negative (IMO a cancer on human society)

Wow wow wow you can't just make a claim like that without any basis whatsoever? It might be true or not, but would you mind collaborating on why you think that? I am not even talking about proving it with some science (which is likely very hard), but you just write it off as if everyone else is sharing your view and as if it is self-explanatory or widely accepted. It is not.

Capitalism and the product culture has led to the most technological and in many case, lifestyle, lifespan, and life standard advancements known in history. This way of propelling progress forward requries efficient markets, and markets need to connect products with people who want and can benefit from those products. No advertisement is directly forcing anyone to buy or do anything, they just provide information for people and help locating people who might otherwise not have knowledge of the products they might want.

Assuming your take on the advertisement industry is different, what is that take?

I would think the feeling that marketing as a whole, and advertising as part of it was a large social negative was prevalent enough that one would not have to explain it even if not everyone agrees.

I mean it's common enough that Bill Hicks on the subject is pretty much a meme by this point https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0

I'm not saying I necessarily agree, but if someone says advertising is a cancer on society or something like that I would not be like - whoa what particular belief system has led him to conclude this?!? - I would think, huh, they have that set of beliefs regarding advertising and marketing.

So, one more time, care to explain why you think that it is? Or am I to understand this correctly that you think it's "cancer" on society because you have just heard other people say that (like Bill Hicks and perhaps others you respect) and you assume it was prevalent?

It would be interesting to understand your original arguments if it was more clear what you based that assumption on (which is by no means universal).

1. you might notice that it was not me that made the original arguments, I just noted my surprise that you needed understanding of the viewpoint since I've seen it expressed throughout the internet at various levels of lucidity for the last decade at least.

2. one expression might be this https://ioptconsulting.com/online-advertising-is-the-new-dig... if the Bill Hicks expression of it was not to your liking.

3. again, I was not arguing for the correctness of the belief that advertising is a cancer, I just noted that nobody should be surprised at it's existence. Maybe it's like this XKCD https://xkcd.com/1053/ in which case congratulations, I've now given you two links to why people think advertising and marketing are awful awful things.

Again, I do not necessarily see advertising as something that is cancerous, but I am familiar with expressions of the idea so I am not shocked, shocked when I encounter it.

> This way of propelling progress forward requries efficient markets, and markets need to connect products with people who want and can benefit from those products. No advertisement is directly forcing anyone to buy or do anything, they just provide information for people and help locating people who might otherwise not have knowledge of the products they might want.

That's the motte-and-bailey[0] defense of advertising that I particularly dislike. Yes, connecting products & services with people who want them is a crucial ingredient for efficient markets. But that's not what most advertising is about, that's not what the advertising industry is doing, that's not what adtech is working on. Ads as made and experienced today (and for the past 100 years), are all about emotionally manipulating people, about convincing people who know about a product to buy it when they otherwise wouldn't, about brainwashing people with brand associations so that in their moment of weakness they'll default to the advertised brand. The end result is customers making suboptimal purchasing choices, and the externalities are noise and utter destruction of all communications media.

As for "cancer on society" part - the following is an incomplete list of problems brought on us by advertising industry: spam, robocalls, telemarketing - all three having a spectrum from just annoying to outright fraud. Dark UX patterns. Blogspam, content marketing and wholesale flooding of the Internet with free garbage to gather eyeballs. Outrage-inducing news reporting. "Native advertising" (aka. just straight up dishonesty). Leaflets and other advertising material overflowing garbage bins everywhere and spilling on the pavements of every city. Excessive light pollution. Billboards distracting drivers. Social media influencers and other "individual advertisers" directly eroding trust you have in recommendations of people who aren't your immediate family. Having to protect your elderly parents from getting scammed by both criminals and reputable companies alike. Having to protect your kids from Elsagate-style video content. And yes, wholesale tracking and privacy violations too.

I could go on, and on, and on. My belief is that advertising is poisoning society from the inside, while at the same time causing absurd amounts of waste through negative-sum games (when competing for a fixed pie of customers, all your advertising efforts work to cancel out the advertising efforts of your competitors).

[0] - https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey

The root of the problem is how we measure the performance of our economy. Fix that, and all negative effects of ads will go away.

>I'm good at JavaScript, not biochemistry. How will I be curing cancer? Trick the cancer cells into calling undefined as a function?

No, that's how we get cancer in the first place. You need to trick it into calling a defined termination function.

Nobody's gonna cure cancer. We'll be able to prevent some cancers and treat others, but cancer is a large number of distinct diseases with different causes and outcomes and you can't eradicate it.

That said you don't need to be good at biochemistry to help treat cancer. The bottleneck in pharma research right now is essentially finding big enough patient groups for clinical trials, I'm sure Javascript can help with that. (And the "best ad minds" of the generation as well). What about tracking habits that may increase cancer rates? Hmmm, Javascript can help with that. What about mapping out locations that have abnormal occurences of cancer due to possible environmental factors so nobody buys a house somewhere the local plant is dumping waste into the nearby water supply? Well, there again...

Also, you can just study biochemistry and become good at it. I did just that. It's perfectly attainable and does not require extraordinary skill.

Doing software work in support of scientists trying to cure cancer. Scientists aren't curing cancer with a notebook and pen, they have have problems that a software engineer can really help with. Boring internal software, with some public-facing software.

It's not glorious work, and your team is typically understaffed and overworked. There are tradeoffs in the job, it's not for everyone. I work at New York Genome Center, and at the Broad Institute before that, both are nonprofits, and there are plenty of firms with software jobs out there where you can do "just software" and help with something meaningful.

Drop me a note, I'm happy to talk about this more. I missed the monthly jobs thread, but my group is hiring.

You mention you work at a nonprofit. Do you take volunteers as well?

We do not, we're a combination of grant-driven research, production/clinical genome sequencing, and scale computing; the work is hard to structure for ad-hoc volunteer contribution.

You are not good at "javascript" you are good at problem solving and logic.

I am good at programming, but I wasn't bad at chemistry either. I could have chosen to go study that instead, or gone into bioinformatics. I still could. There's plenty of software involved in modeling cell functions, which I imagine is pretty significant for curing cancer. Yet here I am, doing other stuff out of my free will.

I'm happy at my current job, but if I truly wanted to make the world a better place there would be more effective ways to do that (cancer research being one of them).

Many of the hardest problems facing us today in biological research are computational in nature. You could have a lot more of an impact than you think

Bioinfomatics is where a lot of research will be going on. And that's a lot closer to JavaScript than it is to biochemistry most of the time.

Genetics grad here, working in IT.

It’s an understandable sentiment but the salary one would be offered in Biology was basically laughable. Even in the so-called hotbed of biotech where I lived.

I don’t see an easy way to fix that either. Working in a politicized government funded organization would be the most likely outcome and I think most of us would hate it.

The academic model is bankrupt. No wonder a lot of people are dropping out because spending years, if not decades of low paying scholarships (at best) for the possibility of a good paying job later is just not a good proposition.

And then big companies require Masters/PhDs for people to go and do jobs when On The Job training would suffice? Yeah, does not sound good.

> Even in the so-called hotbed of biotech where I lived.

Where was that, if I could ask, and how bad is it? A "hotbed of biotech" is an entry on my list of cities to consider relocating to in the near future.

I was referring to Montreal, as there were a lot of biotech labs at the time.

I recall none of them paid above 35k$ at the time, which was the same as one would be paid handling phone support for telecoms.

This was 15 years back so things may have changed.

Not who you are replying to, but in my mind, the only two "hotbed" cities in the US that I can think of are Boston and San Diego.

Bay area (Emeryville and East Bay are pretty interesting, in addition to South SF), and Research Triangle Park (North Carolina). Seattle a bit.

Minneapolis has one of the largest biotech&medical device sectors in the US as well.

One of the brightest minds who did the same in the previous generation was Bill Gates, who then used his wealth to cure polio and is working on malaria. So maybe making money in tech isn’t actually so bad.

It's not just about money, it's about the "brightest minds" part. Injecting arbitrary amounts of money to some cancer projects won't suddenly make smart people to come back from making ads, especially if such donations are unsustainable. And you can't plan for billionaires; a Bill Gates is one-in-a-billion fluke combination of skill, upbringing, luck and conscience. For all the good Gates family is doing, you can't base humanity's most important projects on whether or not a billionaire wants to help their fellow men, instead of hoarding it all for their estate, or damaging some market in an attempt to turn their fortune into a greater fortune, or just blowing it all on heroin and hookers.

Bill Gates isn't really that much of an outlier within the class of people with that level of wealth. There is a long tradition of it stretching to the likes of Andrew Carnegie, and Gates isn't even the only modern example. Warren Buffet has committed to giving 99% of his wealth to charity. Elon Musk is Elon Musk. Any random billionaire is more likely to have a charitable foundation than not. It's pretty much impossible to spend that amount of money on heroin and hookers in practice.

The problem with relying on billionaires isn't that they won't do it, it's that they don't actually have that much money. Gates with ~$90B is #2 in the world, but spending every cent of it all in the same year would amount to less than one half of one percent of US GDP. His entire fortune is not quite half of what the US spends on just advertising each year.

> Any random billionaire is more likely to have a charitable foundation than not.

something something tax avoidance

Donations to certain charities can be tax deductions, but once you give the money to the charity, it has to be used for charitable purposes or it's not tax avoidance, it's tax fraud. Having it be used for charitable purposes seems like the thing we should want to happen to it.

Moreover, most of the things traditionally thought of as tax avoidance don't involve charities at all and are more along the lines of warehousing wealth in offshore companies where it can collect interest at low/zero tax rates.

Bill Gates has no real ability to cure polio or malaria, other than by throwing money at the problem. Other people have to do the actual work. But if the industry for those kinds of jobs isn't very good, enough people won't go into those careers at the time they need to, which is early: they need to have an interest at a young age, major in the right fields in college, specialize in postdoc, etc.

You can't just throw money at something and expect hordes of highly talented and qualified people to suddenly be available to do it.

This isn't Bill's fault (as much as I'd like to blame him for something after suffering with Windows 9x), it's a product of our society. We don't value that kind of work, we don't demand our government to fund it properly (since the "free market" isn't going to), so we get kids going into college tracks where they can be good at online advertising rather than curing cancer.

> Bill Gates has no real ability to cure polio or malaria, other than by throwing money at the problem.

This is far too simplistic. Throw a bunch of money at advertising and everyone goes to work for FAANG. Shift some of that money to disease research and suddenly people - who might have otherwise become doctors or followed a career path that paid - start realizing its a valid career path that they don’t need to sacrifice quality of life to pursue.

Yes, it’s not something that will happen overnight (it’s not like everyone immediately switched to coding once FAANG started paying a lot), but if the money is there, it will start to happen.

It's very easy to shift from some other programming work (where you have a degree in CS or similar) to working for FAANG.

You can't take a CS degree and start working in disease research, any more than you can get an MBA and start in disease research. The time to get people on that track is when they're coming out of high school.

You can't take doctors and have them work in disease research either. They'll have the necessary undergrad work most likely, but all the med school stuff just isn't useful for it, and they'll have to start over with the postdoc studies to specialize in that research. After they've already invested a fortune in med school, they're not going to do that. Who's going to pay all these people to move away from more lucrative fields into research?

The incentives are not alligned properly. Cancer patients don't pay as good as advertisers. It would help if everybody would have an expensive cancer insurance. But I guess most people don't think about cancer until it's too late. It's more fun to buy stuff after clicking on ads.

Edit: the incentive of an insurance doesn't work either :( . It should be possible to bet money on getting cancer. Everybody who bets against me gets my money in the case that I don't get cancer.

> Everybody who bets against me gets my money in the case that I don't get cancer.

That’s called universal healthcare.

Most cancer researchers aren't working on curing cancer! Rather they're working on fabricating for themselves an impressive history of published papers using p-hacking. RP:CB has been trying to reproduce many landmark cancer studies and found that 1) the majority do not reproduce or only partially reproduce and 2) that the authors of the original papers are generally hostile to attempts to reproduce their work.

I've got a PhD in genetics from Cambridge and I do security development work at Google. I'm far better at the latter, and the skills that I use on a daily basis wouldn't have made me a good fit for the former. These aren't fields where capability in one is equivalent to competence in the other.

Interestingly, I did computer science at Cambridge, and now I'm doing university research in genetics. I very much view what I'm doing as applied computer science, with a not-insignificant amount of software development.

By the way, you gave your supervisor quite a scare when you went off and got a computing job before you had submitted your thesis. I remember him lamenting about it quite clearly.

There's overlap between the fields, just as there is between, say, physics and genetics - but we don't usually end up telling physicists that they should be busy curing cancer rather than fucking about with subatomic particles. Different people have different aptitudes, and there aren't many people I've met in the FAANG space who'd I'd say would be well suited to wet lab work no matter how smart they are.

(And hey, I'd finished my revisions before I got the job, submitting them just ended up being a lower priority than moving to America and getting married…)

It's just as well there are areas of genetics that one can do just sat in front of a computer. I wouldn't trust me in a wet lab.

Does inventing gmail count? Webmail before gmail sucked, now they are essentially clones (or improvements) of gmail.

Many cancer researches use gmail (or other similar webmail) instead of the horrible internal email of the university, with a bad spam filter, small disk quotas, bad browser support (only IE6), etc.

And other researches use gmail (or a similar webmail) too, like to cure tuberculosis, eradicate polio, launch rockets, heart surgery, ...

Sounds like you'd be a fan of http://80000hours.org/

The FAANG companies might end up producing the machine learning algorithms which are key to solving many problems in biochemistry.

Ironically, one of my close colleagues left the tech sector to become an HIV epidemiologist.

I believe they had never been asked whether or not they wanted to be born intelligent and I don’t see why should they be given the burden of fixing the world when the world, quite often, turned their backs on them.

I don’t see how its their responsibility or why it should be.

Whenever you hear old timers tell a story, you know it's going to be good when it starts with, "You gotta remember, this was before AIDS." I wonder if there will be a second sexual revolution once AIDS cures are readily available.

There's still herpes, hepatitis, antiobiotic-resistant chlamidyia, etc. Still very uplifting to know that HIV might soon be behind us.

Interestingly, from what I've read, the social stigma around Herpes type 2 (the genital version) is a fairly modern thing. Before the late 1970's it seems that little distinction was made between the genital and facial variants of the disease and both were socially lumped together without one being given much moral stigma as a venereal disease. It was more in the 70's and 80's that media and pharmaceutical interests basically drew attention to the difference so that a sexual hysteria could be created around the genital variant of the virus, apparently in a way that improved antiviral drug sales.

Herpes may be less of an issue now that Pritelivir/Amenamevir is available to order from Japan. Supposedly it's more efficacious than Valacyclovir, and the effects may be combined.

Exactly, this is why behavior modification should also be emphasized.

HIV is bad but I wouldn't say it was ever a threat to humanity. Condoms and clean needles can protect you from HIV, both very accessible.

That's true if you live in a society where contraception is culturally acceptable. If you don't then condoms aren't readily available, and the spread of HIV is still a problem.

That's a society/culture, not humanity.

Then I guess the culture is the actual threat. Just like the anti-vaccination culture.

Now, slightly off-topic, thinking about this I developed my own conspiracy theory: anti-vax is spread as a way to enforce a kind of natural selection.

Abstinence is also an extremely good way to prevent contracting STDs. Imperfect, of course (there's still the risk of rape, and of bloodborne contagion), but remarkably good.

Abstinence is probably even less culturally acceptable than contraception, pretty much universally.

Chastity (i.e. having sex only with one's spouse) is less reliable than abstinence, since one's spouse may cheat, but it's also a very good way to prevent the spread of STDs. But even chastity is often culturally unacceptable, whether for both sexes (as in the U.S. today) or for men (as in many places, both historically & in the present).

It's sad — STDs could be eliminated, but … people make mistakes.

> But even chastity is often culturally unacceptable, whether for both sexes (as in the U.S. today)

You are saying that in the USA today, that "having sex only with one's spouse" (ie - your definition of "chastity") is "culturally unacceptable" here?

I'm curious on what you base this on?

I am pretty certain that being unfaithful to your spouse, or even "significant other" is still considerably frowned upon in the U.S...?

That is - I don't think it's "accepted" culturally - just tolerated (by the wider secular U.S. society). Maybe that's what you are getting at...?

I think for the most part our culture would rather those who are married to remain honest with each other, to uphold the vows they took when they were married. There is also another smaller part of our culture (of which I am in agreement with) that would say as long as all parties are aware and consenting to it - ie, open marriages - that is ok as well.

But I don't think our culture here in the U.S. completely condones unfaithfulness...?

Maybe I am wrong? Certainly something to think about; which is also why I ask...

Abstinence is as effective as a New Years resolution.

Abstinence isn’t a complete and utter failure because it’s socially unacceptable: it’s a complete and utter failure because people want to have sex. The answer isn’t trying to get people to stop having sex. For most people, that’s like asking them to stop breathing. The answer is better education and free or cheap and easily available contraceptives. And since even the best and easiest of contraceptives will occasionally fail or not be used, continuing research into STD vaccines and providing easily accessible options to women to terminate pregnancy.

Further, promoting abstinence and chastity while not promoting other options, and especially when combined with the often corresponding anti-choice politics, disproportionately and unfairly impacts the poor and uneducated, particularly the women.

I would go so far as to say it’s cruel to continue to promote abstinence today.

Monogamy is also an effective preventative strategy.

Yes, as long as your partner is doing it correctly too.

Many tragic cases involve women being infected by their cheating, promiscuous husbands.

And vice versa. We had a very infamous case of it in my country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Mol A few women brought HIV back home catching it from that "activist".

Incredibly disappointing (and predictable, as an "anti-racist, anti-fascist activist") that Mol played the race card when confronted about his HIV status.

He called the Polish people racist, and he called the Polish police racist.

What a monster.

Because only men cheat, right?

Obviously not and I did wonder about phrasing in a more gender neutral way.

However, looking at some data:

https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/estimates/riskbehaviors.html - women are at twice the risk of men in heterosexual relationships.

https://ifstudies.org/blog/who-cheats-more-the-demographics-... - men are a bit less than twice as likely to cheat.

So, risk to women would seem to be, say, about three times as much at risk. And that is not counting the additional and heavily lop-sided risk of anal intercourse for women, but I'm not sure how to quantify that.

So my gut feeling that this is something women suffer from more is potentially backed up by evidence, but not to such a disproportionate degree that my original phrasing was accurate. I'm too late to edit, but happy to consider my earlier comment rephrased with these stats.

celibacy is even better!

Wrong on two counts. First because a monogamous couple has a virtually zero chance of contracting the virus and second because celibacy is evolutionarily indistinguishable from death.

Don't delude yourself, even the monogamous couple has to go to the hospital or could, via sheer bad luck, have contracted it from a former partner (I doubt you were talking only about lifelong monogamy).

And the second comment, I don't even know what to make out of it - living also leads to death, where does evolution come into play in this discussion? By your logic, someone who gets infected and later dies from AIDS, but has had a child is better off than someone who never had kids. What kind of mental gymnastics is that?

I was talking about lifelong monogamy. This should be obvious from the "virtually impossible" descriptor. This is just basic logical reasoning.

> someone who gets infected and later dies from AIDS, but has had a child is better off than someone who never had kids. What kind of mental gymnastics is that

It's the kind of "mental gymnastics" where they propagate their genes and a celibate person doesn't. This isn't hard to understand so please don't be willfully obtuse.

Problem with this sort of moral policing is if your spouse is/becomes abusive then you can't leave them and if they die young you can't ever date/marry again.

Lifelong ends with death. And it's not moral policing, I'm not advocating armed men to force people to not be promiscuous. I'm simply stating a fact based on sound scientific reasoning. Because promiscuous people are the reservoir for STDs, not having sex with promiscuous people, which is isomorphic to lifelong monogamy, is a highly effective way to avoid STDs.

The issue is that you might think that you are in a monogamous relationship while you are being cheated on, and this is not that rare.

> celibacy is evolutionarily indistinguishable from death

So? Also, this is not really correct, sperm donations are a thing after all.

> So?

If your solution requires celibacy, the people who ignore you will be 100% of the population after one generation.

(Your “Also” seems to be a separate and valid point)

I was joking man.

Don't forget Freddie Mercury, another victim of this virus.

A victim of Tom Branson if Hollywood is to be believed.

I've almost stopped watching "movies" entirely but my wife really wanted me to watch "Bohemian Rhapsody" with her. Basically a giant pack of lies to fit the story into the "music biopic" narrative arc. Hollywood has fully embraced pandering to the masses, and their demise to the Netflixes of the world couldn't come sooner.

meanwhile a mosquito net will save 10x live as /10 the cost.

Very soon gene drive eliminating all the mosquitos will save many more lives than a mosquito net can save at the fraction of cost and effort.

But we would not be able to find it if we were only spending resources on things that save the maximal number of lives in the short term.

I’m still really alarmed by the idea of the gene drive. Suppose eliminating mosquitos has unintended consequences, such as the loss of species that feed on them, or other species that rely on their existence in some way we don’t understand yet?

But also, gene drive itself is really spooky? What happens when someone truly evil decides to use it to get rid of all the people of the ethnicity they dislike? How are we going to deal with that?

If I understand correctly, gene drives maximise individual reproductive genetic success in a way which eventually makes a species unviable. I think the specific proposal for mosquitoes is to have a female-chromosome-specific gene which forces all offspring to be female and to carry that same gene.

This takes many generations to wipe out a species; only a genocidal maniac who believes The Other are literally another species would consider it; and the capacity to create it is also the capacity to reverse it.

Is eliminating an entire species a good thing?

Much depends on your definition of "good", I expect.

Even setting aside the possibility of unforeseen negative side-effects of the change to ecosystems, etc., it's not clear to me that minimising human sickness is an absolute "good" that outweighs any other effects, and it's not clear how we should evaluate the deliberate extinction of another species.

How many human lives must be saved to justify an extinction? (Of course, those human lives aren't really "saved" in a long-term sense; they're still going to die, just from some other cause. Meanwhile, the extinct species remains permanently extinct.)

How many species can we justify eliminating in order to stop a given disease? One? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? Does the answer depend on whether they're cute and furry?

Lots of conflicting information here, but the TL;DR - probably, but maybe not.

Perhaps you should compare mosquito nets to condoms.

There's no religious institution prohibiting the use of mosquito nets though.

I've worked in kitchens where hairnets over beards was mandatory though.

maybe too soon to claim victory - this is only the second, and we don't know about any side-effects, short-term or Long-term. This is genetic manipulation after all.

I think the above poster was referring to the advancements in treatment, since HIV is no longer a death sentence even without a full cure.

Just to give some numbers:

Ahead of World AIDS Day, UNAIDS has launched a new report showing that access to treatment has risen significantly. In 2000, just 685 000 people living with HIV had access to antiretroviral therapy. By June 2017, around 20.9 million people had access to the life-saving medicines.

http://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/pressreleasea...

For anyone who doesn’t remember what that period was like, see contemporary works like the movie Philidelphia or the documentary Paris is Burning or the musical Rent. (Those are some that spring to mind anyway after all these years.)

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