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Comment by tomaszs | Hacker News Reader

Lets spend 1% of what we spend on wars and smartphones - on science. We wont have flu, cancers, fever and pandemics after 5 years.

Its shameful our high level civilization is threatened by a primitive virus.

We will now spend 100 times more on survival than we would need to spend to prevent a lots of deseases and pandemics in the first place.

Whole science power and money of our civilization is wasted on smartphones and wars. And health scientists work almost for free.begging for years for our attention. And we are where we are.

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Oddly enough, "the war machine" in particular has driven R&D and science for thousands of years. I encourage you to look into the technologies that DARPA and others have had a hand in creating. Not to mention they fund things like cancer research already.

Smartphones have given millions of people access to information they would never have. Smartphones are the sum of 30 years of computer R&D, making them cheap enough that Kenya has more then 80% of there population online [1]

The issues you listed would take significantly more time then “five years” to cure.

I think there is room to argue how defense money is distributed and used.

[0] First link when searching for DARPA inventions: https://www.itpro.co.uk/technology/34730/10-amazing-darpa-in...

[1] https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/business/article/2001273507/...

Yes - Army had impact on development. War - didnt. Even if we discuss research caused by wars i am 100% sure these would be made a lots faster without an actual war.

And also - its natural army attracts some bright minds because sometimes only army has resources and money to fund research. So as long as it is used for good cause it makes sense as a symbiosis

That is a falicy. Because we got something you notice it, but you have no idea what we missed because we were focused on what we got instead of something else. Maybe we would get smart phones sooner in some other alternative universe, we don't know.

If the money spent on space and military was spent on genetic engineering we might not have smart phones, but we would have fire breathing dragons!

> First link when searching for DARPA inventions:

The article only mentiones in passing - ARPA, as it was called back then - that DARPA was once ARPA, and doesn't explore how DARPA's rate of invention tanked after the passage of the Mansfield Amendment.

This is a longer story that's relevant to the war is great for research! claim.

Wishful thinking in a world where human resources(!) are expendable and replaceable whereas wealth and power are not.

Also, throwing money at a problem doesn't automatically solve it. Progress often depends on few individuals with crucial ideas, but you'll have to get those interested in your problem first.

Good point. But also currently research requires expensive equipment, interdisciplinary cooperation. It all takes money. So its true. Throwing money at a problem does not solve it. But its not possible even for a brightest people do the research if they dont have money for research tools and financial safety.

I'd argue that exceptionally smart people and capable people usually have financial safety early in their lives - and this kind of research has plenty of funding available. It's probably just that other problems or goals seem more interesting until you are personally affected.

Money does get smart people interested. Of course they have their own ideas, but money directs things.

I'm a great C++ programmer (or so I like to think) because I have been paid to write C++. I could write any other language if I had been paid (and I have but the rest were unique to the client)

We have vaccines for flu. Every year, a probabilistic determination is made of which strains will be a problem and those are put into the vaccine. That people still get it is down to incorrect guesses and inadequate herd immunity. The vaccine is super cheap (as low as $20 out-of-pocket and free via most US health insurance).

Cancer isn’t “one thing” that can have one cure, and it’s silly to think otherwise.

Of course cancer is not one thing. But the truth is research with the little money we spend on it, is very advanced if you take almost any cancer into account. What is missing is money to push these efforts into final results.

Cancer’s not one thing but there’s some things you can do to generally improve your odds.

A doctor and an oncologist won’t tell you these things because they’re not even thinking about them. They likely don’t even know how to answer the question “can vitamins help some cancers?” Instead, mine repeated word for word responses about how we get most of our vitamins from a healthy diet. Then said he’d have to look it up.

Ask them about IGF1 levels, fasting, ketogenic diets they mostly won’t know. They simply say there is NOTHING you can do to prevent getting cancer.

It’s the system’s fault, the doctors and surgeons are just human beings who have no incentive to be practical.

I know we’re not supposed to refer to downvotes, but I had cancer and I worked in medicine. My points are valid and downvoting them is analogous is to the collectivist groupthink in medicine.

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