Comment by aclimatt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aclimatt | Hacker News Reader

I applaud your mission to try and improve lives, and I believe that every start-up should focus on just that. I would also like to give it a little perspective though.

There is generally an inverse correlation between the effectiveness of solving a problem and the directness of the approach. If you would like to cure cancer, the most effective way is to cure cancer. The next most direct approach is to help the doctors who are curing cancer. The next most direct approach is to help the medical companies who are helping the doctors who are curing cancer. And so on.

Having "a mission" is of paramount importance to succeeding, but it bothers me when we believe we're on a mission to solve a problem that we're simply not solving. A photo sharing application could say they're improving the lives of cancer patients by allowing them to see photos of their grandchildren, and yes, by the letter that is a true statement, and honestly maybe that's all the patient really wanted -- to see photos of their grandchildren, but to me it seems like an indirect drop in the bucket toward solving the real problem.

I feel like this thinking is actually poisonous to the ecosystem. It prevents us from solving the real problems we've set out to solve by deluding us to think that by building some indirect tool for people who may help people who may help people who may actually solve the problem, we've accomplished our mission. We haven't. It's a text editor, and you have to see it for what it is. If we want to cure cancer, we need to sit down, understand the problem landscape, and solve it without five layers of indirection. Otherwise, we shouldn't be stealing the thunder of those whose actual mission is to cure cancer.

I apologize if my post implies I believe we're out curing cancer - we're not and that was not my intent. If you point out to me where I've somehow stated that, I'll be happy to fix it.

That being said, I'm not sure I agree with your argument. Both indirect and direct means are ultimately necessary for any serious change or innovation. By your logic, a microscope is just an item that lets you see things up close. Now imagine a world without it. We'd certainly be hard-pressed to do much in the medical field. Tools, by definition, enable us to do something we couldn't do before or increase the efficiency of something we did have the ability to do. Without advancements in tools, we won't get very far.

If a new "text editor" ends up providing us a much more efficient means of creating things like Watson, in what way is that not just as important as curing any one disease? The argument is certainly not that one case is better than the other, just that I've decided to go down a different path, one that I believe is just as important. I can fix 100% of something or increase everything by 1% - I believe the latter is the best thing I can do at this point.

Both direct and indirect tools are absolutely equally necessary, and my apologies if that sentiment did not come through -- I would never debate the usefulness or effectiveness of these tools, but instead their fitness for achieving a specific goal.

The parallel to curing cancer was mainly drawn from this paragraph:

I could've become a doctor. All signs pointed to me likely being a very good one. In doing so, I would have gone to work and done my best to save lives every day. In that context, how is some programming environment a greater contribution to the world? Truthfully, it wouldn't be if I just set out to build an IDE. But that's not what I did - Light Table is just a vehicle for the real goal. While an IDE probably won't directly save someone's life, the things people are able to build with it could do exactly that.

To your main point:

If a new "text editor" ends up providing us a much more efficient means of creating things like Watson, in what way is that not just as important as curing any one disease?

Absolutely. I'm not arguing its importance, I'm arguing its effectiveness at achieving a mission, which I interpreted as curing cancer / saving lives. If you "increase everything by 1%", that is fantastic! And it has furthered many different missions 1% closer to their goals. This is very much important and necessary to the advancement of society, but its mission specifically should be put into context.

A microscope is a fundamental tool to help scientists do their best work. Thus, a person setting out to build one, in my opinion, has the opportunity to profoundly impact science's understanding of the human body and the world we live in. This understanding, further, can help scientists achieve their missions of curing disease, et cetera. But while the microscope plays a very important role in science, I believe it is unfair to the scientists for the microscope maker to believe that he is accomplishing his mission of curing disease by inventing one. Rather, he should be achieving his mission of helping our understanding of science, and/or furthering the missions of his users.

I get your point, I really do. It's a decent argument, but if that's his gasoline, let him use it. Motivation is a hard thing to come by and his story just illustrates how hard it can be to focus and build something when dealing with emotional issues.

I don't think it hurts anyone when he says he's helping solve cancer, he's not stealing anyone's thunder. There's plenty of evidence of tool/library developers not getting any credit in the end product. If someone directly finds a cure using Light Table as their IDE, I'm pretty damn sure not a lot of people are going to seek out Chris and congratulate him on curing cancer. But he would've helped and that's the important thing. So let him have his motivation and keep building things.

I don't know why the parent comment got down voted (other than being a bit harsh). I agree that too little is being done to cure cancer directly. Unfortunately, I see two main causes for this:

* Too many successful people (especially founders) end up having an "I've got mine" mentality. They take the money and run instead of seeing their wealth as a grant from society, in other words a kind of debt that they should pay back by applying their skills to really helping others.

* Everyone is in denial about aging and illness. So the real causes of cancer - alcohol and tobacco, too little regulation in food, pollution, and the real kicker: the inequality that causes the social ills that amplify these problems - are not being attacked by the population at large. To me, the sense that we are powerless as individuals to do something about disease is an indictment of capitalism at large.

I think the worst sin, as far as the golden rule goes, is to reach a position of privilege and power and do nothing to change the system that got you there. By that measure, the vast majority of people of influence are failing. I never see myself having a net worth of more than perhaps a few hundred thousand dollars (enough for a home and family), because I know in my heart that society has done more for me than I can every hope to pay back. So I plan to be rolling any wealth I acquire into disruptive technologies and giving grants to people who have a shot at really making life better instead of distracting us.

Insightful comment. You might be interested in checking out the book Twilight of the Elites by Chris Hayes. It talks a lot about societal inequality and the concept of "elite failure", which I think you've alluded to.

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