Spend less time thinking about getting sex and sharing photos. Spend more time thinking about how to solve hard problems. Spend less time thinking about "us" and "them" and more time thinking about "everyone".
The reason people work on sexting apps over curing cancer is because it is a more human problem than curing cancer. In all your tunnel-visioned dash to label problems as "hard and "worthy" you are the one that missed the forest from the trees. All people will die, and while it would be great if they could stick around a bit longer without pain, the biggest difference is how people spend their lives today. If they can spend it connecting with other people they care about, and derive meaning from that, that is a thousandfold more compelling problem.
It's not that other people don't have their incentives and values right, it's that you don't recognize them.
There are many players in the game now who are in it more so for the hopes of striking in rich and social currency than the actual joy of solving problems, surprise surprise. This is why the app stores are flooded with endless spinoffs and knockoffs of the same things over and over again.
Substanceless apps are not only objectively easier than curing cancer, there are much lower barriers to entry. In fact, for some perverse reason, our society seems to feel that the most trustworthy process for handling real, major problems like cancer research is to erect the highest possible barriers to entry, throw even the survivors out of the field at every least opportunity, and then place absolute trust in the few who survive this winnowing process.
The concept that treating everything serious as a tournament-structured winnowing process might have some negative impact on the ability of our research institutions to actually treat and cure cancer does not seem to occur.
I took the side of the issue that I did because its what was discussed in the article; I definitely agree that the medical cartel system we have in place here is also a huge problem. Its the only industry I can think of where the number of new practitioners allowed to enter the field is a function of the number of existing practitioners.
You have a good point, but unfortunately you're still missing the point. Not being able to effectively cure cancer isn't the issue Silicon Valley is facing. As others have said, as software engineers, we would have gone to school to do bioinformatics and study the natural sciences if that's what we wanted. The issue is that a vast number of people are working on shitty, pointless, worthless apps.
It has nothing to do with barriers to entry. What kind of problems do you learn to solve in this field? Computational ones, i.e. things involving facets of computing. So why are less companies devoting resources to working on facets of networking, optimizing computer architecture, writing more efficient compilers and operating systems? Things that software engineers should have plenty of knowledge on, and would be much more beneficial to society than the next bullshit social app. Why is this not the case?
That is what the author is addressing. Churning out photosharing app #35875 isn't helping anyone. But maybe if people started taking pride in the notion of being a hacker and a computer scientist, and actually solving shit worth solving instead of stamping those phrases on their Twitter pages for social approval, then just maybe the Valley could gain some credibility back.
I can think of a couple reasons:
1) Because hardware/microarchitecture companies do devote effort to architecture and compilers.
2) Because low-level software/OS companies do devote effort to networking, compilers, and operating systems.
3) Because network effects mean that only a very few mutually incompatible languages and OS's can survive on the open market, with a larger but still fairly small variety surviving on open-source volunteer efforts.
>Not being able to effectively cure cancer isn't the issue Silicon Valley is facing.
Oh really? Aren't there some computational problems we could work on that have cancer-cure-level impacts?
"Spend less time thinking about getting sex" hahahahaha yeah okay.
Look, maybe when you're in your 30s or 40s and you've got the wife and the kids and the minivan and the bills and the mortgage you can focus on the more noble things in life, like making the world a better place so that your progeny will have an easier time of it.
But, in the meantime, for those of us without children, fucking is a pressing issue.
EDIT:
I'll be still more blunt--the people who gain the most from us "making the world a better place" are those with kids and a stake in society. You are trying to take advantage of us.
You should've gotten us healthcare, but you fucked it up. You should've gotten us a safety net, but you fucked it up. You should've gotten us cheaper student loans, but you fucked it up. You should've gotten us more affordable housing, but you fucked it up.
So, no, I'm not going to help you beat cancer so you can spend an extra year with your kids (who are going to be bankrupt the rest of their lives because of your medical bills).
EDIT2:
You couldn't even manage to kick out the bastards in office who are running the alphabet-soup agencies that are ruining our country. There. There's your fucking legacy.
In 20 years someone will be writing your post about you!
I still find time to try and chase tail--after all, it's the oldest game in the world, and if you're not playing, you might as well be dead, right?
:)
I think it may be overblown a bit sometimes, but there is definitely truth to this.
And further, where did they come from?
Honestly though, I suspect most of the people sitting there writing those silly apps wouldn't be able to do things like cure Cancer or aid in creating vaccines and etc. anyway, so I think the issue may be a tad overblown. Many of these "app developers" are actually people who simply learned to write code on some site and simply churn out games, sex-apps and such just hoping one will catch on and make them lots of money; thats really it.
I really don't think many pathologists, biologists, etc. are wasting most of their time making some silly app that "disrupts" how people share naked photos.
Incentives, please? I would guess that maybe 20 years earlier, being an engineer who spent all their time working on something that sounds boring like "making better semiconductor materials" probably got more recognition and social status than it does now. If I say something like "Oh yeah, I work on gallium arsenide diodes at [research company]", people at parties are going to nod off before I can get to 'diodes'.
Why would a 20-something want to work for the likes of, say, JPL, when they can get tons more pay and recognition by working at, say, Facebook?
No, I think it has more to do with the fact that people who work on things that matter more in the long run should be offered those "shallow incentives" as you call them by a societal structure. Society (at least in the US) has withdrawn those incentives (a stable family, recognition of intelligence vs. being popular); and the result is that people are moving away from anything that doesn't offer them more recognition -- of any kind.