[adamlangsner]

I think I'm the only one here who liked this article.

While there are some good, albeit somewhat pedantic, points raised in the comments. I think we may be missing the forest for the trees.

There is a sort of sophomoric myopia that exists in silicon valley and maybe it's not technology per se that is the problem, but in fact the incentives created around the tech community. I think the problem is more accurately described as the combination of access to large amounts of capital and low cost mass communication/experimentation technologies (i.e. the internet). This has a created a culture that thinks they can solve any problem with one of the two.

But I think what's even worse is that the solutionists subconsciously have an unspoken prerequisite to "solving" a problem, which is "It needs to be wildly profitable". And it's that incentive that lead to the myopia and pervert the "solutions" they create.

Instacart and Uber are great examples. Did they actually solve a problem? For whom did they solve it for? For whom did they not solve it for? Did they make certain things worse than they were before? You probably have your own answers to those questions.

[peytn]

I liked it too. In the case of the pandemic, if we were as smart as we think we are, we would’ve had the public doing drills. We didn’t put in the work ahead of time. The countries that’ve done well are the countries that faced SARS back in 2003.

I don’t blame anybody for not wanting to go along with these just-in-time pandemic fixes or for self-soothing with misinformation. Educational initiatives would’ve been funded and followed during swine flu with little difficulty. We’ve had ten years to pull together a well-orchestrated plan and build up our societal immune system.