[misterremote]

I’m often thinking about the same thing, but not only in tech.

Like why this photo filter app boy/girl is super rich + has a lot of free time, and my friend nurse has very little money and works all the time?

[ryanlol]

Because being a nurse doesn’t scale. It’s better to provide a small amount of value to 100 million people than immense value to 10 people.

[c22]

It's kind of subjective to say this is better. If 100 million people had a bunch of cool image filter apps on their phone but no access to medical care the outcome is pretty clearly not better.

Perhaps it's more reasonable to say that providing a small amount of value to a larger amount of people is more profitable.

[ryanlol]

Luckily this isn’t a binary choice, the more profitable cool image filter app takes nothing away from healthcare.

The world is full of people who simply aren’t capable of providing “value” at scale. Odds are that society gets better outcomes when the few who can do so pursue things like silly image filter apps (and sometimes actually useful things too) over nursing careers.

[c22]

This may be true today, but it is a lot easier to build a silly image filter app now than it was 10 years ago. If the incentives remain skewed in favor of "highly distributed but small value" contributions to society while the difficulty of making such contributions also decreases we may, in fact, see a shortage of nurses.

[misterremote]

Yeah. And I'm also thinking about the value you give to the world, you know. Like these photo filter apps. How do they improve our life here on Earth.

They rather have negative effects I would say: like a bad impact on teenager's self esteem or something like that.

But yeah, it's our society and it's values :)

[ryanlol]

That filter app probably makes people laugh or at least smile, that’s value right there.

[amelius]

The question is: should everybody pursue work that is of low value and scales well? Because that is what seems to be more and more the case.

In a way, scaling/globalism seems to be working against us.

[ryanlol]

For a variety of reasons most people can’t. Those who can probably should.

Let’s also not forget the possibility of highly valuable and highly scalable pursuits.

[amelius]

There are still two problems here:

1. People with the talent to make high-value/low-scale products (e.g. medical imaging) are working on low-value/high-scale products (silly apps). This is similar to how our brightest minds are making people click ads.

2. Apple and the HN reality distortion field make everybody (even those without the skills) believe they can become rich by creating low-value/high-scale apps.