[paul]

When people complain about entrepreneurs building social networks instead of curing cancer, they need to understand that this is a big part of the reason. The internet attracts so much innovation in large part because it's very open to innovation. In more regulated/corrupt (the two are closely related) fields, such as health care, there are many barriers to competition that kill innovative new companies. Mobile was actually very similar to this in the pre-iPhone era (because you needed to make deals with carriers). This in turn leads to less investment, since it's kind of dumb to invest in a doomed company.

We're at a point in history where most of our problems are social/political. Our technology is good enough to make the world into a nice place for everyone, but we don't do it because our social "software" is broken. It's easy to make fun of Facebook or Reddit as being all about sharing cat picture, but the reality is that they also are changing the flow of information and influence to be much more peer-to-peer instead of top down (e.g. three television networks). Many will disagree, but I believe that in the long term society will evolve to match this more egalitarian structure. The most effective way to cure cancer may be to first cure the social disfunctions that lead to the types of situations described in this article.

[DanielBMarkham]

Wish I could double-upvote you, Paul. Health care has been regulatory-captured for a long time now. (Obligatory blog link to relevant anecdote: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/06/if-we-told-yo... )

I don't know if anybody has read Thomas Kuhn, but this has a parallel in how science works. Science gets "stuck" in one way of thinking. During this time, people work on small details and innovate in tiny ways around the edges. After enough pressure builds up for a change, there's a paradigm shift (he was the guy who coined the phrase) and people start working in the new world.

Complex, rule-based systems of people are mostly quantum by nature. Progress is never a straight line. Instead, it stays frustratingly far away, then it jumps. The stuff you read about in school where everything happened in a linear, step-by-step fashion was just a bowdlerized version of things they tell kids.

Hopefully the system does not require an extreme amount of pressure and our next jump is not too far away. (Apologies to students of Kuhn if I butchered his thesis badly. This is what I got from his work)

[asr]

Not to derail, but the regulatory capture in this article is mostly an absence of enforcement of laws. Retractable Technologies had to file their own antitrust suit because the DOJ and FTC wouldn't investigate GPOs.

The next time someone suggests antitrust laws are uniformly bad and should be abolished due to their (mis)application in tech, this is a great counterpoint.

[eaurouge]

No, the reason many entrepreneurs are building social networks is because many of those entrepreneurs don't have the technical chops to cure cancer or to solve more difficult problems. Solving difficult problems often requires either deep domain knowledge or solid technical expertise in areas more challenging than web/phone app development. There's a much higher barrier to entry.

Mind you there's a fair number of entrepreneurs out there solving difficult problems. But they're not as many and they don't get as much press.

[paul]

People choose what to focus on based in part on the expected benefits.

I was very interested in biology in high school. Part of the reason that I ended up working with computers instead is that the feedback is much faster (compile and run) and the leverage much greater (e.g. Bill Gates got rich with a software company, not a life sciences company). Needless to say, I don't regret choosing software over biology.

[eaurouge]

I agree that software solutions can be leveraged for more financial success than (say) hardware solutions. I also decided to switch focus (at least temporarily) from what would have been a medical devices startup to software for that reason, among others.

But I think an entrepreneur's skill set is more of a limiting factor in the type of startup he/she can decide to pursue. After all there are problems that are potentially more lucrative than social networks but if you don't have the domain expertise or technical knowledge to solve those problems you may not even know they exist and if you did, would not be able to solve them.

There's a more extensive discussion on this here: http://swombat.com/2012/1/19/idea-reach-cofounder-myth

[HeyLaughingBoy]

This is the kind of thing that's so disheartening. I work for a large medical device maker and on a daily basis I see the gross inefficiencies in the way we do business. It's been obvious to me for years that a much smaller company could build exactly the same things we do and do it better, but the enormous barriers to entry mean you need millions just to start playing the game.

The regulations are another hurdle, but I think they are easier to get through since everyone is on the same playing field in that regard. But getting your product into hospitals and labs? There's a battle I don't even know where to start fighting.

Maybe it's time to start looking exclusively at foreign markets.

[Retric]

Building App's is ridiculously simpler than solving major problems like cancer. Consider the smartest person you ever met could spends their entire life working on a cancer cure with everything they had and chances are they would have saved more lives by donating 10% of their salary to a vaccination program.

[paul]

Yeah, cancer definitely isn't the "low hanging fruit". Hospital errors and infections would be much easier to address, though as this article shows, even that is nearly impossible.

[earbitscom]

Fighting cancer is a $200B+ industry. It's not cured yet because 1 million people would suddenly be unemployed.

[Retric]

Whenever I hear people say stuff like this I there is a huge part of me that wants to say: Science and magic are not the same thing, just because you can describe something does not mean you can actually do it. I realize it's not productive, but people seem to confuse sci-fi physics and medicine with actual physics and medicine.

The simplest explanation I have come up with goes something like this. Cancer is you, the only thing that cancer describes is the breakdown of the billion year contract that enabled Multicellular organism to exist in the first place. There is no single way to tell cancer from non cancer and just as importantly almost cancer cells from normal healthy cells. You can literally have 2 different cancers at the same time that are closer to you genetically than each other. Out of something like 10^(10^10) viable forms of cancer, a few themes are vastly more common, but the edge cases are effectively endless.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/personalized-m...

PS: A billion years from now we might not find a way to travel faster than light because it might not be possible. It might not seem like it, but I am not convinced it's possible cure all possible forms of cancer in a human body. However, people with cancer are serving far longer after all this research than they where 40 years ago and continuing down this path hopefully we can transform cancer from one of the more common and nasty ways to die to something as rare as lighting strikes.

[ktizo]

There's even more money spent on fighting idiocy, but despite the evident failure in your case I don't think that teachers have conspired in order to try and guarantee a future salary.

[brc]

This agrees with a personal belief I hold which is that no monopoly can exist for long without a government assisting it.

The worst monopolies always seem to me to be underwritten by government policies. The worst part is that, for the most part, the policies were created to try and do the right thing, but end up doing the opposite.

[kfk]

That is true, but the typical HN reader entrepreneur is missing also a big chunk of field knowledge. Those that are in the field, instead, don't read HN. It's a cycle of miscomunication on both sides.

[smokeyj]

So is regulation the answer or the cause?

[paul]

Both.

I think it's a little bit like asking whether programmers are the cause of bugs, or the solution. The problem is that the regulations are being created by people who are either incompetent, corrupt, or possibly both. Unfortunately people in government don't really have the right set of incentives, and so it's not surprising that the results are awful. Imagine if software were written in the same way that laws are written :(

[pjscott]

It's easy to get into murky arguments about this, but I think it's safe to say that regulation can, and often does, prevent market competition from solving problems like this.

[robomartin]

Yes!