[mamp]

Very interesting interview, but I couldn't help be saddened by this:

"...my PhD research was on Gaussian random fields, with particular application to brain imaging data. The bulk of my work at Google is in other areas, since I work for the Ads Quality Team..."

I wonder how much innovation in health and other important areas are hampered by the draw of bright people like Nick to the quest for ads and likes. Follow the money I guess.

[drunkpotato]

This probably won't make you any less sad. Apologies in advance.

It's not simply a matter of throwing money and brains at healthcare. I used to work on data analysis at a healthcare startup. There is no shortage of driven, talented, intelligent people making businesses in that space. There are giant firehoses of money in healthcare as well, both effective uses and of the boondoggle variety.

So it's not solely the lure of money that draws bright people out of healthcare. It could also be the realization that nothing you ever did would be more effective than getting doctors to wash their hands, and doctors still don't do that.

Many people are brilliant enough to make wonderful tools, but it seems that nobody is brilliant enough to overcome a system that doesn't want to use them. Whereas if you make a tool that helps businesses sell advertisements, or whatever the source of revenue, there is a higher chance people will actually use it.

[chime]

> It could also be the realization that nothing you ever did would be more effective than getting doctors to wash their hands, and doctors still don't do that.

If you could invent some sort of mechanism that told doctors to wash hands, I think they would be more likely to. Here's a few ways to do that:

1. Google Glasses with OpenCV - touching blood, bodily fluids etc. sets an alarm that doctors must either snooze till later or walk up to a sink to silence.

2. Special gloves that instantly turn green when coming in contact with the most common bacteria.

3. Wrist watch / mobile device that beeps loudly every time a doctor goes from one patient to the next without stopping by a sink.

I agree that hospitals and doctors don't want to change because that takes time. However, there is no point in giving up today because your work isn't going to be popular for two more decades.

[skore]

Is there something missing in your post? You write that throwing money doesn't work... and later mention that doctors still don't wash their hands. It seems like there was something in between where you gave an abstract of that problem?

[S4M]

The same could be said about all the PhD's in maths and physics who went to work as quant in Wall Street.

[martinced]

Well the same about finance is certainly said, even by billionaires, like Warren Buffet. Paraphrasing Buffet here:

"The biggest tragedy of our time is that so many brilliant minds go work in the finance field"

and also, still Buffet: "Finance is the crumbs of capitalism".

Now I'd say that the reality is quite complicated: nearly anything that helps grow the GDP has a positive effect on technological progress.

Even finance, by providing liquidity, plays an important role. Now when a country like the UK has 8% of its GDP coming out of the city obviously there's something inherently rotten: you can't just have an economy made of nothing. 8% of finance is way, way, way too much and it doesn't take a genius to see were we're heading: major crisis after major crisis. These "brilliant minds" in finance managed to create crazy derived products totally unrelated to the fundamentals of the economy and it cannot possibly be good.

So it's all about finding a % that works, just as with everything. Let's take the "geniuses" that go into politics and raise public spending in a good Keynesian fashion to 67% of the GDP like Sweden in 1993 (recent The Economist article)... Government deficit running out of control, public debt accumulating fast and, eventually, lowering the % of public spending to saner level (49% in 2012) and reducing the public debt.

There's a place for ads. There's a place for a disrupting company like Google who brought us so many things (including a free OS for smartphones, cutting the grass under would be monopolist' feets like Apple or Microsoft). There's a place for finance. There's a place for reasonable public spendings (what there probably should be no place for are crazy socialists who are going to use intellectual terrorism to get elected and then constantly raise the power of the state and raise public spendings, constantly strangling the public sectors and destroying the entrepreneur mindset and, inevitably, leading to state default and authoritarian states).

The question is: "Which % of the economy should it represent so that we work efficiently?".

Just as with nearly everything: "Which % of the GDP should public spendings represent before there are diminishing returns?" (hint: it's way lower than what socialists think it should be but I'm still a statist: I'm not an anarchist and I do believe there should be a reasonable state).

Mostly, I'm siding with Buffet and with GP here: there are two many great minds working on too many bullshits.

[bearmf]

I work in finance. The vast majority of what quants do is meaningless work which is only (maybe) useful to their employer. Most of them, if you ask about usefulness of their work, will probably conjure some bs argument about "providing liquidity", "making markets efficient" or "controlling risk".

The reality is that people do it for the money and prefer not to think about deeper matters. Some of the work is also really interesting and cutting-edge. But if you start rationally thinking about your contribution to society, the only answer is that there is none. If you want to do something useful, you leave finance.

[Houshalter]

Well the money is coming from somewhere. There is certainly some benefit to finance as opposed to advertising which is annoying and manipulative (though to be fair it has funded Google, television, and most websites, but again, the money is coming from somewhere.)

[bearmf]

Your argument seems to be that if someone is paying you for what you are doing then you are useful to that someone. Which is of course true. But then if you are really intent on figuring out what is going on, the next question is who is paying your employer and what is your employer actually doing to earn their money. Many people conveniently forget about this step.