[dm2]

>> By this logic no one should ever work on really hard problems.

Maybe the key is that not just anyone should work on really hard problems, if you have an advantage or enough capital then nobody is stopping you. Someone with a PhD in clinical research has a much higher percentage "chance" of succeeding at a difficult medicinal problem than >99.999% of the rest of the population. Maybe the best approach would be to help funnel funds to specific cancer research groups.

If you start with nothing and have the goal of curing cancer, it just isn't going to happen (<0.001% chance of success or even progress).

[toufka]

It gets weirder too. In SF I can make substantially more money working for a random social startup than I can working as a postdoc directly on cancer-curing science. I have the capacity to work on such science at a high level, or a social startup at a pretty moderate level. But society has worked its compensation out such that being a highly trained PhD is far less compensated than someone working on the tech scene.