[mdakin]

I've had an idiosyncratic but highly useful definition of the word 'genius' since I was a little kid thanks to my mother. She taught me that a genius is an intuitive/rational thinker-feeler-person who was lucky enough to somehow line it all up for humanity in his/her mind and bring something big into the world that changes it for the better. If you think about all the real geniuses-- that criteria holds.

There is not much academic research into genius these days but there is research into intuitive people and intuition. And there is also related work in psychology about self-actualization and the other mental-processes.

But eventually it all comes down to someone doing something breathtakingly interesting-- you can't really roll that step off an assembly-line.

I percieve one of the problems with the world right now is that lots of the most highly-competent/skilled people are sort of holding off doing big things, esp. with technology. The number of intuitive man-hours that have been poured into the subject of online advertising is staggering. Those people working on that are capable of actual works of genius. But instead they feel motivated to work for a big company on long-term useless problems. But I understand this: if you look at what the last waves of true high-tech are i.e. computer/communication/aerospace/nuclear vs. what their "fruits" have been i.e. surveilance-state/police-state/military-industrial-complex/mass production and mass proliferation of WMDs. It's quite disgusting.

Anyway, I know why I'm working on "social technology" and "consumer technology" instead of "high technology."

[jared314]

> But instead they feel motivated to work for a big company on long-term useless problems.

I remember this opinion also surfacing with the Steve Yegge OSCON 2011 presentation[1]. In which he complained about Google, and all the hard working people there, focusing on social media instead of hard problems. There was a good discussion as to why these problems are not in the forefront.

[1] http://youtu.be/vKmQW_Nkfk8?t=5m47s

Subsequent discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811818

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2011/07/hacker-news-fires-st...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2814032

[mdakin]

I think hard problem vs. social media problem is a false dichotomy. I wish people would focus on wise problems. High tech is too dangerous at this moment, even though it's the best stuff to work on long-term for humanity.

[a_bonobo]

So you're saying that only good comes from "social technology" while mixed things have come from "high technology", so working in social tech is "morally" better?

I think social technology has enabled the surveillance of more people than ever before in history - a more than mixed bag. Not only that, new graph theoretical approaches that come from Facebook, Google etc. can easily be used to track humans using non-social technology, as well.

[mdakin]

I don't see this as a good/bad/moral calculation. I see it as a practical calculation. We don't need to go into the moral domain when the cause and effect domain is capable of completely outlining the problem.

Working on high tech is dangerous as long as the world is run by warlords and the USA is a surveillance/police state. The last several rounds of high-tech have been utilized by a dynastic, authoritarian power-class to make the world a more horrible place while benefiting themselves, their families, friends, and other cronies.

[001sky]

This is an interesting post. The attraction of advertising is two fold: (1) its passive income; (2) its highly scalable. One of the problems with it as a source of "innovation" is that it is primarily an accelerant. It can either accelerate the adoption (a) of non-ad-tech; or (b) the accumulation of debt. Both of these can be "productive", but only up to a point.

[mdakin]

I think you're right about the "attraction of advertising." But the real attraction there is that (1)+(2)=(money pump). And these companies don't seem to know what to do with the type of money pump they are capable of building. It just sort of piles up. :)