[jmsduran]

I don't blame people choosing to work in other business areas rather than putting their efforts in fixing government, curing cancer, improving medicine, rebooting our space program, fixing education, etc.

Why? Because it's honestly very hard work, often with little recognition and less pay. People trying to innovate or 'disrupt' these fields are up against deep rooted political institutions, large corporations with millions to spend on lobbying efforts, and a broken legal/patent system that favors those who exploit its many loopholes.

That said, I have great respect for people who devote their time and effort for the greater good.

[api]

"fixing government, curing cancer, improving medicine, rebooting our space program, fixing education, etc."

I think a big part of it is less pay. Important things pay very little compared to frivolous metoo.io apps and social advertising and whatever.

Capitalism is a greedy optimizer. When it finds a local maximum it goes all in. It does not explore the fitness landscape.

[msandford]

I think another part of the problem is that there aren't really any important things in the public sector right now. The last public sector thing that engineers got excited about was the Apollo program.

Fixing government? Yeah you might be able to modernize a lot of the tech stack that runs various governmental entities but you're not going to actually fix the entities. You'll be implementing failed or broken policies in node.js instead of cobol. It's a step in the right direction but it doesn't actually fix the core of what's broken.

Curing cancer? There's no Federal Department of Stopping Cancer, either you work for a big pharmaceutical company or you get a PhD and scramble for grant money.

Rebooting our space program? That happens every administration and it always starts with some kind of dream to do audacious thing X that won't get any significant funding.

Fixing education? I'm not really sure where to start here. You can't fix from within since there's a constant struggle by the administrators to stay in power because teachers don't have any upwards mobility besides administration. And trying to fix it from the outside? That's even tougher, Kahn Academy has some traction with people but little with teachers who fear it'll put them out of work.

Find me something inspiring that's not going to be mired in politics and bullshit and I'm all ears. I don't think any of those are all that inspiring. I'd even deal with less pay for something really impressive.

[jmalicki]

>Curing cancer? There's no Federal Department of Stopping >Cancer, either you work for a big pharmaceutical company or >you get a PhD and scramble for grant money.

Actually, there is a Federal Department of Stopping Cancer - the National Cancer Institute.

http://www.cancer.gov/

[msandford]

Point taken.

But it's got a $5b a year budget which is pretty small in the biotech world. It's even worse when you consider that 42% of it is grant money. So my statement isn't quite right, but in my opinion, still close to right. Maybe 70% true.

http://www.cancer.gov/aboutnci/budget_planning_leg/plan-2013...

http://obf.cancer.gov/financial/factbook.htm

Inflation adjusted NASA's budget during the Apollo program was $30 billion a year or so. And that was in a realm that's better understood.

I'm not necessarily suggesting that we should start spending $50 billion or $100 billion a year on cancer research. But I would argue that it might take that kind of investment to really move the needle in a meaningful way and provide enough good paying opportunities for nerds to get them interested.

Thanks for the link though, even if it makes me look a little dumb.

[wtracy]

<<Capitalism is a greedy optimizer. When it finds a local maximum it goes all in. It does not explore the fitness landscape.>>

Upvoted specifically for this line. That strikes me as a key insight into the free market's strengths and weaknesses.

[api]

I've thought this for a long time. Ultimately I think it's that private enterprises must have a low appetite for risk. The only time you see private enterprises investing in fundamental R&D or otherwise really exploring, it's when they are either so huge that they have immense cash hoards (e.g. Google) or they are monopolies with guaranteed cash cow income streams (e.g. the old Bell Labs). The vast majority of private enterprises cannot risk investing in anything without a very high probability of return, and that means being conservative and doing things that have already been proven to work. (Or that are only a slight deviation from things that work, or that build on already proven tech, etc.)

Governments have immense disadvantages too. They are slow and inefficient and are absolutely horrible at taking things the "last mile" from lab prototype to product. Governments flat out suck at "shipping." Yet they have the ultimate guaranteed income stream -- taxes -- and so can afford to invest in "high risk, high payoff" R&D and basic science that might never produce direct payoff (but may produce large indirect payoffs later).

The optimum seems to be, as with many things in nature, a balance. There may also be third options that have yet to be discovered, such as innovations in finance that enable risk to be spread more intelligently.

[sjg007]

"fixing government, curing cancer, improving medicine, rebooting our space program, fixing education, etc."

-- There are a bunch of startups already in these areas...

[eli_gottlieb]

It's also an Unfriendly optimizer. Capitalism's local maxima often consist of things like Gilded Ages and Great Depressions in which return on investment is maximized to the hilt at the expense of nearly all other values. Yes, once we force it out of those local maxima, it goes back to generating wealth in a way that people actually want it to, but eventually, without deliberate management to keep it out of them, it always finds another damn local maximum to get stuck in.

[caycep]

Especially with the way academic science / biotech is run. Some reasons off the top of my head:

-Curing cancer (i.e. biotech/biomedical research) often requires a lot of startup overhead. Engineering training is hard, and I am sure there are a lot of expensive hardware and laboratory equipment, as well as similar levels of bureaucracies and personalities to deal with. But a similar startup training path in bio requires - wet labs, animal labs, and associated support (including feeding, caring, ethics oversight which is important but adds additional time and effort to everything). The medical angle adds both additional regulatory, ethics, and safety considerations, as well as political egos from MD's, hospital admins, university chairmen, etc.

-Pay: in the commercial/private sector, I am sure things are probably a little better, but with more strings. But you can choose to fight in the VC funding space, for bigger pots of money, vs. jumping into the right for NIH R01s, R21s where the politics and competition are brutal. The basics are not dissimilar - VCs like founders with track records and ideally a minimum viable product or proof of concept, NIH grant reviewers like proposals from established labs (who have a lot of money and data already). Just that it seems the pot is a lot tighter for people trying to get money from the government. The DoD maybe better in this regard.

-Culture: Are you going to be a founder or early employee, with equity and potential for higher raises? Or are you going to be a postdoc making $40-60k for the next decade of your life?

That being said, I do know people do it, i.e. the "Craig Venter model". They don't tend to get a lot of press, though, and they often exit to big pharma or big devices (medtronic...)

[rayiner]

Its a cop-out. If SV wanted to tackle the big problems, the legal costs of playing in D.C. wouldn't hold them back. Lobbying revenues for the top 10 firms in DC combined are probably $250m per year. Facebook could buy all the top players in DC for a few decades with what it spent on WhatsApp. Citing legal challenges is just cover for the fact that there is more money in sexting than curing cancer.

[strlen]

What people miss is the incredible amount of infrastructure development done at Facebook. While it would be an honest statement that it's behind Google (which takes a different approach to infrastructure) in that respect, it also differs crucially from Google that much of it is open source. As a mater of fact, here is one example of code that Facebook contributed heavily to (and that I've worked on as well) that is being used (amongst many other things) to cure cancer: http://www.slideshare.net/ryancox/20101207-o-connortrihughba...

Not everyone is a geneticist or a bioinformatician. Not everyone who has the capability to write code that Facebook need has the capability to become as good of a geneticists as they are a programmer. Yet, it's not fair to say that this talent is wasted: some Facebookers have contributed to open source, others have joined infrastructure companies (much as others have come from those companies).

Why haven't I instead went to work directly for, e.g., NASA or a national lab? Well first, as an undergraduate I deeply _wanted_ to take an internship at NASA (they had a great program for local students) but couldn't as only US citizens were permitted to do so.

I was already well into a full-time industry job when I became a US citizen (I've also worked at startups prior to attending college: again, I highly doubt NASA or a research lab would just hire a high school student ). Now I've already heard too many horror stories from classmates working for various government/aerospace/hardware/other traditional orgs about the low autonomy, office-space-esque working condition (be in the office by 8:30 AM, or there'll be a "talk", even if you've worked late into evening), but most importantly about how most of the folks working there are not doing the kind of work I am. Those that _did_ do that kind of work first had to expand a lot of energy proving what was apparently at the start -- that sometimes building something from scratch is less work (both now and later) than trying to shoehorn a problem to an existing but ill-fitting abstraction.

Fortunately, I am seeing this change for the better -- and many places (e.g., LLNL) already stand out -- but for now I'll quote Thiel: "rocket scientists go to Wall St for money, but also because aren't allowed to play with rockets anymore!"

Obligatory disclaimer: I'm a former Facebook employee and am holding on to my RSUs, but I've sad much the same long before I've worked at Facebook (indeed, this is why I chose to work there!). I am not speaking solely for myself, not on any company's behalf.

[rayiner]

Did you intend to respond to me? I'm sure Facebook does lots of neat things, I'm not criticizing it. All I'm saying is that its a cop-out when companies and investors say that its legal challenges that prevent investment into curing cancer, or whatever it is people think smart kids should work on besides sexting apps or the infrastructure for sexting apps. Its cover for the fact that there's just not much money in saving the world.

[strlen]

Hmm, I think I've mis-read your comment then. My apologies. That said, if you don't mind I'll let it stand as is -- perhaps as a comment on the OP. My point is "cancer research OR Facebook" is not a choice anyone goes out to make consciously: they study a specialty and then seek out the most rewarding (according to their own definition of "rewarding") career options available to them. If one is interested in building distributed systems, there is simply more opportunity to do so at Google, Facebook, or other places in the software/Internet industry than in other industries (that's not to say those opportunities don't exist elsewhere, of course).

I do agree that it's B.S. to say that legal challenges prevent investment in cancer research (unless people mean "coconut oil cures cancer" type of research, in which case they well should). I would probably say that if anything current patent law makes cancer research more profitable that it would be without it (however, I don't have enough of legal background to speak definitively on this).

[harryh]

> Its cover for the fact that there's just not much money in saving the world.

The question for me is why is this true? It seems like there should be.

[rayiner]

I think its an issue of discounting the return by probability, and being able to internalize positive externalities. You can spend $10 billion trying to cure cancer, but how much do you have to get in return for the risk that you won't? And if you need to make a 50x return in the successful case to justify the failure risk, how will you do it while society is demonizing you for withholding cancer cures from dying people?

[strlen]

I think part of it also diminishing returns: life of cancer patients has been greatly improved, with early detection it's no longer a death sentence and at times not even a major handicap. See, e.g., quality of life after treatment of prostate cancer now vs. quality of life after treatment of prostate cancer treatment just 20-30 years ago.

I imagine power law holds in most disciplines: going from 99.99% uptime to 99.999% is far harder than going from 99.9 to 99.99% which in turn is harder then going from 99% to 99.9%. Likewise, I'd imagine same holds true with death tolls over N years from various illnesses (but obviously with different constants involved).

Can you explain to me what you meant by externalities here? Do you mean medical industry benefits from cures without contributing to funding the NIH grants?

[eli_gottlieb]

>The question for me is why is this true? It seems like there should be.

As someone else noted, "saving the world" usually translates into economics as "generating large positive externalities". It's not just that you might have to give out cancer cures for free (in most countries the state will pay for health-care anyway), it's that you simply can't patent the Theory of General Relativity or the Germ Theory of Disease or the Dead Germ Method of Vaccination. Even improvements in nutrition and yield of crops can only partially be treated as private, excludable property.

Radical new discoveries are almost always nonexcludable, and thus can't really be treated as private commodities sold on a market. Note that I said can't, not shouldn't: trying to treat nonexcludable goods as private commodities leads to bankruptcy rather than sin.

[cinquemb]

Another thing I was thinking about was if people had as many government recruiting requests come in their inbox/linkedin, if that would factor into more people in tech joining? It just seems like private sector throws more resources into keeping the machine fed with talent.