Be the change you want to see in the world. Feel free to quit your job and go bankrupt while trying and most likely failing to make the world a better place.
I wasn't saying that any given programmer was the best mind of their generation - just that many of the best minds of these recent generations have been programmers, or involved in technology development in some manner.
And what are some of the "pretty good ways to make a good deal more money more predictably" that you're referencing?
By your definition, those realtors of 2006-2008 were the greatest minds of that period, so were the financial analysts, and the personal wealth managers who had nothing other than a 1 week seminar to certify them as such.
This is a huge part of it. There's a certain arrogance in this tired, oft-repeated claim. And more subtly, people can be great at different things. Tech stuff has always come quite easily to me. Chemistry, biology, or creating social change? Not so much.
But my focusing on the stuff I'm good at hasn't stopped other people from doing (what my doctor friends decribe to me as) extremely interesting research in the health area.
Well, I upvoted you, because yes, but I'll make a refinement to the question: just replace "greatest minds" with "greatest programmers".
Seriously, great programmers are needed in bioinformatics, engineering and infrastructure. Some already are there, but the field is generally unglamorous and you can get much better pay for a job that doesn't involve your deep knowledge of microcontrollers at all. Bah, even if you're a civil engineer starting with just a basic knowledge of programming, unless you get lucky you'll get incentives to switch into developing knock-off websites way too many times. The chance of return on improving your basic programming skill to average is just higher than on improving your decent material engineering skill to superb.
It must be a "Valley" thing (and the associated cost of living), because depend on one's location, 100k would be a good figure for a project manager. Someone straight out of school? Not a chance.
I think there's a certain degree of arrogance to that claim, but a lot of truth. For the smartest minds of our generation, programming is not that hard to pick up. I've seen (classical) engineers and physics PhDs working in ad tech and social games many times.
And I think this is the biggest issue. Where do I find the information? Who's going to pay me for it? What incentive do I have to toil over something that might be needed and useful on one level, but stark in contrast to other opportunities that derive much greater incentive.
To become competent, I might be wasting my time in the end. If I have a marketable skill now with no additional work, then I don't have much a reason to invest into something else.
Help build better tools for researchers.
* Julia (julialang.org) is very promising and could use talented developers to help build the ecosystem.
* Numba (http://numba.pydata.org/) looks amazing and should build on the existing strength of SciPy.
Contributing to an open-source project would give exposure to the problem space while leveraging existing skills and not taking a huge initial risk (school or paycut). If you wanted to make this a full-time pursuit, such contribution could be leveraged: many labs would love to hire a talented programmer. However, expect a ~30-50% haircut (in hospital or university labs you will have a hard time cracking $50k to start and $70k on the high end).
I am familiar with open-source projects in a number of other medically-relevant research areas. If you are interested in some specific area, shoot me an email and I'll see what I can think of.
There's a normal human tendency to occasionally worry about whether one is doing the correct thing with one's life. And then sometimes people extend that from themselves to those they associate with.
There are a lot of interesting startups right now in the mobile health space, but it is a significantly more difficult space to operate in. It takes years to get FDA approval for new medical devices, the healthcare industry is beholden to several large industry players, and the culture of medicine is resistant to rapid innovation. I understand and echo your frustration that silicon valley often only pays lip service to 'dangerously ambitious ideas', but there are also real reasons why people don't operate in these difficult business environments.
As an example, Glooko makes a mobile version of a glucose logbook that reads data straight from a sampling device - useful, but not earthshaking. But to go from that data to automatic reminders and advice about managing glucose levels - what raganwald wishes existed - would require a much more stringent level of approval from the FDA.
I used to work next to the guys from mySugr. They went through the process of having their app certified as a medical device by the European Commission, (the CE or Conformité Européenne mark). Not easy, but doable. I'm not sure whether it gives explicit recommendations, but it let's you identify patterns based on what you're eating and the activities you're doing.
Regulations are a bastard, but there for good reasons. Imagine getting a med which wasn't tested and which is made in someones bathtub…
Exaggerated but you get what I mean?
Maybe smart people don't care about money all that much, but they want their lives to not suck, their effort to not feel wasted, their identity not wrapped up in the service of dysfunction and politics. There are not many places where you can better humanity for a living and live the life such a person deserves, and it is not the job of humans to sacrifice themselves for no reward. That's why people who do so, effectively, are so rare.
I’m concerned that the US — one of the innovation powerhouses of the world — will hurt its own future considerably if we continue to make educational professions unappealing.
Is there any indication that education needs geniuses? Does it substantially improve innovation? When America was world dominant in innovation, were its geniuses in academia, or industry?
> When America was world dominant in innovation, were its geniuses in academia, or industry?
Good question. How I'd answer for the 1940s-60s depends heavily on what you consider the status of research labs that were outside academia, but rather academic in terms of personnel, style, and management: the national labs, the NSA, the Manhattan Project, Bell Labs, etc.
If that's included as honorary academia, I would feel comfortable saying that "academia" (or perhaps "academia-plus") had most of the geniuses of that era.
I doubt any industry needs geniuses. I don't think the human race needs a super-human .01% individuals to come in and solve all our problems every quarter century. I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of the genetic geniuses Mother Nature gives are struggling in the 3rd world somewhere.
I don't think most of our medical breakthroughs in the last 50 years came from geniuses either. They came from mostly regular people, who put the perspiration in and slaved away trying and failing time and time again to deliver life saving products.
The sad thing is these people aren't praised for their work and these people have a much higher bar to set. These people aren't any more gifted than the guys at Google. They just made the choice to work in Medicine and not Software Engineering. To me post like OP's say "To everyone who has done anything in medicine in the last 100 years, your achievements don't matter because you aren't as famous as Rob Pike."
Why the fuck does this guy think that the engineers at Google would be have half as good as the researchers at Johns Hopkins? What special quality do they have that allows any field they enter to turn to gold? Is it really the case that Google Engineers are super humans or is OP ignoring the hundreds/thousands of researchers who are working towards a cure for diabetes?
So Sweden is ranked as the "most innovative" country, with the USA coming in seventh. Switzerland and Singapore beat the US also.
Yet I can't think of a single innovation I've seen from them. Good governments, great fashion, cheap furniture, sure. But what is the innovation they speak of?
Fwiw, Iceland was number one last year. Was it for their constitution?
My point is that I don't think you really have to look into history for "when American was dominant in innovation". (And this is coming from a major cynic of current affairs in the US!)
Because it creates value, whether or not you approve or understand it. Fun and entertainment are what most people spend most of their time seeking. Simple as that.
Because most people, Facebook programmers included, don't have the patience and the resources to undergo the amount of schooling necessary to reach the level of understanding to make an impact in these areas; and after they do, the amount of bureaucracy they will need to fight to make a dent will drive even the most resilient minds to take a job getting people to click on ads.
Disagreed. It isn't a matter of patience, it's all about incentives.
Almost all people who are smart enough to make a difference aren't foolhardy enough to make terrible economic decisions that will drastically reduce their quality of life.
The existence of economics PhD students still baffles me.
It appears that Diabetes research receives over a billion in funding each year just from the NIH [1][2]. As far as I can tell this doesn't include private funding for cures/treatments.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting the data here, but it looks like many people and many millions of dollars are devoted to solving real world problems like the one Scott Hanselman has.
Diabetes has a variety of causes. Concentrating on just one cause - too much sugar in the diet - how much money is spent by producers of sugar on, for example, advertising each year?
How much is paid by those producers of sugar in tax, and how much of that tax is used for research?
Type II diabetes is almost entirely the result of obesity. Put on 10 pounds and your fasting blood glucose will skyrocket. Sure, there are genetic factors that predispose a person to insulin resistance, but the dominant factor is adipose tissue. Type I (juvenile/auto-immune) is more interesting.
That the general population does not distinguish between Type I and Type II Diabetes it an unfortunate fact of life.
But that someone who is diagnosed with Type I Diabetes does not inform himself about it and learn about the difference is simply inexcusable stupidity.
Type II diabetes is almost entirely the result of obesity. Put on 10 pounds and your fasting blood glucose will skyrocket. Sure, there are genetic factors that predispose a person to insulin resistance, but the dominant factor is adipose tissue.
Thankfully, the inverse is largely true as well. Develop diabetes, and if you lose enough weight, you can often avoid the need for meds altogether. I was just diagnosed as a type II diabetic about 3 months ago... they originally had me on injectable insulin and Metformin, but as I've lost weight (17 lbs in ~ 3 months) and switched to a low carb diet, I've been able to stop taking insulin and still see my blood glucose numbers move closer and closer to stabilizing in the normal range.
I'm hoping (and my doctor seems confident) that if I lose more weight and stay active (and eat right) that I'll be able to drop the Metformin eventually.
One thing this experience has taught me though, has been a much greater appreciate for the evils of simple sugars and high glycemic index carbs. I now look at a bottle of (non diet) soda and the idea of drinking that shit just makes me sick.
Also, just to be clear... I'm not suggesting that diet soda is exactly good for you. I plan to try and wean myself off of that as well, over time. But the sugar (HFCS really) in plain soda is just horrible, horrible, evil stuff... especially when it's in soda, since sugar that comes into your body in such a ready to digest form seems to hit your bloodstream much faster than, say, a piece of orange, which also has plenty of sugar (fructose) but has to be digested to get to the sugar.
And there's a lot more sugar in a soda than in a piece of fruit. (although fruit juices have a lot of sugar, which is why people suggest that you drink small amounts or water it down.)
A 3" orange has about 14 g of sugar.
12 oz (a 355 ml can) of coca cola has 39 g of sugar.
I've had Type 1 diabetes for about 20 years now; it's a little bit of pain in the ass, but I don't get why people bellyache about it so much. Blood sugar meters? Check. Fast-acting insulin? Check. Insulin pumps? Check.
Blindness, amputation and kidney failure are no longer guaranteed and I'm grateful as heck for that. For now I'll count my blessings: one of which is the fact that my wife has yet to find me laid out in a diabetic coma -- something that was very, very common less than 50 years ago.
I'm sorry to hear. That he experienced so much pain and suffering, and that you lost him so young, is exactly the reason I can't feel sorry for myself (and no other diabetic should either).
Unless our hA1cs are under 6, it's more than likely that diabetes will be our ultimate cause of death. Type 1 diabetics almost always die of Type 1 diabetes. I think that's a good reason to bellyache. It's a big deal.
Historically, you're correct that our prognosis is poor. Then again, we cannot compare numbers with the generation before us because they were, more than likely, cruising around with sugars consistently in the 200-400mg/dL range.
I realize that what works for me won't necessarily work for others, but I have a really hard time complaining in light of the fact that I regularly achieve A1Cs of less than 6.3 with nothing more than a glucose meter, syringes and some Humalog. Maybe I'm lucky, but testing sugars 4-8 times a day and injecting before every meal isn't hard work.
Perhaps our demise will be miserable but for now I'm grateful for my current quality of life. It could be so much worse.
True, it can always be worse. Having a 6.3 A1c with MDI and no CGM or pump is very fortunate. Perhaps you've still got working beta cells. Congrats on those results!
Hm. I always assumed my efforts would yield similar results for anyone. Maybe I am luckier than I deserve and should pay closer attention to what other diabetics have to endure.
In the meantime, here's to fighting the good fight.
Because research pays terribly and not everyone has the luxury of martyrdom.
Want to be a grad student? 80-90% pay cut. (Unless you go to Switzerland and then it's closer to 70%).
Want to be a university research programmer? 70% pay cut.
Removing economic considerations, would I rather be researching auto-immune disease? Sure. But 'doing good' means compromises like buying a house at 45 instead of 35.
No one asks doctors to make these compromises.
Edit: If someone wants to deposit $2m in my bank account I'll quit my job on Tuesday and go to grad school.
"buying a house at 45 instead of 35" is an economic considerations, no? ;)
In the case you had $2M: Have you consider that reasearch problem are far longer and thus far less exciting than the ones we, programers, are used to solve?
Yes. I did research as a student and as a research programmer / computational biologist. I was just an author on a paper for work done three years ago. There will probably be another one being written up in a year or two.
This is a pretty fair summary. A badly-paid software engineer (BS in CS) makes a little under a PhD in CS at a university. Which is where I'm at right now, literally. :-)
Grad school pay for a CS PhD is about $20K-$30K, assuming full funding, not a good assumption.
Run the numbers when you move the wage bar down from the 70-110K down to 20-30K (almost certainly without spouse/family health insurance) for about 4-8 years; then the followon work at a University won't pay well. Think about how many people would leave 30-40K on the table to go work for a university instead of doing ads. While most people aren't aces at finance, they can do the basic math that this calculation involves. :-)
The key problem, of course, is that research structures in the US are not designed to be profit returning; if they were, they'd look different and the really off-the-wall stuff wouldn't be done.
I, of course, am stupid enough to have gone for a MS, and am planning on pursuing a PhD. Hopefully I can get a job afterwards.
What an ignorant post. How exactly does "laying down the taco" help Scott Hanselman and the other million of US citizens who suffer from Type 1 diabetes?
Even if it doesn't, there's a lot more profit in advertising than insulin. The economy would probably function better if diabetes patients were left untreated and die, since the cost saving estimates are quite enormous.
> today’s diabetes patients are tomorrows alzheimer patients
... possibly. Or they could be tomorrow's cancer patients, or tomorrow's stroke patients, or tomorrow's jack-knifed tractor trailer across three lanes of traffic patients. All those can happen to people without diabetes, too, though; it's part of living.
There are multiple types of diabetes, one of them being type 1. "The exact cause of type 1 diabetes is unknown. Most likely it is an autoimmune disorder. An infection or some other trigger causes the body to mistakenly attack the cells in the pancreas that make insulin. This kind of disorder can be passed down through families." [1] So how could taco and exercise cure this type of diabetes?
Obesity and Type 1 diabetes aren't related...I think @raganwald was thinking about Type 2. For the record, I am not obese, nor are most Type 1 diabetes.
For those with Type 2, yes, exercise and eating right largely solves that (totally different) issue.
I'm not toiling to work out how to get someone to click on ads. I'm toiling to feed, house and educate my children. The pay cheque from Google enables me to do those things in the best way.
Why do we play videogames? Why do we create art? Why do we eat tasty unhealthy foods? Why do we go on hikes or climb rocks?
Why do we write posts complaining about other people not saving the world?
We do things we enjoy, things we're passionate or curious about, things we care about or have no choice but to do them. Glamour is a factor. Money too.
Perhaps if I had diabetes, or someone very close to me was suffering from the disease, then I would spend some time thinking about how to more efficiently manage one's blood sugar levels. Perhaps if I were closer to the realities of obesity, then I Move You (my former startup focused around getting healthy through social pressure) would have worked out differently. I learned that this isn't something I'm passionate about, but I know there are others who are.
But this just states what this generation lacks the most... Empathy.
I couldn't care less if Facebook didn't exist because humanity focused it's work into solving real problems. But some people just don't care. As long as they are living their good life... who cares about diabetes?
The biggest problem IMHO is our generation's goals. Money, money and more money.
If the world provided better ways for us to help each other instead of distracting us, while they suck work and money out of us, until we die. Imagine how different everything could be...
As someone who left biomedical field and moved into tech, one of the biggest reasons for my move is that I have a distaste towards relying on guilt in order affect things (this probably goes back all the way to my childhood and my parents' use of guilt in order to affect my own decision-making), and that I generally dislike people who rely on it to further their causes.
I will work hard if there is an incentive. I will not work hard because someone is trying to guilt-trip me to.
And what is Money that you make such a fuss about?
Why humans should care about others?
If someones not-well being is affecting my well-being then I will care.
If someone is suffering and that is making me feel bad, I will help, because then I will feel good, It have nothing to do with knowing how they feel or wanting to help them.
Realize that you are ultimate cause and driver. You do not have empathy, you have selfish selfish needs to feel good, and you invent all sorts to put yourself in a way of distress, so you could find a way back to nirvana, and then you could throw more trouble in your way.
Distractions, I see no difference between playing video games till you die or discovering cure to aids/cancer and find out the meaning of life. It is just something that helps get rid of boredom.
There is no higher goals, causes. You make up words. And sometimes you will be disappointed when a man next to you do not live by your standards. Then you can engage him in healthy discussion, or war, to come to some sort of conclusion :D
I don't get the sense that there's an obvious, simple solution here that is just waiting to be implemented. I don't think it's that the only reason it doesn't exist is just because programmers are choosing to work elsewhere. Basically I think this question is probably built on faulty assumptions.
I was really excited when Gates announced his foundation. Smart people, lots of money, focussing on evidence based things that work or should work.
Even though they've done fantastic things it doesn't feel like we're much closer to a cure for Malaria being developed.
Would the world be a better place if smart people weren't sending private vessels to space or the deep ocean or around the world photographing every road or onto the public roads with no human drivers? Like actors working the lousy but well paid films to give them the cash to work on the good but low paid films we need the cat pictures and social buttons and advertising to give companies the funds to do exciting things.
Having said that, anyone facing burnout in the industry should really consider some humanitarian thing because there are problems looking for solutions there, and more smart people can't hurt.
Seeing how pharmaceutical companies and other medical related things have a lot of money thrown at them world wide, I think that isn't the case. Computing isn't the only place where 'the greatest minds of our generation' reside, there are a lot of them in the medical community.
Also there has been a recent trend of quantified self and medical start ups starting to gain traction, such as fitbit, mybasis.com, the tricorder xprize and so on. For quite a while it's been a software only world and just now we are starting to see an uptick in consumer electronics start ups.
Thats a very myopic view. Indeed its not good if everybody work on things that 'matter'; it is essential that some people do work on things that don't matter.
Not everybody can be doing and/or should be doing cancer research or whatever the author seems to perceive is important.
Because curing cancer and solving major issues doesn't make money right now. It takes major investment and years of research for something that may or may not give return.
Further, google is solving big problems. How bout better internet service, cars that drive themselves, making computers more accessible, a universal translater, etc.
How bout the fact that many of the top grads from schools go to work in finance. If we could get all those people to go work at google, the world would be a better place.
To launch a Facebook clone you sign up for Heroku or AWS, push some Rails code, and start promoting yourself. To launch a medical device you spend years cutting through regulation and red tape, negotiating with and marketing to an industry that is probably threatened by your existence and will do its best to stop you.
Screw up at Facebook, you get yelled at on Twitter and your share price dips for a few days. Screw up a medical device, you get sued out of existence.
This probably doesn't explain the whole thing, but it is certainly related.
Off-topic, but I'm curious how you handled that situation. Personally, a safe-guard I might build in would be to audit our code by an independent third-party. Was this at all feasible in your situation, and/or how did you handle QA?
When I was a kid, volunteering at a hospital for Community Service, I was assigned a task to transfer pills from bottles to those plastic + foil single serving wrappers using a hot glue machine, and deliver said pills to the wards. I had no training, supervision, or QA/QC in this job.
Well... External QA for app which costs 2.99$ (or less at times)? No. We just tried to make sure it worked properly - some code reviews, several unit tests to cover some nasty edge cases and that's it. I really hope everybody is alive and well. :)
Also it did help that the users grew confident in it over time. It was not like these overnight success stories (not even success story) which you hear all over the news :)
People also die because of late or never materialized medical technology. We just prefer that people die from inaction (because is "normal") than from mistakes. This may be psychologically attractive because we avoid SEEING all the blood and dead bodies, but probably not the best way to minimize death and suffering.
Of course this is nothing new (Economic version: "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen"). Just another cognitive bias.
There is some more-or-less optimal middle ground between too little and too much regulation, but I don't think we're on it now. In fact, maybe it would be worthwhile to have a two-tier system, one for ordinary medical devices, another for experimental "this will probably kill you but perhaps you have nothing to lose" situations.
Because consenting adults aren't allowed to engage in an exchange of medical services without the approval of federal bureaucrats + lurking personal injury lawyers.
All we need is just one state with medical contractual freedom.
We also don't need the government telling adults what kinds of contractual agreements they can or can't enter into. "Caveat Emptor" and all that. People are, at the end of the day, responsible for the outcome of their own actions. Interestingly enough, this is still true even if we DO have a nanny state and an FDA and all the accompanying B.S.
Spin the FDA off as a non government agency, with no force of law behind it, let it create a voluntary approval process (something akin to the UL process for approving home electrical devices, for example) and let it be.
Yes I agree with this, I think the current system is worse than snake oil because you have government people telling you exactly what is medicine. And they are the FOOD and Drug administration. They are now telling people what they can label on things like blueberry extracts. That should just not be their business, they should just keep dangerous chemicals out of our lives.
In ayurveda, there are 3 types of medicines, food, herbs and poisons. The current allopathic system is purely the last type. It is heavily regulated because it is big money. There is not big money in the first two. (You may think there is money in food, but not fresh food which you actually have to prepare and eat within an hour, not prepare and let sit and pump full of preservatives).
Besides, creating Facebook clones is sexier. At this moment, your content is rated lower than @benihana's scathing criticism of @raganwald's outrageous assumption that saving lives is somehow nobler than squeezing out yet another social app-turd.
. To launch a medical device you spend years cutting through regulation and red tape, negotiating with and marketing to an industry that is probably threatened by your existence and will do its best to stop you.
I know someone, kind of financially successful, who swears by everything that his team developed a cure for AIDS, but they found out after years of politics that they will never get approval from legal entities to release.
Do they have any available information? Preliminary test? Cured it in vitro, animal models, a few humans? Patents? Any other interesting medical/biological result published?
There are a lot of people that proclaim that have cure for AIDS/cancer/whatever, and many of them blame the establishment for blocking it. The same history appears with perpetual movement machines. Without more proof, probably it just another too optimistic investigator, a scammer or a crackpot.
Diabetes isn't a problem that we need technology to solve. Sure it could help, but that's treating the symptom, when what we really need to do is use preventative care to treat the root of the problem - corn subsidies and education.
There are more than one million of Type 1 diabetics in the US alone, like the man mentioned in the post (Scott Hanselman). How would those measures improve their life?
If you knew the difficulty/incentive trade-off involved in making sugar management easier relative to that involved in getting people to click on ads, you wouldn't ask this question.
If web application developers had to jump through the same hoops that medical device developers did we'd all still be using AltaVista.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 321 ms ] threadThat way, doing good wouldn't be something on the side -- it would be the main thrust of our competitive economic system.
(setting things up this way is my life goal)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(rhetoric)
And what are some of the "pretty good ways to make a good deal more money more predictably" that you're referencing?
so.. you are saying you need to.. be one of the best minds?
But my focusing on the stuff I'm good at hasn't stopped other people from doing (what my doctor friends decribe to me as) extremely interesting research in the health area.
Seriously, great programmers are needed in bioinformatics, engineering and infrastructure. Some already are there, but the field is generally unglamorous and you can get much better pay for a job that doesn't involve your deep knowledge of microcontrollers at all. Bah, even if you're a civil engineer starting with just a basic knowledge of programming, unless you get lucky you'll get incentives to switch into developing knock-off websites way too many times. The chance of return on improving your basic programming skill to average is just higher than on improving your decent material engineering skill to superb.
To become competent, I might be wasting my time in the end. If I have a marketable skill now with no additional work, then I don't have much a reason to invest into something else.
Reg should use crowdfunding to develop this device, or something along those lines, if he really cares about this problem.
Help build better tools for researchers. * Julia (julialang.org) is very promising and could use talented developers to help build the ecosystem. * Numba (http://numba.pydata.org/) looks amazing and should build on the existing strength of SciPy.
Contribute to open-source projects related to medical research; a few favorites in the imaging space: * PLUS (https://www.assembla.com/spaces/plus/wiki) * OpenIGTLink (http://openigtlink.org) * XTK (http://goxtk.org) * NiPy (http://nipy.sourceforge.net/nipy/)
Contributing to an open-source project would give exposure to the problem space while leveraging existing skills and not taking a huge initial risk (school or paycut). If you wanted to make this a full-time pursuit, such contribution could be leveraged: many labs would love to hire a talented programmer. However, expect a ~30-50% haircut (in hospital or university labs you will have a hard time cracking $50k to start and $70k on the high end).
I am familiar with open-source projects in a number of other medically-relevant research areas. If you are interested in some specific area, shoot me an email and I'll see what I can think of.
If I had more time (and judging by the docs better linear algebra skills) I might certainly be interested in these.
I hope that some smart hackers do take you up on this.
As someone who works at an academic lab, though, I think you are being a bit pessimistic regarding the pay scale.
If someone makes this device and markets it 5 years from now, Reg can point back to his blog post and say "See, look how smart I am"
https://mysugr.com/
We are now getting FDA approval too. Good fun.
Regulations are a bastard, but there for good reasons. Imagine getting a med which wasn't tested and which is made in someones bathtub… Exaggerated but you get what I mean?
Maybe smart people don't care about money all that much, but they want their lives to not suck, their effort to not feel wasted, their identity not wrapped up in the service of dysfunction and politics. There are not many places where you can better humanity for a living and live the life such a person deserves, and it is not the job of humans to sacrifice themselves for no reward. That's why people who do so, effectively, are so rare.
Here's a guy who left the ivory tower for Google: http://cs.unm.edu/~terran/academic_blog/?p=113
I’m concerned that the US — one of the innovation powerhouses of the world — will hurt its own future considerably if we continue to make educational professions unappealing.
Good question. How I'd answer for the 1940s-60s depends heavily on what you consider the status of research labs that were outside academia, but rather academic in terms of personnel, style, and management: the national labs, the NSA, the Manhattan Project, Bell Labs, etc.
If that's included as honorary academia, I would feel comfortable saying that "academia" (or perhaps "academia-plus") had most of the geniuses of that era.
I don't think most of our medical breakthroughs in the last 50 years came from geniuses either. They came from mostly regular people, who put the perspiration in and slaved away trying and failing time and time again to deliver life saving products.
The sad thing is these people aren't praised for their work and these people have a much higher bar to set. These people aren't any more gifted than the guys at Google. They just made the choice to work in Medicine and not Software Engineering. To me post like OP's say "To everyone who has done anything in medicine in the last 100 years, your achievements don't matter because you aren't as famous as Rob Pike."
Why the fuck does this guy think that the engineers at Google would be have half as good as the researchers at Johns Hopkins? What special quality do they have that allows any field they enter to turn to gold? Is it really the case that Google Engineers are super humans or is OP ignoring the hundreds/thousands of researchers who are working towards a cure for diabetes?
Yet I can't think of a single innovation I've seen from them. Good governments, great fashion, cheap furniture, sure. But what is the innovation they speak of?
Fwiw, Iceland was number one last year. Was it for their constitution?
My point is that I don't think you really have to look into history for "when American was dominant in innovation". (And this is coming from a major cynic of current affairs in the US!)
http://www.thelocal.se/15578/20081110/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Swedish_inventions
http://www.du.ac.in/fileadmin/DU/DUCorner/pdf/14812_IR_Examp...
It can be noted that most people studying engineering in Sweden go on to work for companies like ABB, Volvo, Ericsson, Scania etc.
Almost all people who are smart enough to make a difference aren't foolhardy enough to make terrible economic decisions that will drastically reduce their quality of life.
The existence of economics PhD students still baffles me.
Interestingly, I have met many in the sciences that feel the same about computer science.
After all, professors are all drawn from the ranks of former graduate students who finished their degrees...
Maybe I'm misinterpreting the data here, but it looks like many people and many millions of dollars are devoted to solving real world problems like the one Scott Hanselman has.
[1] General Disease research numbers http://report.nih.gov/categorical_spending.aspx
[2] Diabetes funding by project http://report.nih.gov/categorical_spending_project_listing.a...
How much is paid by those producers of sugar in tax, and how much of that tax is used for research?
I agree with your general point though.
Sugar production in the US is heavily subsidized.
Thankfully, the inverse is largely true as well. Develop diabetes, and if you lose enough weight, you can often avoid the need for meds altogether. I was just diagnosed as a type II diabetic about 3 months ago... they originally had me on injectable insulin and Metformin, but as I've lost weight (17 lbs in ~ 3 months) and switched to a low carb diet, I've been able to stop taking insulin and still see my blood glucose numbers move closer and closer to stabilizing in the normal range.
I'm hoping (and my doctor seems confident) that if I lose more weight and stay active (and eat right) that I'll be able to drop the Metformin eventually.
One thing this experience has taught me though, has been a much greater appreciate for the evils of simple sugars and high glycemic index carbs. I now look at a bottle of (non diet) soda and the idea of drinking that shit just makes me sick.
A 3" orange has about 14 g of sugar.
12 oz (a 355 ml can) of coca cola has 39 g of sugar.
Blindness, amputation and kidney failure are no longer guaranteed and I'm grateful as heck for that. For now I'll count my blessings: one of which is the fact that my wife has yet to find me laid out in a diabetic coma -- something that was very, very common less than 50 years ago.
Yes, died essentially because the equipment wasn't as good back then (he was born in the late 1930s, died in the 1980s) as it is now.
He also taught me to program when I was 7 (by pairing together on a ZX Spectrum!).
Awesome that his hacker spirit lives on in you...
I realize that what works for me won't necessarily work for others, but I have a really hard time complaining in light of the fact that I regularly achieve A1Cs of less than 6.3 with nothing more than a glucose meter, syringes and some Humalog. Maybe I'm lucky, but testing sugars 4-8 times a day and injecting before every meal isn't hard work.
Perhaps our demise will be miserable but for now I'm grateful for my current quality of life. It could be so much worse.
In the meantime, here's to fighting the good fight.
Want to be a grad student? 80-90% pay cut. (Unless you go to Switzerland and then it's closer to 70%).
Want to be a university research programmer? 70% pay cut.
Removing economic considerations, would I rather be researching auto-immune disease? Sure. But 'doing good' means compromises like buying a house at 45 instead of 35.
No one asks doctors to make these compromises.
Edit: If someone wants to deposit $2m in my bank account I'll quit my job on Tuesday and go to grad school.
In the case you had $2M: Have you consider that reasearch problem are far longer and thus far less exciting than the ones we, programers, are used to solve?
Grad school pay for a CS PhD is about $20K-$30K, assuming full funding, not a good assumption.
Run the numbers when you move the wage bar down from the 70-110K down to 20-30K (almost certainly without spouse/family health insurance) for about 4-8 years; then the followon work at a University won't pay well. Think about how many people would leave 30-40K on the table to go work for a university instead of doing ads. While most people aren't aces at finance, they can do the basic math that this calculation involves. :-)
The key problem, of course, is that research structures in the US are not designed to be profit returning; if they were, they'd look different and the really off-the-wall stuff wouldn't be done.
I, of course, am stupid enough to have gone for a MS, and am planning on pursuing a PhD. Hopefully I can get a job afterwards.
... possibly. Or they could be tomorrow's cancer patients, or tomorrow's stroke patients, or tomorrow's jack-knifed tractor trailer across three lanes of traffic patients. All those can happen to people without diabetes, too, though; it's part of living.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/bittman-is-a...
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001350/
For those with Type 2, yes, exercise and eating right largely solves that (totally different) issue.
Why do we write posts complaining about other people not saving the world?
We do things we enjoy, things we're passionate or curious about, things we care about or have no choice but to do them. Glamour is a factor. Money too.
Perhaps if I had diabetes, or someone very close to me was suffering from the disease, then I would spend some time thinking about how to more efficiently manage one's blood sugar levels. Perhaps if I were closer to the realities of obesity, then I Move You (my former startup focused around getting healthy through social pressure) would have worked out differently. I learned that this isn't something I'm passionate about, but I know there are others who are.
I couldn't care less if Facebook didn't exist because humanity focused it's work into solving real problems. But some people just don't care. As long as they are living their good life... who cares about diabetes?
The biggest problem IMHO is our generation's goals. Money, money and more money. If the world provided better ways for us to help each other instead of distracting us, while they suck work and money out of us, until we die. Imagine how different everything could be...
Our own fear and depravity damn us to these outcomes. :(
I will work hard if there is an incentive. I will not work hard because someone is trying to guilt-trip me to.
Is Empathy possible?
Who are they?
And what is Money that you make such a fuss about?
Why humans should care about others?
If someones not-well being is affecting my well-being then I will care.
If someone is suffering and that is making me feel bad, I will help, because then I will feel good, It have nothing to do with knowing how they feel or wanting to help them.
Realize that you are ultimate cause and driver. You do not have empathy, you have selfish selfish needs to feel good, and you invent all sorts to put yourself in a way of distress, so you could find a way back to nirvana, and then you could throw more trouble in your way.
Distractions, I see no difference between playing video games till you die or discovering cure to aids/cancer and find out the meaning of life. It is just something that helps get rid of boredom.
There is no higher goals, causes. You make up words. And sometimes you will be disappointed when a man next to you do not live by your standards. Then you can engage him in healthy discussion, or war, to come to some sort of conclusion :D
Even though they've done fantastic things it doesn't feel like we're much closer to a cure for Malaria being developed.
Would the world be a better place if smart people weren't sending private vessels to space or the deep ocean or around the world photographing every road or onto the public roads with no human drivers? Like actors working the lousy but well paid films to give them the cash to work on the good but low paid films we need the cat pictures and social buttons and advertising to give companies the funds to do exciting things.
Having said that, anyone facing burnout in the industry should really consider some humanitarian thing because there are problems looking for solutions there, and more smart people can't hurt.
Also there has been a recent trend of quantified self and medical start ups starting to gain traction, such as fitbit, mybasis.com, the tricorder xprize and so on. For quite a while it's been a software only world and just now we are starting to see an uptick in consumer electronics start ups.
Not everybody can work on curing cancer.
Not everybody can be doing and/or should be doing cancer research or whatever the author seems to perceive is important.
Further, google is solving big problems. How bout better internet service, cars that drive themselves, making computers more accessible, a universal translater, etc.
How bout the fact that many of the top grads from schools go to work in finance. If we could get all those people to go work at google, the world would be a better place.
Screw up at Facebook, you get yelled at on Twitter and your share price dips for a few days. Screw up a medical device, you get sued out of existence.
This probably doesn't explain the whole thing, but it is certainly related.
Or, you know, people die.
Also it did help that the users grew confident in it over time. It was not like these overnight success stories (not even success story) which you hear all over the news :)
Of course this is nothing new (Economic version: "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen"). Just another cognitive bias.
There is some more-or-less optimal middle ground between too little and too much regulation, but I don't think we're on it now. In fact, maybe it would be worthwhile to have a two-tier system, one for ordinary medical devices, another for experimental "this will probably kill you but perhaps you have nothing to lose" situations.
All we need is just one state with medical contractual freedom.
Spin the FDA off as a non government agency, with no force of law behind it, let it create a voluntary approval process (something akin to the UL process for approving home electrical devices, for example) and let it be.
In ayurveda, there are 3 types of medicines, food, herbs and poisons. The current allopathic system is purely the last type. It is heavily regulated because it is big money. There is not big money in the first two. (You may think there is money in food, but not fresh food which you actually have to prepare and eat within an hour, not prepare and let sit and pump full of preservatives).
I know someone, kind of financially successful, who swears by everything that his team developed a cure for AIDS, but they found out after years of politics that they will never get approval from legal entities to release.
Can you put me in contact with them?
There are a lot of people that proclaim that have cure for AIDS/cancer/whatever, and many of them blame the establishment for blocking it. The same history appears with perpetual movement machines. Without more proof, probably it just another too optimistic investigator, a scammer or a crackpot.
But the real question is why a mind as bright as Reg is doing biz dev at a services company in Toronto? Shouldn't he be saving the world?
If web application developers had to jump through the same hoops that medical device developers did we'd all still be using AltaVista.