I never understood this sentiment. I'm good at JavaScript, not biochemistry. How will I be curing cancer? Trick the cancer cells into calling undefined as a function?

It's not a criticism at your individual specialization. It's fucking hard to get into cancer research at this stage, though if you know the right people, you could maybe help scientists with some simulations or visualizations or whatever other tangential concern that requires JavaScript knowledge.

This is a complaint against the market at large. There is work to be done in things like curing cancer(s) and mitigating climate change, but the jobs are few, far between, and pay peanuts. Meanwhile advertising is a direct social negative (IMO a cancer on human society), but it offers plenty of positions with good wages. The choice thus becomes: take the hard road and a paycut to maybe help some unspecified amount of people you don't know, vs. take the easy road with good wages and hurt an unspecified amount of people you don't know.

This complaint is about the market, and it's essentially the same thing you may say during debugging some algorithm: "I understand the steps it make and they all look good, but the final result is wrong".

Hang in there. Things change. Society as a whole takes it's own sweet time to make hard choices. But we do.

Otherwise the market would still have slave ships running.

Is it possible to speed things up? History says no.

But scaling things fast is a very new thing.

Islam took a few hundred years to spread from Delhi to Lisbon. That was before the invention of the printing press. The Reformation after the printing press, took a hundred years of war before most not all got along with each other.

Today Fortnite or what the Kardashians are upto spreads through the globe in a few months.

This is a new thing. And sooner or later someone will figure out how to infect minds positively at the same rate.

> Otherwise the market would still have slave ships running.

I think the slavery ended mostly because its relative efficiency dropped as technology developed.

You'll see how fast acceptance of animal slaughtering will drop once we can get cheaper, provably healthier lab grown burger.

Slavery dropped due to European Enlightenment values in the inherent dignity of man finally taking root among educated people in power. The cotton gin and the steam engine only made slaves more efficient and ramped up their quotas, not reduced the worth of their labor.

> ... steam engine only made slaves more efficient ...

Yeah, because so many slaves were trained to be steam engine operators.

Slaves are only worthwhile if they do machine job and you don't have a machine and you don't have local population in deep poverty that you could just pay a little bit to do your thing and not care what they eat, where they sleep and whether they die or not. That's why slavery never realy caught on in Europe in industrial times. Europeans were cheper than slaves.

No, enlightenment values were and still are quite good at rationalizing the status quo. It was wealthy religious zealots that ended slavery, to the opposition of the businessmen and economic pragmatists.

I think maybe it's a hockey-stick like graph on the speed...

Think about cigarettes and tobacco. Fairly flat for a while, a few upticks, gradual rising, and then - in the last decade or so, this rapid increase in legislation and other means by consumers against it.

Part of it has to do with attitudes and understanding about harms, and getting the public to understand this. At some point it reaches this breaking point, but that also seems to correlate with technologies to allow for alternatives (witness in the case of tobacco the rise of vaping products, as well as tobacco-free nicotine products becoming OTC and cheaper).

While I think you are right that acceptance of "natural beef" or other similar protein will drop once a viable artificial alternative becomes available, it won't really take off until that alternative can replicate a good portion of the other products out there as well.

That is - for myself - all the artificial ground beef in the world won't get me to switch over and away from a proper well-marbled rib-eye steak, or a BBQ'd brisket or pork shoulder.

But if they could replicate those items as well, and do it at a comparable price, then I'm game for the change (which has been the downside to current analogues on the market - $12-15.00 USD per pound for artificial hamburger is not my idea of a financially sound choice).

I'm much the same for things like electric vehicles - just give me one that is off-road capable, 4WD, that I can lift and put on 30"-plus tires, and still give me a few hundred miles of driving range - and be inexpensive to purchase - then I'll do it.

Heck - even a cheap small 2WD pickup truck would be nice.

Not all of us want a sedan or sports car.

We could use markets to shape humanity based on our collective values but instead we let the markets shape us. Perhaps it’s a failure to coalesce around shared values; too much tribalism. Clearly some political regimes are better able to harness the power of the state to guide the invisible hand to do its work where it’s most needed. By delegating the “guiding” role to market participants themselves, those who control markets by lobbying and legislating, we forfeit our control.

> By delegating the “guiding” role to market participants themselves, those who control markets by lobbying and legislating, we forfeit our control.

This discussion is interesting; I was thinking something similar this morning, with the focus on our collective food choices.

It's an imperfect analogy, but there are many things that we as both a society and thru governments we have banned, or highly regulated, as having too many external negative issues to allow them to continue to be sold openly on the market.

You can think of any number of drugs (including more than a few that used to be OTC not long ago), stuff like "high test peroxide", cigarettes and tobacco products, etc.

For the vast majority of these, though, none have extreme externalities - that is, none cause death in society like certain foods that are easily available.

But those items don't have huge lobbying efforts around them, either.

For instance - we know that HFCS is a great contributor to obesity and heart disease/stroke - yet we don't ban it for commercial food usage. While there have been recent inroads from a consumer standpoint (next time you go shopping for food, note the number of ordinary items that have packaging marked as "contains no HFCS" or similar), it's unknown whether this will continue to be a trend, nor how long it will take to rid the majority of purchased food items of the substance. It is also unknown how long it will take for the effects of its removal to show up in the overall health levels of society.

But there again is a product that we freely allow in our foods that arguably is slowly killing all of us; one could say "well, you are free not to eat those foods" - but one could have argued the same about tobacco and cigarettes not too long back (and they did). There is actually a good parallel between both the tobacco industry and the corn/HFCS industry (the lobbying, hidden and such papers about the dangers, etc) - but even in the case of tobacco, there wasn't an outright ban; it's been more of a slow attrition via consumers and the public...

> Meanwhile advertising is a direct social negative (IMO a cancer on human society)

Wow wow wow you can't just make a claim like that without any basis whatsoever? It might be true or not, but would you mind collaborating on why you think that? I am not even talking about proving it with some science (which is likely very hard), but you just write it off as if everyone else is sharing your view and as if it is self-explanatory or widely accepted. It is not.

Capitalism and the product culture has led to the most technological and in many case, lifestyle, lifespan, and life standard advancements known in history. This way of propelling progress forward requries efficient markets, and markets need to connect products with people who want and can benefit from those products. No advertisement is directly forcing anyone to buy or do anything, they just provide information for people and help locating people who might otherwise not have knowledge of the products they might want.

Assuming your take on the advertisement industry is different, what is that take?

I would think the feeling that marketing as a whole, and advertising as part of it was a large social negative was prevalent enough that one would not have to explain it even if not everyone agrees.

I mean it's common enough that Bill Hicks on the subject is pretty much a meme by this point https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0

I'm not saying I necessarily agree, but if someone says advertising is a cancer on society or something like that I would not be like - whoa what particular belief system has led him to conclude this?!? - I would think, huh, they have that set of beliefs regarding advertising and marketing.

So, one more time, care to explain why you think that it is? Or am I to understand this correctly that you think it's "cancer" on society because you have just heard other people say that (like Bill Hicks and perhaps others you respect) and you assume it was prevalent?

It would be interesting to understand your original arguments if it was more clear what you based that assumption on (which is by no means universal).

1. you might notice that it was not me that made the original arguments, I just noted my surprise that you needed understanding of the viewpoint since I've seen it expressed throughout the internet at various levels of lucidity for the last decade at least.

2. one expression might be this https://ioptconsulting.com/online-advertising-is-the-new-dig... if the Bill Hicks expression of it was not to your liking.

3. again, I was not arguing for the correctness of the belief that advertising is a cancer, I just noted that nobody should be surprised at it's existence. Maybe it's like this XKCD https://xkcd.com/1053/ in which case congratulations, I've now given you two links to why people think advertising and marketing are awful awful things.

Again, I do not necessarily see advertising as something that is cancerous, but I am familiar with expressions of the idea so I am not shocked, shocked when I encounter it.

> This way of propelling progress forward requries efficient markets, and markets need to connect products with people who want and can benefit from those products. No advertisement is directly forcing anyone to buy or do anything, they just provide information for people and help locating people who might otherwise not have knowledge of the products they might want.

That's the motte-and-bailey[0] defense of advertising that I particularly dislike. Yes, connecting products & services with people who want them is a crucial ingredient for efficient markets. But that's not what most advertising is about, that's not what the advertising industry is doing, that's not what adtech is working on. Ads as made and experienced today (and for the past 100 years), are all about emotionally manipulating people, about convincing people who know about a product to buy it when they otherwise wouldn't, about brainwashing people with brand associations so that in their moment of weakness they'll default to the advertised brand. The end result is customers making suboptimal purchasing choices, and the externalities are noise and utter destruction of all communications media.

As for "cancer on society" part - the following is an incomplete list of problems brought on us by advertising industry: spam, robocalls, telemarketing - all three having a spectrum from just annoying to outright fraud. Dark UX patterns. Blogspam, content marketing and wholesale flooding of the Internet with free garbage to gather eyeballs. Outrage-inducing news reporting. "Native advertising" (aka. just straight up dishonesty). Leaflets and other advertising material overflowing garbage bins everywhere and spilling on the pavements of every city. Excessive light pollution. Billboards distracting drivers. Social media influencers and other "individual advertisers" directly eroding trust you have in recommendations of people who aren't your immediate family. Having to protect your elderly parents from getting scammed by both criminals and reputable companies alike. Having to protect your kids from Elsagate-style video content. And yes, wholesale tracking and privacy violations too.

I could go on, and on, and on. My belief is that advertising is poisoning society from the inside, while at the same time causing absurd amounts of waste through negative-sum games (when competing for a fixed pie of customers, all your advertising efforts work to cancel out the advertising efforts of your competitors).

--

[0] - https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey

The root of the problem is how we measure the performance of our economy. Fix that, and all negative effects of ads will go away.

>I'm good at JavaScript, not biochemistry. How will I be curing cancer? Trick the cancer cells into calling undefined as a function?

No, that's how we get cancer in the first place. You need to trick it into calling a defined termination function.

Nobody's gonna cure cancer. We'll be able to prevent some cancers and treat others, but cancer is a large number of distinct diseases with different causes and outcomes and you can't eradicate it.

That said you don't need to be good at biochemistry to help treat cancer. The bottleneck in pharma research right now is essentially finding big enough patient groups for clinical trials, I'm sure Javascript can help with that. (And the "best ad minds" of the generation as well). What about tracking habits that may increase cancer rates? Hmmm, Javascript can help with that. What about mapping out locations that have abnormal occurences of cancer due to possible environmental factors so nobody buys a house somewhere the local plant is dumping waste into the nearby water supply? Well, there again...

Also, you can just study biochemistry and become good at it. I did just that. It's perfectly attainable and does not require extraordinary skill.

Doing software work in support of scientists trying to cure cancer. Scientists aren't curing cancer with a notebook and pen, they have have problems that a software engineer can really help with. Boring internal software, with some public-facing software.

It's not glorious work, and your team is typically understaffed and overworked. There are tradeoffs in the job, it's not for everyone. I work at New York Genome Center, and at the Broad Institute before that, both are nonprofits, and there are plenty of firms with software jobs out there where you can do "just software" and help with something meaningful.

Drop me a note, I'm happy to talk about this more. I missed the monthly jobs thread, but my group is hiring.

You mention you work at a nonprofit. Do you take volunteers as well?

We do not, we're a combination of grant-driven research, production/clinical genome sequencing, and scale computing; the work is hard to structure for ad-hoc volunteer contribution.

You are not good at "javascript" you are good at problem solving and logic.

I am good at programming, but I wasn't bad at chemistry either. I could have chosen to go study that instead, or gone into bioinformatics. I still could. There's plenty of software involved in modeling cell functions, which I imagine is pretty significant for curing cancer. Yet here I am, doing other stuff out of my free will.

I'm happy at my current job, but if I truly wanted to make the world a better place there would be more effective ways to do that (cancer research being one of them).

Many of the hardest problems facing us today in biological research are computational in nature. You could have a lot more of an impact than you think

Bioinfomatics is where a lot of research will be going on. And that's a lot closer to JavaScript than it is to biochemistry most of the time.

Genetics grad here, working in IT.

It’s an understandable sentiment but the salary one would be offered in Biology was basically laughable. Even in the so-called hotbed of biotech where I lived.

I don’t see an easy way to fix that either. Working in a politicized government funded organization would be the most likely outcome and I think most of us would hate it.

The academic model is bankrupt. No wonder a lot of people are dropping out because spending years, if not decades of low paying scholarships (at best) for the possibility of a good paying job later is just not a good proposition.

And then big companies require Masters/PhDs for people to go and do jobs when On The Job training would suffice? Yeah, does not sound good.

> Even in the so-called hotbed of biotech where I lived.

Where was that, if I could ask, and how bad is it? A "hotbed of biotech" is an entry on my list of cities to consider relocating to in the near future.

I was referring to Montreal, as there were a lot of biotech labs at the time.

I recall none of them paid above 35k$ at the time, which was the same as one would be paid handling phone support for telecoms.

This was 15 years back so things may have changed.

Not who you are replying to, but in my mind, the only two "hotbed" cities in the US that I can think of are Boston and San Diego.

Bay area (Emeryville and East Bay are pretty interesting, in addition to South SF), and Research Triangle Park (North Carolina). Seattle a bit.

Minneapolis has one of the largest biotech&medical device sectors in the US as well.

One of the brightest minds who did the same in the previous generation was Bill Gates, who then used his wealth to cure polio and is working on malaria. So maybe making money in tech isn’t actually so bad.

It's not just about money, it's about the "brightest minds" part. Injecting arbitrary amounts of money to some cancer projects won't suddenly make smart people to come back from making ads, especially if such donations are unsustainable. And you can't plan for billionaires; a Bill Gates is one-in-a-billion fluke combination of skill, upbringing, luck and conscience. For all the good Gates family is doing, you can't base humanity's most important projects on whether or not a billionaire wants to help their fellow men, instead of hoarding it all for their estate, or damaging some market in an attempt to turn their fortune into a greater fortune, or just blowing it all on heroin and hookers.

Bill Gates isn't really that much of an outlier within the class of people with that level of wealth. There is a long tradition of it stretching to the likes of Andrew Carnegie, and Gates isn't even the only modern example. Warren Buffet has committed to giving 99% of his wealth to charity. Elon Musk is Elon Musk. Any random billionaire is more likely to have a charitable foundation than not. It's pretty much impossible to spend that amount of money on heroin and hookers in practice.

The problem with relying on billionaires isn't that they won't do it, it's that they don't actually have that much money. Gates with ~$90B is #2 in the world, but spending every cent of it all in the same year would amount to less than one half of one percent of US GDP. His entire fortune is not quite half of what the US spends on just advertising each year.

> Any random billionaire is more likely to have a charitable foundation than not.

something something tax avoidance

Donations to certain charities can be tax deductions, but once you give the money to the charity, it has to be used for charitable purposes or it's not tax avoidance, it's tax fraud. Having it be used for charitable purposes seems like the thing we should want to happen to it.

Moreover, most of the things traditionally thought of as tax avoidance don't involve charities at all and are more along the lines of warehousing wealth in offshore companies where it can collect interest at low/zero tax rates.

Bill Gates has no real ability to cure polio or malaria, other than by throwing money at the problem. Other people have to do the actual work. But if the industry for those kinds of jobs isn't very good, enough people won't go into those careers at the time they need to, which is early: they need to have an interest at a young age, major in the right fields in college, specialize in postdoc, etc.

You can't just throw money at something and expect hordes of highly talented and qualified people to suddenly be available to do it.

This isn't Bill's fault (as much as I'd like to blame him for something after suffering with Windows 9x), it's a product of our society. We don't value that kind of work, we don't demand our government to fund it properly (since the "free market" isn't going to), so we get kids going into college tracks where they can be good at online advertising rather than curing cancer.

> Bill Gates has no real ability to cure polio or malaria, other than by throwing money at the problem.

This is far too simplistic. Throw a bunch of money at advertising and everyone goes to work for FAANG. Shift some of that money to disease research and suddenly people - who might have otherwise become doctors or followed a career path that paid - start realizing its a valid career path that they don’t need to sacrifice quality of life to pursue.

Yes, it’s not something that will happen overnight (it’s not like everyone immediately switched to coding once FAANG started paying a lot), but if the money is there, it will start to happen.

It's very easy to shift from some other programming work (where you have a degree in CS or similar) to working for FAANG.

You can't take a CS degree and start working in disease research, any more than you can get an MBA and start in disease research. The time to get people on that track is when they're coming out of high school.

You can't take doctors and have them work in disease research either. They'll have the necessary undergrad work most likely, but all the med school stuff just isn't useful for it, and they'll have to start over with the postdoc studies to specialize in that research. After they've already invested a fortune in med school, they're not going to do that. Who's going to pay all these people to move away from more lucrative fields into research?

The incentives are not alligned properly. Cancer patients don't pay as good as advertisers. It would help if everybody would have an expensive cancer insurance. But I guess most people don't think about cancer until it's too late. It's more fun to buy stuff after clicking on ads.

Edit: the incentive of an insurance doesn't work either :( . It should be possible to bet money on getting cancer. Everybody who bets against me gets my money in the case that I don't get cancer.

> Everybody who bets against me gets my money in the case that I don't get cancer.

That’s called universal healthcare.

Most cancer researchers aren't working on curing cancer! Rather they're working on fabricating for themselves an impressive history of published papers using p-hacking. RP:CB has been trying to reproduce many landmark cancer studies and found that 1) the majority do not reproduce or only partially reproduce and 2) that the authors of the original papers are generally hostile to attempts to reproduce their work.

I've got a PhD in genetics from Cambridge and I do security development work at Google. I'm far better at the latter, and the skills that I use on a daily basis wouldn't have made me a good fit for the former. These aren't fields where capability in one is equivalent to competence in the other.

Interestingly, I did computer science at Cambridge, and now I'm doing university research in genetics. I very much view what I'm doing as applied computer science, with a not-insignificant amount of software development.

By the way, you gave your supervisor quite a scare when you went off and got a computing job before you had submitted your thesis. I remember him lamenting about it quite clearly.

There's overlap between the fields, just as there is between, say, physics and genetics - but we don't usually end up telling physicists that they should be busy curing cancer rather than fucking about with subatomic particles. Different people have different aptitudes, and there aren't many people I've met in the FAANG space who'd I'd say would be well suited to wet lab work no matter how smart they are.

(And hey, I'd finished my revisions before I got the job, submitting them just ended up being a lower priority than moving to America and getting married…)

It's just as well there are areas of genetics that one can do just sat in front of a computer. I wouldn't trust me in a wet lab.

Does inventing gmail count? Webmail before gmail sucked, now they are essentially clones (or improvements) of gmail.

Many cancer researches use gmail (or other similar webmail) instead of the horrible internal email of the university, with a bad spam filter, small disk quotas, bad browser support (only IE6), etc.

And other researches use gmail (or a similar webmail) too, like to cure tuberculosis, eradicate polio, launch rockets, heart surgery, ...

Sounds like you'd be a fan of http://80000hours.org/

The FAANG companies might end up producing the machine learning algorithms which are key to solving many problems in biochemistry.

Ironically, one of my close colleagues left the tech sector to become an HIV epidemiologist.

I believe they had never been asked whether or not they wanted to be born intelligent and I don’t see why should they be given the burden of fixing the world when the world, quite often, turned their backs on them.

I don’t see how its their responsibility or why it should be.