Too Many Smart People Chasing Too Many Dumb Ideas?

theodp writes "In The Unexotic Underclass, C.Z. Nnaemeka argues that too many smart people are chasing too many dumb ideas. 'What is shameful,' writes Nnaemeka, 'is that in a country with so many problems, with such a heaving underclass, we find the so-called 'best and brightest,' the 20-and 30-somethings who emerge from the top American graduate and undergraduate programs, abandoning their former hangout, Wall Street, to pile into anti-problem entrepreneurship.' Nnaemeka adds, 'It just looks like we've shifted the malpractice from feeding the money machine to making inane, self-centric apps. Worse, is that the power players, institutional and individual — the highflying VCs, the entrepreneurship incubators, the top-ranked MBA programs, the accelerators, the universities, the business plan competitions have been complicit in this nonsense.' And while it may not get you invited to the White House, Nnaemeka advises entrepreneurs looking for ideas to 'consider looking beyond the city-centric, navel-gazing, youth-obsessed mainstream' and instead focus on some groups that no one else is helping."

Comments

Mweeehhhh

[kruach aum]

Smart people aren't doing what I want them to!!! Why aren't they making the world better the way I think it should be done?!

Re:Mweeehhhh

[jythie]

To be fair, one can look at it as a balance issue. The most capable people tend to shift their focus to the things society values the most, and right now we place a high social value on getting rich quick through finding some narcissistic niche and building something that appeals to it.

The value of helping others, helping the underclass, solving systemic problems, building shared resources, things that elevate society as a whole rather then the privileged, well, these things are often argued about and I will not even attempt to claim one way or the other is 'best', but I think it is fair to express distress regarding shifts in what people value.

Essentially, this is the same complaint as people talking about how we do not have enough STEM talent or too much manufacturing+research is moving offshore.

Re:Mweeehhhh

[Grishnakh]

Essentially, this is the same complaint as people talking about how we do not have enough STEM talent

From what I've seen, almost all the people who complain that we don't have enough STEM talents are also people who, themselves, are not in STEM fields. If they think it's so important, why didn't they go into it?

Basically, it's because the people complaining want a larger STEM workforce to make money from, but they don't work in it because they can't make nearly as much money in it as whatever they're doing. So they want other people to work their asses off for mediocre pay.

Re:Mweeehhhh

[Gorobei]

To be fair, one can look at it as a balance issue. The most capable people tend to shift their focus to the things society values the most, and right now we place a high social value on getting rich quick through finding some narcissistic niche and building something that appeals to it.
 

As you note, capable people focus on things that society values most. "Getting rich quick" is the result of producing what society values most, *not* the thing that society values most. So you make Facebook and get rich because society wants Facebook, not because it wants you to be rich.

So I don't see what Nnaemeka wants to happen: society to invest more money in the underclass, or people to altruistically forgo riches to serve the underclass. Either one may be a noble goal, but he should at least articulate what he wants: he complains about us being to urban-focused, but over 80% of people in America live in an urban environment! And tech apps work better in a dense environment: seamless.com, etc, isn't a business model for a farm community; the big stuff has already been done (amazon.com, youporn.com.)

Re:Mweeehhhh

[SerpentMage]

How is this funny? He is not trolling. If you read the article what he is getting at is that we are not solving the problem that move society forward. Case in point tumblr. Wow, what a piece of effen work! Yippeee! Or look at all of those one day camps of ideas. All related to simplistic systems, where the business model falls into, "lets make this so that we can get bought out." These days the idea is not about actually building a business that makes money.

Case in point Ubuntu. This is a company that does try to push the boundary and does try to help, all while trying to make a business about it. Same thing with Redhat. Yet are they rewarded like say a Tumblr? I just crack up laughing that a TUmblr is worth a tenth of Redhat. you know a business that is actually making money and solving problems.

Where is the real innovation? The uniqueness? Where are the plans that drive real businesses? I think that is a valid question.

Re:Mweeehhhh

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Lawyerly politicians whining about need for more STEM is exactly what both Heinlein, in Starship Troopers, and Niven, in The Mote In God's Eye were sarcastically describing.

In Starship Troopers (the book anyway), the bugs were non-sentient. But every time a colony was distressed, the workers bred this "brain bug", and then the problem would magically go away. Then the brain bug became irrelevant to it again.

In The Mote In God's Eye, the Moties are led by a political caste, with other castes obeying them, as they went about their political machinacions and wars. The Engineer caste was ungodly brilliant, but otherwise completely mute, and specifically he juxtaposed it against the yabbering schemes of the political class.

I hope some of you wake up to the memes of both parties guiding and directing you. You are disposable.

My point: This guy's bleat is a whine from the political class to come save them from their own idiocies, then shut the hell up once they take credit for breeding brain bugs to solve problems. Do it, but leave them in control.

Vernor Vinge gets even more sarcastic in A Deepness In The Sky, the sequel to the phenomenal A Fire Upon The Deep, wherein the bad guys use a drug that makes you find whatever it is impossibly seductive and pleasurable. If you do art, you will focus on it and produce world-class works. If science or engineering, phenomenal feats. And so on.

But you won't dream of resisting their control because you get to do what you want...that it's to your overlord's benefit doesn't enter into it.

silly

[O('_')O_Bush]

I think there are lots of smart people helping those that fewer people care about (there are no groups that need help that nobody does), you just don't hear about it because they don't get invited to the White House.

The truly smartest are often considered insane

[Qbertino]

People who will change society by orders of magnitude a few decades or centuries down the road are considered borderline insane today.

Actually, by the usual measure they often _are_ borderline insane. RMS is a great example. His ragging on about GNU/Linux instead of Linux etc., his appalling table manners (I've heard first hand that they are bound to make you throw up), etc. are mannerisms that cloud the greatness of the ideals he holds dearest. His deed of introducing the GPL and putting is power where his mouth is ang giving us the GPL and the GNU Toolkit will have more positive consequences for humanity further down the road than a Mark Zuckerberg could only dream of. And every expert knows this.

It's quite common that people really helping humanity move forward become famous only after they've died - if at all - and society gradually grows to see what they did for us all or what they saw coming (Ada Livingston, Tesla, ...). And if they do experience fame themselves, it's not unlikely that they are in trouble for their ideas and insights (Galilei, US founding fathers, founders of the German republic, etc.). ...

That all been said, I have to second the initial claim that there basically is a solid measure of decadence, especially in the field of IT, that is leading us nowhere. I've spent my recent years scrum mastering for browsergames, fiddling with FOSS CMSes (and we all agree that the world surely does not need any more of those) and now techleading the development of travel booking sites. With all the power as a developer and IT expert at my hands today nothing to brag about, really.

However, I *do* have a daughter and she needs to be put well on her way, and if assigning tickets to webdevs for the next generic webapp is what helps me follow through with my responsibility, I guess I'll have to swallow my pride until she's out of the house and on her own. Then I might actually finally drop IT as a main career all together and put my skills into action for some greater cause, such as protecting/defending the environment or pushing for some advancement in womans rights somewhere or something.

My 2 cents.