[mmxiii]

And you exemplify the kind of self-righteous person that probably spews this kind of junk daily.

The reason people work on sexting apps over curing cancer is because it is a more human problem than curing cancer. In all your tunnel-visioned dash to label problems as "hard and "worthy" you are the one that missed the forest from the trees. All people will die, and while it would be great if they could stick around a bit longer without pain, the biggest difference is how people spend their lives today. If they can spend it connecting with other people they care about, and derive meaning from that, that is a thousandfold more compelling problem.

It's not that other people don't have their incentives and values right, it's that you don't recognize them.

[Jaiguss]

Lets just be honest with ourselves. The biggest reason more people are willing to work on these substance-less apps is because its far easier to create something superfluous as a twitter-helper(or any of the hundreds of ecommerce sites that simply provide new ways to do old things like laundry, via your phone), than it is to cure cancer, and they get to call themselves "hackers", "entrepreneurs", "techies", etc.

There are many players in the game now who are in it more so for the hopes of striking in rich and social currency than the actual joy of solving problems, surprise surprise. This is why the app stores are flooded with endless spinoffs and knockoffs of the same things over and over again.

[eli_gottlieb]

Let's just be honest with ourselves. The people who become research doctors working on curing cancer have very, very hard lives, and most aspiring cancer curers never get to do any actual curing. They have to do a PhD/MD, survive their internship and residency process, and most likely publish papers before they're even out of school before a cancer lab will even hire them.

Substanceless apps are not only objectively easier than curing cancer, there are much lower barriers to entry. In fact, for some perverse reason, our society seems to feel that the most trustworthy process for handling real, major problems like cancer research is to erect the highest possible barriers to entry, throw even the survivors out of the field at every least opportunity, and then place absolute trust in the few who survive this winnowing process.

The concept that treating everything serious as a tournament-structured winnowing process might have some negative impact on the ability of our research institutions to actually treat and cure cancer does not seem to occur.