> There are a bunch of people out there right now solving #firstworldproblems.
> A waste of talent!
No, it's not. You know what's a waste? The common "appeal to worse problems".
Just because you are not working on curing cancer or solving poverty in Africa, it doesn't mean that your work is trivial, useless, or a waste. People in the first world have problems. Solving them is anything but a waste.
Every time you bring civilization a little step further through technology, you inevitably end up helping those who work hard at what you consider worthy problems. I'm sure at some point someone considered the creation of the web as a self-serving project for academics in the first world. It turned out to be the biggest innovation of the century, greatly benefiting people everywhere.
Innovation can come from anywhere. As an example, memcached came from LiveJournal. It's important not to fall into the trap of considering #firstworldproblems as not worthy of consideration or a waste.
Why are you talking about curing cancer or solving poverty? All he said was,
"Lately we have seen a plague of Next Better Widget ™ startups and bright minds all over the world solving frivolous problems that ultimately contribute nothing to the betterment of humanity as a whole."
This isn't a first-world versus big-problem dichotomy; this is just a matter of whether or not what you're working on is measurably benefiting anyone. If not, then yes, it might be a waste of talent.
These justifications are silly, anyway. How many people, in offices all over the world, are spending significant amounts of time doing something other than work? I don't mean taking the occasional ten-minute break, I mean spending half or more of their day on Facebook or other distractions. How much GDP worldwide is being consumed by this? How much human effort is being spent just clicking on something while staring at a screen?
How much more effort do we want to put into trying to maximize all that waste?
I didn't necessarily mean you should go cure cancer, or end world poverty. There are many of first world problems that are perfectly awesome to try solving (for example, how do we convince people to use nuclear, how do we make nuclear safer? how do we make it easier for people to actually recycle? how can we help people get proper rest instead of brainrot?)
You should really look at the #firstworldproblems hashtag on twitter to get a sense of colloquial usage :)
Mmmh, he probably refers to things like developing Farmville. It is unclear why this solves any problems and not just wastes the time of users. But to be fair, if people wouldn't play Farmville doesn't mean they wouldn't find another way to waste their time :-)
That strikes me as one of those perfectly logical justifications for contributing to a problem: "Well, if we didn't produce cigarettes, someone else would anyway." It's also a red herring; it doesn't matter if someone else would or not, all that matters is whether or not we did the deed.
Well, you are right here, but that's essentially the point I try to address. Everyone of us has to decide on his own if he wants to work on something, which has no positive effect on overall society.
> A waste of talent!
No, it's not. You know what's a waste? The common "appeal to worse problems".
Just because you are not working on curing cancer or solving poverty in Africa, it doesn't mean that your work is trivial, useless, or a waste. People in the first world have problems. Solving them is anything but a waste.
Every time you bring civilization a little step further through technology, you inevitably end up helping those who work hard at what you consider worthy problems. I'm sure at some point someone considered the creation of the web as a self-serving project for academics in the first world. It turned out to be the biggest innovation of the century, greatly benefiting people everywhere.
Innovation can come from anywhere. As an example, memcached came from LiveJournal. It's important not to fall into the trap of considering #firstworldproblems as not worthy of consideration or a waste.