Yes, I believed you missed the point. Someone lamenting the fact that smart people are working on stupid problems is not the same thing as them saying that smart people should be forced to work on hard problems. Hamming put it best:
"Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, ``Do you mind if I join you?'' They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, ``What are the important problems of your field?'' And after a week or so, ``What important problems are you working on?'' And after some more time I came in one day and said, ``If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?'' I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring."
While I have some sympathy for your point of view (after all the guy is free to say what he wants) I still think the argument is facile. A few thoughts:
- As others have pointed out, talent is not fungible. Just because you can program Yo, doesn't mean to can solve other issues.
- If everyone is so convinced that Yo is such a dumb idea, do you really want the founder who's "capable" of doing something so stupid working on serious issues?
- What is worthwhile? If you view Yo as art (in the modern sense) it's pretty effective! Seems to have made the entire tech community collectively think. That's a hard thing to do. We don't mock the choices made by Banksy (who on the surface is a vandal)... Perhaps Yo will be a godsend to folks with severe disabilities, allowing them to simply communicate with others nearby easily and effectively. Or perhaps it's just fun. Why is that bad?
- Or maybe the whole thing fails and that's OK. Far more 'worthwhile' companies have failed.
Re: fungible talent, I disagree, talent is not non-fungible, it's semi-fungible within certain subfields. If you know how to hammer a nail you can apply that to different applications. Beyond that, I'd argue that if you are a smart individual who is generally well educated and adept at learning, your labor is fairly fungible given enough ramp-up time to acquire new skills.
The entire article (and this viewpoint in general) is predicated on the idea that if you are capable enough to learn what is necessary to build and launch a mobile app you are capable enough to solve similar technical problems that apply to what the author considers more worthwhile to society. I don't think this is far fetched.
As far as determining what is worthwhile, I think this is less about what others think and more about what you think about what you are working on and its worth. Just because you have built something doesn't mean you actually have reflected on if it was the best use of your time. It's easy to be drawn in (due to flow, endorphins, cash, etc) and then suddenly you realize you've spent half of your life working on something you're not exactly proud of. It's easy to throw out moral relativism as an excuse to never be able to say something is objectively stupid, but some things are dumber than others, and at the end of the day this is about what you decide to spend your limited time on Earth doing. These little reminders I think provide a good nudge for people to think about what they are working on and consciously decide they want to continue on that path, regardless of what others think.
Skills are not fungible - just because I can make a web app doesn't necessarily mean I can learn how to perform surgery - but most people with certain skillsets certainly are.
How else would people build products by hiring more developers?
So, in so far that there are more socially useful problems that iOS developers can help resolve it remains a valid critique to say that those developers could have worked on something else.
"Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, ``Do you mind if I join you?'' They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, ``What are the important problems of your field?'' And after a week or so, ``What important problems are you working on?'' And after some more time I came in one day and said, ``If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?'' I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring."
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
Yo's developers getting more than a million in funding at least makes it pretty clear at least in part why this happens.