A lot of people, especially in the tech industry, think reading the news is a waste of time. It pulls time away from shipping product or reading OpenAI's latest blog post. Even the meditation I listen to warns me not to read the paper, beause of how emotionally draining it can be. They're all right, to some degree.
But how else are you to know about humanities biggest issues, without listening to the people reporting on it? It seems impossible to find PMF for a problem you made up. On the other hand, there are millions of problems in our world to fix: climate change, lack of humanitarian aid, surveillance, renewable energy, corruption, inequitable transportation, poverty, and chronic disease (just to name a few). ^3
These are huge problems to take on, and some of them might need cultural and political movements to truly fix. However, as Dwarkesh Patel says,
"In another sense, there’s something strange in terms of domains you think of as crowded and totally competitive. There are usually totally obvious blind spots."
Considering the rate of progess in technology, I predict many niche problems in the world actually could be solved with 2-3 years of dedicated effort. To a lighter degree, could hackathons for social good be more impactful if people knew what was happening outside of their own bubble? What if 10% of people working on side projects or startups wanted to find a way to help people?
It’s also a fair argument to say that “helping people doesn’t pay” or “there’s no such thing as altruism”. It definitely can’t compare to the 6-7 figure salary of being a ML scientist or Optimization Engineer at Amazon. But I’d have to argue that there’s a lot more opportunity in it than there used to be, and just as much risk when compared to starting a B2B Saas in today’s saturated markets! To get an ambitious project off the ground, it takes being scrappy: a few cold emails, the right people, or keeping your eyes out for grants. VC money trickles in this space, but there are a few (LowerCarbon, Founders Fund) that are willing to take on higher risks to support inventions for the future. Here’s a list^1 I conjured of a few I know of: lmk if you know any too!
Here’s just one reason that should convince everyone to read the news:
Here’s two more:
I am amazed by how fast technology moves. Last month, I was sitting in on a computer vision workshop at BAIR^2 and realized how much insane, sci-fi-level tech is being shipped (my favs were on 4D View Reconstruction, Long Range Point Tracking, and CLIP interpretation with text).
The CS community has come so far: most papers now make their code open source and include github pages and documentation on how to use it!! Ready to go!!! As someone privileged enough to live in the heart of Silicon Valley and surrounded by researchers, programmers, and builders, you have the power to use this tech for good.
I’ve recently been blown away by The New York Time’s committment to reporting. Recently, they sued the US Health and Humanitarian Services for not releasing all their data on the current migration crisis from Central America. For every anecdotal story they release about the Israel-Palestine conflict, they have done hundreds of interviews. I once interviewed 20 farmers to iterate on a product I was building for soil health analysis. It took me a week, and more than 50 cold calls. Could you even imagine 100 interviews for one line in a news article? NYT has to be my favorite outlet.
I also recommend The Economist for these sick monthly reviews and short daily updates they put out about the world economy and markets. NPR is great for less technical, broad yet specific stories on current events.
ps. I’m new to following the news (nobody in my family thought it’d be more important that applying for internships), so my recommendations are non exhaustive.
ps. If you want a free new york times subscription, im happy to send account details. It’s that important.