There's a lot that I dislike about this article, but I'll start with this: it is probably self-refuting. Someone could just have easily written: "I find it difficult to see individuals who could focus their time and effort solving [problems like energy, food, water, health, education], instead put their efforts into something like a takedown of the moral priorities of the people behind Yo on a their personal blog." A person could argue that the post has more value than Yo (though I'm not sure this is self-evident), but it still isn't in the same ballpark as "energy, food, water, health, education." I mean, c'mon Christoph McCann, get your priorities straight!
Of course, I don't actually make that argument, because I reject its premise. As the above argument hopefully illustrates, it is not reasonable to insist that everyone spend all their time in the most socially beneficial way possible. Should we all strive to make the world a better place? Of course. But I don't know many people who think that we need to spend all our time tackling the world's biggest problems.
And, by the way, who appointed Christoph McCann arbiter of what it good and valuable in this world? Maybe an app like Yo will bring us together in a new (albeit marginal) way. That's valuable, even if it is also silly. (See, e.g., the first few paragraphs of this article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2014/06/23/goo...) Or maybe it provide a cautionary tale to remind us (as, perhaps, it already has) what is really important. Value exists in subtle forms that are not so easy to glibly list, and can be advanced in subtle and unexpected ways. While I wish we lived in a world where more people focused on problems like energy, food, water, health, education, I'm not sure I want to live in a world where EVERYONE works on those problems. I want people to be free to do the unexpected, even if the results sometimes seem frivolous.
So, if McCann's only point is that we should take a moment and reconsider our priorities, point taken. But this looks suspiciously like something a bit more (with respect, and apologies) totalitarian.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." [0]
The reason why this article resonates with many readers is that it expresses frustration with the triviality of how our economy allocates resources to start-ups. The promise of tech is huge, but following the money often leads to optimizing ads, machine learning algorithms competing with each other in HFT, or other applications with little net benefit to society.
It's not that EVERYONE should be working on the big problems -- just that the incentive systems seem to lean towards triviality over deep human benefit.
"It's not that EVERYONE should be working on the big problems -- just that the incentive systems seem to lean towards triviality over deep human benefit."
Yes, exactly. And even more importantly: we can fix it, but we choose not to. I know brilliant people with extremely specialized training in chemistry, physics, biochemistry, and so on. People who should be developing new drugs, or high-speed trains, or improving solar energy, or creating new ways to generate hydrogen or ethanol from plants.
You know what? They can't get jobs in their field of training, and if/when they do, the jobs are crap. The sad truth is, it's not (currently) economically rational to devote your youth to these high-minded pursuits. In all likelihood, you will be rewarded with a lifetime of insecurity and low income, followed by an uncertain potential of a comfortable life in old age.
This is a societal problem. We're currently spending all of our resources on short-term wealth accumulation and neglecting longer-term technological development. We could stop it with the right set of financial incentives, but we don't.
That quote is dripping with hubris. There's a few high profile cases where it's true -- Ng at google and now Baidu, for example -- but I guarantee that the bulk of the "best minds" of the generation are not programmers at Google or Facebook.
You have a point, but it's worth mentioning that the fundamental observation behind the complaint is still sound: incentives are rigged to guide smart people towards pursuits of dubious utility compared to what they would otherwise choose to work on. Let's look at a rough picture of incentives for a new graduate:
1. Helping the poor: $0 (maybe $12k if you count a fellowship)
2. Trying to Cure Cancer: $25k/yr, bump to $40k after 6 years
3. Engineering Medical Devices, Airplanes, etc: $60k/yr
4. Trying to Build the Next Twitter: $100k/yr-$150k/yr
5. Helping Rich People Game the System to Get Richer: $150k/yr, $300k/yr after a few years if successful
I have placed these in decreasing order of social value per my own judgement. Note that salary has precisely the opposite trend. The probability of that particular relative order occurring by chance is 1 in 120. I could add other jobs to the list to drop the probability even further.
In some cases the market is conveying valuable information. If we have enough !Software Engineers, it makes sense to depress their wages as a way of discouraging people from entering those fields. Similarly, it makes sense to encourage smart people to pursue roles with a lot of leverage (in the value creation sense, not the bargaining sense), which is a plausible excuse for sending smart people into finance (not one that I buy, but it's plausible).
But in other cases we can identify the information that the market is conveying and pass judgement with the opposite conclusion. By design, the market rewards those who feed and clothe wealthy people and punishes those who feed and clothe the poor and penniless. In this instance the market's reasoning is transparent enough to judge and few would rule in its favor ("necessary evil" is the best I've heard, and then only in the context of the circular "it's the best system we've tried" argument).
Another negative example would be medical research. Next time someone you care about is sick or dying and has run out of options, reconsider the wisdom of our system in spending ~3% of all medical expenditures on research. Also remember that much of that is governmental -- if the market had its way, that figure would be even lower. The market's reasoning is transparent: a doctor, insurance company, or drug company can threaten to withhold the service or good they provide in order to capture a fraction of the value they create. A researcher can't do that, at least not effectively (their product only appreciates in value once they no longer control it). So they are systematically undervalued and the options that your loved one has are artificially reduced as a result of this.
Market-based incentives have huge problems. The million dollar question (many trillion dollar question) is how to fix them.
Ad money is what's paying for all the interesting projects and acquisitions going on at Google right now. If not directly a net benefit to society, it has been one indirectly.
Paraphrasing Peter Thiel [1], this is a stochastic approach ("unplanned statistical view of the future") to technological progress. Throw darts at ad clicks and hope that it cures cancer. The opposite approach is the 'Manhattan Project'-way, where you throw the best minds in a field to work on a particular project. To some extent, this is going on in areas like mathematics (Langlands Project), Human Genome Project, NIH BRAIN Initiative, etc. In the long term, it is unclear if the 'stochastic approach' is deterministically effective in solving the 'Big' problems.
Not only that, but ads pay for the otherwise free content. We used to have to trudge to the library, in the snow, uphill both ways, to pour over out of date books to try to find information. Or pay very high prices to have a librarian type searches into things like lexus nexus. Now we do this from home, for free. Not to mention stream film, download books, get college degrees, and so on.
Internet ads have transformed life as we know it, in a good way.
Reaching consumers is hard, even if you have the superior product. Facilitating such a transaction should make one proud.
The 'psychological exploits' are a marginal component, but again, why is it inherently bad for someone to feel good about using product x over product y, even if they're exactly the same?
Advertisements are more manipulative than informative. But the bigger point was that they are far less of a benefit to humanity than other things, yet they get far more resources allocated to them.
>> And, by the way, who appointed Christoph McCann arbiter of what it good and valuable in this world?
This is such an important point, and why free markets work best. If people derive value out of Yo, then terrific. If they don't, it goes away. Don't need a moral crusader to decide what is worthy.
> This is such an important point, and why free markets work best.
Free markets don't work best, popularity is not best; free markets cater to what people want, not what they need and certainly not what's best. Absolute belief in the free market is a religion, not a fact supported by history.
Market driven economies are wonderful for producing loads of crap and me too-ware and woefully inadequate for solving really hard and necessary yet not immediately profitable problems. Quite simply, market driven economies optimize the making of money, not the solving of problems in the best way.
There's also a "market" of ideas and opinions. The OP expressed one.
The OP isn't a jack-booted right-thinking enforcer. The OP isn't even a "moral crusader", as you put it. In a free society, it is perfectly reasonable to gently mock people you believe are engaging in stupid and/or pointless pursuits. As the OP did. Of course the people doing the dumb stuff are free to scoff and ignore them. As you are.
Anyway, I think the OP has a perfectly valid point. Just because there is some market demand for an app like Yo, doesn't mean that we are predestined to make building it our life's mission. Some of us, if we slow down and reflect, might opt to be remembered for doing something other than: "Invented an app that no consumer was willing to pay for, and which solved no meaningful problems for anyone, but which some investment bankers managed to persuade some big company had strategory value. RIP".
That's fine if all y'all want that on your tombstone (the other kind of tombstone), but it's also fine to at least reflect on whether that's really what you want.
Of course. However in the marketplace of ideas, it's important that as a society we don't embrace the trappings of a command&control economy. I am merely reacting to the OPs (albeit extremely benign in this case) view that an individual or group of individuals can decide what is OK for others.
>This is such an important point, and why free markets work best.
Well, there's a subtlety there.
It's not that "free markets work best". It's that the efficient market hypothesis claims that a market with perfect information dissemination consisting of uniformly rational agents will deliver Pareto-optimal resource allocations.
There's a lot to disagree with in that sentence; market agents collude, people are demonstrably irrational/rely on cognitive heuristics and just because something is Pareto efficient doesn't mean it's fair or equitable.
All three are valid critiques, and the case in point in TFA - the market allocated money to Yo, but that doesn't mean a priori that funding Yo is a worthy and moral choice.
So, if we have markets that routinely deliver inequitable outcomes it's perfectly reasonable to ask - why is this happening?
Having studied with the originators of the efficient market hypothesis (Fama), I regret to inform you that what you describe is not a feature of EMH but is rather frequently attributed to it in an attempt to discredit it. There is nothing that rationally follows EMH that leads to Pareto-optimal outcomes in society.
EMH means that well informed markets make sound decisions on the pricing of assets. This means that based on the current information available, markets are excellent at understanding the probability-weighted value of an asset. It doesn't mean that the outcome ends up being right, it means that it's fairly priced based on the information at hand. Nothing guaranteeing Pareto-optimal outcomes from that.
Furthermore, an investor giving 1.2M to a company is not an efficient market under any circumstance.
The efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) requires neither "perfect information dissemination" or "uniformly rational agents".
Here is one well stated version of the EMH:
"The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) essentially says that all known information about investment securities, such as stocks, is already factored into the prices of those securities. Therefore no amount of analysis can give an investor an edge over other investors. EMH does not require that investors be rational; it says that individual investors will act randomly but, as a whole, the market is always "right." In simple terms, "efficient" implies "normal." For example, an unusual reaction to unusual information is normal."[1]
Also, I'd venture a guess that if you sum up the total cost that has gone into Facebook's Poke feature (development, maintenance, deciding whether or not to turn it off), it would dramatically eclipse the 1.2M that everyone is so up in arms about. No one is losing their marbles over that stuff.
Look, I agree it's a ridiculous app.. but if people use it and derive value from it, good! Utility created!
I think you could just stop at "people use it". What kind of value they derive from it (if any) is another inquiry, and can't be discerned from merely observing the fact that they use it. At least, not without some really strong assumptions to the effect that people always correctly make positive-utility choices. It's possible people use it, but derive negative utility from it, and mistakenly use it nonetheless.
There are some very popular things (tobacco, say) that in most reasonable analyses produce negative utility over the long run! The problem is that people are not very good at utility-maximization, especially when the analysis involves more than one factor, some uncertainty, different time scales, etc. People are generally not good at almost any vaguely arithmetically complex operation (e.g. correctly using conditional-probability information in their decision-making, even when known).
That's one reason neoclassical economics prefers to talk about simply "price", rather than the classical discussion of both "price" and "value". Modern economics is the empirical study of pricing and economic behavior, and is agnostic about value.
Your points are all very valid of course. While utility theory has largely been superseded by prospect theory, like Newtonian physics, it can still be useful for back-of-the-envelop thought.
Furthermore I'll be a devil's advocate however and just make the point that one could rationally defend tobacco use as utility deriving. Just because a (in my view) sane person would see all the horrible effects of tobacco as trumping any positive attributes, someone else may disagree. Depending on one's own discount rate, tobacco use at any point in time in fact be net positive in enriching their life. Even if you argue that some of the positives are created by advertising cigarettes as cool (Joe Camel, etc.), so what? Someone spending $50,000 on a fancy watch is also making the same sort of determination. If the user derives the benefit, regardless of whether it's endogenous or exogenous to the product itself, that isn't obviously inherently bad.
Now, of course, smoking has it's own set of problems because it negatively affects others... but again, it's not so clear that one can't attribute rational decision making to even a smoker.
If you told someone a top 10 app with over 300,000 users raised $1.2 million they probably wouldn't bat much of an eye. That's what Yo is now. It probably wont last, but that doesn't mean its creator can't take advantage of its success right now.
Well, except there's all kinds of economic theories about how this isn't true: the tragedy of the commons, negative externalities. There's also a lot of evidence that rational actor theory isn't as true as pure economics would suggest. And of course market inefficiencies will distort price signals. And truly free markets have a hard time remaining such in face of large incentives for rational actors to instead engage in rent seeking or other anti-competitive behavior.
But yes, if you ignore all the problems both theoretical and practical with free markets, free markets work best.
Go back and read again. He's not saying anything that free markets are an imperfect way of delivering what people want, but they're better than anything else we've come up with. He's saying that free markets tell us what people want, and if you disagree with the "free market" (which is an abstraction, I don't think most things people refer to as free markets actually are the "free markets" of economic textbooks), you're disagreeing with what people actually want. That makes free markets right by tautology; the best is what people want, and what people want is what they buy on free markets. Which is fine if you want to short-circuit debate, but it doesn't actually let us ask the important questions.
> He's saying that free markets tell us what people want, and if you disagree with the "free market" (which is an abstraction, I don't think most things people refer to as free markets actually are the "free markets" of economic textbooks), you're disagreeing with what people actually want.
And while that's a common argument, the obvious problem with it is that free markets weight preferences by existing wealth. $ as a proxy for utils isn't really a valid assumption when people don't have the same quantity of $.
And yet we still have successful socialism-based projects in the US. The reality is that capitalism isn't a one-size-fits-all solution to solving all problems. We can stand outside of economic systems as moral beings and decide what ends we want to accomplish as a society, and find the best means to get to those ends.
To sacrifice the role of morals and ethics in forming societies at the altar of capitalism denies us one of the things that makes us human. If capitalism gives us "Yo's", then we may want to question why, not defer the morality of "Yo's" to capitalism and shut our brains off.
(And no, I am not making a moral statement about economic systems. I'm capitalist as fuck, but even I think if the Yo story is what it seems to be on the surface, something seems wrong.)
> If people derive value out of Yo, then terrific. If they don't, it goes away. Don't need a moral crusader to decide what is worthy.
Then you wind up with things like Fox "News" (actually Entertainment, NOT news) being popular, because they found that entertainment is much better at making money than actual news. If you let "making money" be the decider, lots of valuable things fade away.
The answer is that those things are not valuable. People don't want news. This is not a bad thing. This means that people aren't like the elitist ideal of what you want in your socialist utopia.
Real people happen to like Facebook and Fox News and Snapchat and Yo. And that's fine. To say that those desires are somehow immoral because they aren't lofty enough is elitist, condescending, and anti-humanist.
I'm not sure it's entirely correct to claim that the set of "things that people want" is equivalent to the set of "things that add value to people's lives".
I'm also unsure as to how arguing that such a distinction might exist could be construed as elitist, condescending, or anti-humanist. And I've no idea at all how you got the idea that it might imply that the desires, of people, for things which do not add value to their lives, are immoral.
(That is, that the desires are immoral, not the people. Crikey that last sentence is hard to parse. Sorry.)
>If you let "making money" be the decider, lots of valuable things fade away.
20th century was spent exploring the alternatives to such a decider. As the result we do know that "making money" is the most efficient and effective decider that humanity has so far been able to come up with. Basically the humanity is just too stupid to use anything else at the moment.
I find it so strange when people make this argument, that a century was "spent" exploring these alternatives. I don't disagree that "making money" is our best heuristic so far, but it's not like the entire 20th century was devoted solely to exploring these options. There are various other concerns intertwined with the economic strategies that competed. Fascism could have won, Stalinist communism could have won, and it would not be accurate to say that any one economic strategy is the "best we've got" just because they came out, geopolitically/militarily, on top.
There are things like Public Goods[1] that can have very high value to society but no individual has any incentive to invest in pay for them. E.g. most of the "big problems" the author is talking about. Free markets severely misallocate resources because of this. There are also things like normal wealth inequality. A poor person can't pay for the drug that will save his life. Then there are things that are very long term.
Kind of a blanket statement, free market works best. It works adequately in many cases, at best. Completely ignores non-transaction, external participants, like the environment.
Attempting moral persuasion ("moral crusading" seems an extreme interpretation) is essential for society to progress. Not much of a future if value is only determined by some business-genius decision maker deciding that, "Hey, I can make a million bucks off this. Must be worthwhile!"
That's a facile argument. There's money to be made in a wide variety of pointless or even deleterious services. You can get rich hydrofracking or producing TV shows about how aliens built the pyramids. You woukd get paid relatively little and certainly get no ownership stake working for a government program like the NHS or Medicare. Doesn't mean people don't need them.
You confuse Pareto efficient with beneficial. Indeed, markets could just as easily result in a planet wide Easter Island while still being pareto efficient at every step.
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.
The problem with those problems is that they are very hard. Much harder than starting a Yo.
It's a false choice. Even if the founders of Yo were working on important problems, those problems might not get solved, because they are very hard. The world is big enough to have people working on big problems and people working on Yo.
I would disagree. Sure the app itself does something ridiculously trivial. But setting up an app that is expected to scale is not (I assume it is, if they got 1.2 million). They must have some very good marketing, or something special to get that million.
I do the database for a DNA sequencing centre. I guess some of these things are considered "important" problems (working towards curing cancer, or other diseases). But most of the bioinformaticians are second rate programmers (there are a couple of geniuses thrown into the mix as well). Their work generally helps, but to say they are doing something smarter that a scalable web app is a bit naive. Most of the stuff is 100 line scripts that count some numbers, and do some basic stats. Their software doesn't scale, it doesn't even have to be reliable, as often it will only be run on a couple of datasets. At the end of the day its a different set of knowledge and problems, the only similarity being that there is some programming involved.
Ok, I didn't claim that starting Yo was easy, or that merely contributing to important problems is harder than starting Yo. I meant that, e.g., solving the energy problem is much harder than starting Yo. Basically, those big problems are so big that even if everyone at Yo devoted their careers to one of those problems, the chances of that being the difference in solving it is almost infinitesimal.
There have been a lot of brilliant efforts at curing cancer. You could spend a large portion of a brilliant career following up on one lead. Odds are, that lead won't yield a cure. Cancer is that hard.
Also temporarily assuming his premise, I disagree with your conclusion that this article itself becomes a waste of time: if he convinces a couple people to work on those things he finds important by way of having written and published this article then it may be more beneficial by the stated metric of doing good for the world than directly working on those important problems. I'd instead try to question the value of the post (again, assuming the premise, so in the eyes of the author) by asking this question: "if someone actually finds Yo worthwhile enough of their time to work on, maybe they aren't the kind of person who would actually come up with useful solutions to actually important problems anyway". Then again, the cost of writing this article is so low that even if the potential reward has very low probability, it has sufficient value (the productive output of another individual working on important problems) that it is probably still worthwhile (again, if you agree with the basic premise).
I think the issue buckles down to someone saying "I'm working on this important thing and I can't raise $1MM, while this trivial, non-important app just raised $1MM, WTF?!"
It just doesn't seem fair that a pointless app could raise 7 figures while others are struggling, but it does point back to the idea that fairness and judgment are human-made, and not absolute.
But I don't know many people who think that we need to spend all our time tackling the world's biggest problems.
It's hard to see what the point of such a thing would even be. Isn't the whole point of solving the world's problems that we'll have more time to waste on frivolous pursuits like the Yo app?
Also, this attitude is an example of the well-debunked fallacy that time and effort are fungible and/or exchangeable goods (i.e. that the creators of Yo could just as easily have been solving more difficult problems instead).
Things more 'physical' than apps have been made and distributed in an attempt to solve a problem the wrong way, or even the wrong problem entirely. History is littered with examples of great aspirations and benign intent that either failed catastrophically or caused more harm than good, or frequently, both.
A somewhat recent example that pops into mind is this PRI story about the Soccket...
Sometimes people need to be reminded that there is a lot happening in the world outside of the sphere of influence that they exist in. As a global society we are leaving segments of our population behind and it is unnecessary and cruel. Do we really need more distractions and toys if we can't fulfill basic needs like food and water? Put yourself in the shoes of someone that experiences real needs (not wants) for a while before you judge the author's criticisms of our self indulgent society.
Besides the argument of the potential that an app like Yo could have, it's also a business decision.
Developers have a limited amount of time they can spare to write code so they have to be wise with their venture choices.
At the end of the day, when you read that Yo was funded for $1M, bubble or not, it's a smarter decision after calculating the risk / benefit ratio to emulate Yo's model.
If their would be more funding in the areas described in the blog post, I'm sure more developers would launch start-ups around them.
I was unaware that the mere suggestion that we should focus attention on the public good is now "totalitarian". Clearly I need lessons in the new English. That or there is such an aversion to any form of social responsibility that even mention of it is met with massive hyperbole.
Well, right. That's why I wrote the sentence prior to what you've quoted. I'm not sure I understand quite what the article's point is. The part you quoted sounds very live-and-let-live. But then there's this:
> it saddens me that some of the worlds most driven, focused, intelligent and inspiring individuals don't focus their time on solving the real problems our society faces. It may well be that Yo has the user engagement and growth that justifies such an investment on purely those terms, but, to me, that is a narrow outlook.
> I therefore find it difficult to see individuals who could focus their time and effort solving these problems, instead put their efforts into something like Yo.
I grant that this is not exactly boot-on-the-throat language. But it's hard to read these remarks about what "saddens" McCann as anything other than (passive-aggressively) prescriptive.
Your analysis seems deliberately obtuse. The basic human emotion of empathy can explain sufficiently why someone can feel the way the OP does. You can question his assumptions (that in another world where incentives were aligned differently, Yo's creators would have been capable of contributing to alleviating human suffering) but to think there is some totalitarian undercurrent here is absurd when the more obvious explanation is frustration that people are suffering when they could be being helped.
I think the point is that smart money / people are not being given the funding they ought to be in the world, when our wonderful market driven economy prioritises crap like Yo app.
Mis-allocation of resources thanks to market forces. Though I am guessing the pro capitalist people on here won't like that and try to justify it.
Of course, I don't actually make that argument, because I reject its premise. As the above argument hopefully illustrates, it is not reasonable to insist that everyone spend all their time in the most socially beneficial way possible. Should we all strive to make the world a better place? Of course. But I don't know many people who think that we need to spend all our time tackling the world's biggest problems.
And, by the way, who appointed Christoph McCann arbiter of what it good and valuable in this world? Maybe an app like Yo will bring us together in a new (albeit marginal) way. That's valuable, even if it is also silly. (See, e.g., the first few paragraphs of this article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2014/06/23/goo...) Or maybe it provide a cautionary tale to remind us (as, perhaps, it already has) what is really important. Value exists in subtle forms that are not so easy to glibly list, and can be advanced in subtle and unexpected ways. While I wish we lived in a world where more people focused on problems like energy, food, water, health, education, I'm not sure I want to live in a world where EVERYONE works on those problems. I want people to be free to do the unexpected, even if the results sometimes seem frivolous.
So, if McCann's only point is that we should take a moment and reconsider our priorities, point taken. But this looks suspiciously like something a bit more (with respect, and apologies) totalitarian.