Andyfilms

This, 100%. The author says how difficult it is for multidisciplinary teams to come together when they don't understand each others skillsets--but the same applies to the investors themselves. When you start talking about these complicated ideas, there comes a point where unless the investor is involved in the industry they're investing in, they simply won't understand the true impact of it.

My company is trying to raise capital now, and that is the exact problem we're running into.

There's a reason for the "janitor as a service" unoriginal ideas--because they're easy to understand, so more likely to be funded. Those kinds of investors are looking for the buzzwords, too, "as a service," "cloud," "social," "AI" that cut off ideas that aren't strictly consumer-facing and infinitely scalable. If you have a modest idea that requires a modest amount of money and targets a modest group of people, you're just not going to hear back from investors. This causes people to have to wrap their idea in buzzwords or lobotomize it into something that allows them to achieve their true goal in a sideways manner.

I suspect what the author is getting attempting to do is to get us to examine the criteria that determines suffering itself.

Some aspects are universal--hunger, pain, disease--but once those needs are met, emotional suffering becomes manifest to take it's place. And emotional suffering is subjective; I suffer because I lack the time to explore my true passions, my friend suffers because they are unable to form lasting relationships. Which of us is suffering more?

It's doubly tricky because the things that minimize physical suffering often aren't the best way to minimize emotional suffering. Eating fast food every day ensures you won't starve, and staying indoors ensures you'll never get sick, but you certainly won't be happy with that lifestyle.

I do agree that many people lack introspective tendencies that would lead them to becoming better people. I think that's partly because it's difficult to be introspective without context. If you don't expose yourself to points of view counter to your own, you will never know what views to self-examine. People tend to gravitate to echo chambers, it seems.