Chamath Palihapitiya, Founder and CEO Social Capital, on Money as an Instrument of Change

What I don't think many people get is that these types of people and structures and institutions they exist in largely exist in order to perpetuate inequality in many ways. It's not just google though, this is fairly widespread in America, and I bet many of these companies that practice hiring like that are either doing it because thats what everyone else has done (without realizing the reasons or not articulating the real ones), or because taking those kinds of candidates means not only do you get a potentially useful in their job employee, but you get access to another kind of elite-social capital. [this video]

I am sorry, but I beg to differ. This concept is built onto basic insights into how the human reward system works, why else would Design (cf. Tristan Harris tristanharris.com/essays or Chamath Palihapitiya [this video] ) and Advertisement use this to try to shape peoples desires (and in turn consumer choices)? What you are drawing is in my opinion a false equivalency. It is not at all the same doing things in real life like reading a book, mowing the lawn or knitting a sweater and skimming a news feed or interacting with social media. The main reason for that imo is the amount of effort you have to put in to get a reward. When you take the offline work you (in the case of a book) at least have to go to the bookshelf, pick a book, take it in your hand and whilst reading have the rough content of the previous pages in your head or (in the case of mowing the lawn) actually physically move. This delays the gratification you get when having finished reading the book or mowing the lawn. With social media or quickly skimming articles from a news feed the delay you get on your gratification when scrolling through is literally given by the speed with which you can scroll and read. This makes dopamine so cheap for your brain, that it will of course reward you when you engage in these activities. (Incidentally it also makes it more susceptible to future easy dopamine hits (too lazy to find online sources, will look a little later. Joachim Bauer: Selbststeuerung is a very good book on this)).

Our society is so obsessed with the fear of censorship, or the "elite" hoarding all information, that we've now dived right into the opposite deep end. There's always too much of a good thing. We created tech to usher in an era of new mediums. But we never stopped to ask ourselves what should we keep from the "old" systems. In any system that gets recreated/refactored, there is always a duplication of efforts. And that's what we're seeing right now. We're slowly realizing that editorialization is desperately needed. In all these social graphs that's been created, we assume all "nodes" are rational actors, or are likely to be rational actors and that the information if just let free would steadily sort itself out. But that's not what we're seeing. Old diseases are new again and entire republics have fallen victim to misinformation. It's well past time to address these issues. I thought 2008 was bad. I could have never imagine 2016. And now I'm severely worried about what non-sense we'll see in 2020. Tech companies, and the employees in these companies, need to continually ask themselves what they're empowering. EDIT: [this video]