I have held this view for most of my life. But now I kind of see them as complementary to each other.
At the end of a workday, a spacex or Tesla employee will likely sit down and watch stupid tiktok videos or Netflix or any number of things the rest of us do (or just sleep).
The point is that we need both these things and they do complement each other.
The way I think of it though, is more about scarcity of talent.
The idea that a really smart human being (a finite quantity) can either help build a better renewable energy system or a better video compression pipeline, that feels more obvious. One is using their talents to help humanity. The other is using their talents to help a company’s bottom line but doesn’t actually add to the pleasure of the audience or the enjoyment of humanity like the actual content does. And the cost of having a slightly less efficient video processing pipeline or subtitles software, is negligible compared to the cost of taking another five years to build better toilets, ways to recycle plastic, or use drones to plant trees.
So it’s less about whether the companies are useful. It’s more about where we most need our best and brightest talents used.
It’s that gross misallocation of talent at places like Facebook, Netflix, and Apple that bothers me.
At the end of a workday, a spacex or Tesla employee will likely sit down and watch stupid tiktok videos or Netflix or any number of things the rest of us do (or just sleep).
The point is that we need both these things and they do complement each other.
The way I think of it though, is more about scarcity of talent.
The idea that a really smart human being (a finite quantity) can either help build a better renewable energy system or a better video compression pipeline, that feels more obvious. One is using their talents to help humanity. The other is using their talents to help a company’s bottom line but doesn’t actually add to the pleasure of the audience or the enjoyment of humanity like the actual content does. And the cost of having a slightly less efficient video processing pipeline or subtitles software, is negligible compared to the cost of taking another five years to build better toilets, ways to recycle plastic, or use drones to plant trees.
So it’s less about whether the companies are useful. It’s more about where we most need our best and brightest talents used.
It’s that gross misallocation of talent at places like Facebook, Netflix, and Apple that bothers me.