My unironic recommendation for any nation state is to block American social media companies and then proceed to restrict or outright ban R&D work on 'ads' and other such trinkets. Exactly because of: ".. a tragedy for ... that so many physics PhDs have gone to work in hedge funds and Silicon Valley." Just looking at the sheer amount of work gone to optimize ad clicking is insane.
Perhaps a less heavy-handed approach would be to actually enforce existing anti-trust laws against Big Tech so that they're not able to monopolize America's best and brightest?
Also, as a Physics PhD holder myself, I dislike that Physics PhDs are held up as the archetypal smart people to be allocated in society's best interest. My opinion is that most of them, myself included, were foolish to go that far in their education and would have better served themselves, and society, if they had stopped at a BS. We could unlock a large economic gain if we went back to fairly matching job responsibilities with the minimum required education.
> Just looking at the sheer amount of work gone to optimize ad clicking is insane.
It's circular -- while I think ads are absurd and am actively trying to remove as many of them from my life as possible, it's not like technologies that have been subsidized by optimizing ad clicking haven't come back around to help science out.
I hear this kind of thing repeated here a lot, but I have to ask - what percentage of the engineering staff at Google and Facebook directly work on advertising? I would be shocked if it was as high as 10%. "The sheer amount of work gone to optimize ad clicking" is pretty damn small compared to the tech economy, let alone the whole economy.
It may be funded by advertising, but Search is incredibly useful. And Facebook keeps me in touch with my extended friend circle, which as far as I'm concerned is an unconditional social good. Most of the people working on those products aren't working on the advertising part. And if a small percentage are, well, you can't fully optimize every system of humans.
Why does the distinction of direct vs indirect matter when the question is about opportunity costs of deploying talent to potentially more fruitful endeavors?
Because a search engine that almost always finds what you are looking for is a fruitful endeavor. A website that lets me keep up with my extended friend circle is a fruitful endeavor. A website full of educational videos (and yes, a lot of mindless entertainment) is a fruitful endeavor.
By focusing on how they are funded, you're losing track of the fact that these companies provide incredibly valuable services.
