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Comment by notmindthegap | Hacker News Reader

VCs with no personal skin in the game have funded what is essentially addiction engineering. It’s wild that the industry does not seem to have the awareness to understand or care about this. People are getting paid fat salaries to figure out how to covertly manipulate users into abdicating their attention and time to wholly isolated, disconnected, and malnourishing behaviors.

Now the techies are concerned with the mental health crisis.

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Just add it to the pile. It's humanity.

- Cigarette companies giving people lung cancer.

- Alcohol companies giving people lifelong addictions and liver disease.

- Food companies happily providing high calorie, high fat food to contribute to the obesity epidemic.

- Tech workers inventing hyper-addictive apps, websites, social networks and video games.

- Media companies producing endless mindless content that we won't remember or care about in our dying days.

Everybody just destroying one another (and the planet) for that sweet dollar dollar bill.

I'm not going to feign surprise that there is no shortage of young, white, straight men with engineering degrees that either don't care or can't comprehend that they are contributing to a mental health crisis in exchange for $250k/yr.

The majority of people in engineering roles in the tech industry aren't white, engineering in tech is now a heavily East Asian/South Asian dominated segment of the industry, especially in the tech companies that are producing these things. Young, definitely, straight probably, men mostly, but not so much white.

All of those things likely don't matter, what matters is $250k/yr puts you in the top 5% of earners in the United States of America and the top 0.01% of earners globally. That's a major motivation to do whatever is necessary to earn. Upton Sinclair said it correctly nearly a hundred years ago: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Race, Gender, Age, Sexuality not relevant.

Race, gender and other factors are always relevant. But thanks for the lecture pops.

All available evidence indicates socioeconomics trumps demographics every time. The issue you're describing is because people are being paid large sums of money (relative to the rest of global society) to do work that is bad for the rest of society. It wouldn't matter if they were purple aliens with no genitalia, they're being paid to do a job that is a net negative for society, and the pay for that job is significantly higher than their alternatives.

Maybe stop trying to make everything about identity politics, especially in a conversation where there's actually important political issues at hand that impact everyone globally?

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