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I assure you that I am, in fact, not a fan of the fact the brightest minds in the past 20 years have been dedicated to developing and selling more efficiently targeted ads.

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well, the brightest minds as self-described by the people doing it.

And the people doing it self select for showing the ability to work in a disingenuous self-advocating marketing field, so you might expect them to talk themselves up.

i don't think the actual brightest mind could stand working in the field for more than about 5 seconds

You can argue that they aren't the top of the pyramid and I'd give you that, in exchange for the admission that the people working for FAANG, MANA, or whatever, are certainly a cohort of smart people who's skills could have gone to basically anything else and humanity would have benefited for it.

I hate to imagine what kind of actual societal progress we could have made had these brilliant minds been working on nearly anything else. So much wasted potential just to serve an ad that gets ignored a tiny bit faster.

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