strikelaserclaw

I'm not saying people without any background or connections can't be successful. I'm saying that it is like winning a lottery to be even born to parents who even read books about how to make their kids successful. With that kind of parental dedication, i have no doubt that their kids would be successful even without reading the book above.

Lets look at the timeline :

1. Be born to a stanford physics professor and his very conscientious/intelligent wife

2. Have google start in your garage

3. Pivot and be successful

I always wonder how many people could have replicated similar successes if put in similar positions and i always feel like it is a lot. Like i can't imagine you taking someone from the same time period as newton or einstein and replacing them and seeing similar success but in a rich environment surrounded with bright people like early google, i feel like just being early to google is enough to guarantee that you'll have some good ideas. Using advertising to make money has always existed that is what tv channels and magazines did for a long time before the internet, i'm sure google would have been just as successful without google doodles or put another way - google's success allowed it to be whacky and not vice versa.

in what way though? she seemed like she was pretty much plugged into the silicon valley ecosystem from birth - her dad was a professor at Stanford, google was founded in her garage ! I willing to bet there are a lot of people in silicon valley who could have replicated her success if they'd been put in the same position.

"You still load up the ads so the website owner gets an ad view, no harm done." - not quite, without other events like taking a user to advertisers page or linking sales to this particular ad, i think this website will have its ad revenue reduced.

if you think from the perspective of people who can't really build any wealth and are just slaving away with nothing to show for it - you can understand why they see it that way. Lets be honest, 80% of building wealth is just what time period and what country and what socioeconomic class you were born to

we need to replace humans at the helm with robots.

humans will always take the path of least resistance to spike domaine when given the option - that is why we banned drugs and most of these apps with short form info like tiktok, reels, instagram, twitter - these are pretty much like drugs. I wish i can just throw away my phone and live my life but 'being on' is just an expectation in todays world.

in east Asia, education is a commodity for material / societal success - we should not emulate them.

this makes sense as schools mostly exist just to create an educated workforce to can run the machine. Even science is big business these days, just keep cranking out papers of dubious value and reproducibility

This phenomenon is a function of attributing all the positive developments within a company to the C-suite executives. Just as shareholders profit from the productive work of many employees, the C-suite executives often receive credit for the achievements of a large number of people. I think it is related to a fundamental characteristic of humans, that being we can't understand information unless it is calculated into simpler versions ( concepts like medians, averages, variance, "who is the best", "who is the worst", "who is the most evil", "who is the least evil" all come out of the same human need to get simplified answers). When credit and information moves up up the funnel from employees to c - suite, it gets - credit gets assigned at higher and higher levels. It is not team xyz that did it, it is their manager, or their manager's managers until it gets to the ceo who only knows that "svp x was responsible for this successful product launch" - since the people at the top determine pay scales, if theres 10-20 million to pay out in terms of increments, the board rewards the ceo with 10 million because he is apparently responsible for ALL the successful product launches, the ceo decides to reward svp with 2 million increment etc... It truly does pay to sit at the table with the decision makers.

math is just formalizing ideas into symbols and creating rules to manipulate and understand the ideas further. It is really the "ideas" that are important but all school really teaches is the manipulation aspect of it which is a bit boring without understanding the ideas. Most of early mathematical education is of the form "assume we have so and so arcane formulation - here is what we can do with it by applying these rules whose truths you just have to memorize"

i mean you are a small cog in a giant machine, what else can you expect?

because most of these companies are (run by?) sociopaths - as soon as low interest rates dried up DEI initiatives got slashed even though these companies are still making record profits.