If the clearing rate is equal to the cost of an engineer at a tech firm in SF, the education budget for a small town in Alaska wouldn't afford it.

Your formulation isn't wrong, however it covers only one scenario. What happens when the locality cannot afford the cost to attract people to their region?

This is not even theoretical, its what happened to the rest of the world, as their best and brightest immigrated to America or Europe.

You could say "them's the breaks" and I would understand. However people vote for solutions, so how would you cover the worst case scenario?

Far too much money in tech traces its roots to ad tech.

You are asking all the later gen engineers at major tech firms to blow their salaries up.

There used to be an ethos to do the right thing, however the people who came to tech later aren’t driven by the same values. They (understandably) would like to get paid rather than go on a crusade.

Incentives make the world go round.

Social media was weaponized from the days of PHP forums. I remember Palantir shilling sock puppet management technology at a time where most people didn’t even know what a moderator was.

AFAIK, Russia’s Internet Research Agency was the first organization to weaponize social media and the internet.

This was always going to be the case, no genie situation at all.

Information sharing networks with humans in it can only track so many things, or spend limited time on consumption. The more stuff on the network, the harder it is for things to be seen. The stuff that gets seen is content that is evolved to gain attention, or is resourced to gain attention.

This is as inevitable as sunrise.

Unfortunately, pointing this out is not fun. In general, everyone assumes that there is little actual difference between CNN and any Murdoch enterprise. The difficulty in disabusing this position in a few short sentences, is one of the reasons there is such a chasm in American politics.

People don't want to hear that fox news was created specifically to lie.

What? We interfere with terror cells and criminal communication whenever we can. What is this absolute line in the sand you are drawing.

>We need to establish measures of accountability for data holders

This is true, and it needs to change. The incentives are warped right now, as a decent chunk of global GDP traces itself back to ad tech.

Nope.

The surest disincentive is knowing you will be caught, not the penalty.

If you can get away with it, then what value the penalty?

The data doesn't agree with you, as others in this subthread have noted with references.

I saw only one submission to a paper, would you be willing to share links to the other references you mention?

This is valid, and I would add that these academic hunger games are a result of College Degrees being needed to get what remains of well paying jobs.

Maybe we can use AI to create new exams that grade people on professional capability, and then gate entry into other professional degrees?

Hmm, Where would the teachers come from, and how good would the education actually be?