Cancer research is hard work where smart people burn themselves out to fight for scraps. Optimizing metrics for bigtech at least easily pays for retirement. I don't know, maybe it's dumb to choose to optimize ads and get paid 500k and still be able to act like the company owes you. The alternative is to save lives, and in return live a life where you constantly have to beg for the next grant, and the people you save are only grateful to the MDs, say PhDs aren't real doctors, and vote for people who either want to cut science budgets or remove meritocracy to destroy your career.

Before you complain how people waste their talent, maybe ask yourself what you did to help them. Or broadly how to truly make society reward people who do God's work. Society cares about getting likes, don't want to pay even a little for quality work, so smart people give them a platform to earn likes and show them ads. Everyone is complicit, the worst among them put all blame on "smart people".

Bay Area living costs ain’t cheap.

well most of us even the ones that get through the merit filters to work at "tech" companies are not that smart. it will take some kind of breakthrough in human cognition to make an impact on the emergent economies that result from our current neural hard-wiring.

right now these fake tech companies are literally the best we can do to keep everything moving forward on an economic basis.

Just as we tricked each other into bidding up crypto tokens, we could self-hypnotize to bid up biotech patents or something similar, but we have not yet decided to do that.