I always wondered when I was a kid if collecting a vast amount of wealth is the way to achieve happiness in life. And I think everyone asks that question, especially with social networks now that backpropagate the high standards of living of the elites of society to our pockets.

I would argue that with all its known drawbacks and challenges it creates for the less accomplished class in society, it also in parallel creates a strong evolutionary mechanism of competition and lifting force for society upwards over the long arc of evolution.

Just think about it on a personal level, if you were studying to become a lawyer, seeing the lifestyle and trajectory of those successful in your profession can create a huge incentive for you to want to work hard to achieve the same things. That is of course assuming people have a non-zero sum mindset and believe in the idea that the pie gets bigger with more success.

There’s this saying that “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with”, well nowadays many accomplished people have risen from having the internet shape their personality with five remote friends.

This evolution mechanism can be thought of as a Generative Adversarial training setup, where the less accomplished want to become better and the better want to avoid being less better.

Many problems in our society and especially professions suffer from incentive mis-match. Take medical students in Canada for example, it’s almost become a huge burden to study medicine for the average citizen. And at the end of a 10+ years in school and loans piling up, the average salary might not be higher than what you’d get from pursuing a career in tech if with half that effort and a surplus of cash.

Modern societies have so many problems that can be easily fixed by just tuning the constraints and setting a right evolution loss function.

Social networks are extremely new as part of the evolution arc, and as simple as something like evolution that took us from hunter gatherers to (hopefully soon) a multi-planet species, we can do more to engineer the setup of social networks and let evolution do its magic.