There’s a lot that’s interesting about the early days of Google from both business and technology perspectives, but what grabbed me about this interview with an early Google employee is that when he’s asked about Google’s issues with privacy objections, he reframes it as a problem of rationality:
Google doesn’t have enough irrational people working there, and the rest of the world doesn’t have enough rational people occupying it.
The point that he comes around to is that, even if it isn’t strictly factually accurate that having Google automatically scan your email for keywords in order to choose the advertising it shows, people still feel like their privacy has been invaded. The unusually rational bunch of people who control a lot of the decision making at Google have difficulty grasping the fact that perception might as well be reality when it comes to how people react on an issue like this, and so they get themselves into trouble.
My mind went straight back to that article when I saw this claim today that half of the people who’ve used government social programs think they haven’t. There are some statistics about how many people who have benefited from different types of programs still think they’ve never gotten any social program benefits, but that’s not really the main thing that interested me here.
In the comments, you can see that people get into debating details like what constitutes a social program and what counts as getting benefits. Some of them actually are a little arguable, but the most interesting part to me is the stark line that people try to draw between the idea of the government sending you money and the government not taking the money to begin with (e.g. tax credits).
In the strictly mathematical and rational sense, whether I give someone $5 with an agreement that they were discounting it from $10 or I give them $10 and get $5 back afterward, we’re in effectively the same situation. The emotional nature of the exchange is very different in those two cases, though.
