I believe it's a responsibility of organizations themselves to orient this way, and for customers to be vigilant about this orientation. Does your search engine

I believe it's a responsibility of organizations themselves to orient this way, and for customers to be vigilant about this orientation. Does your search engine have weird incentives to exploit you? Change search engine :) ---- I have an idea (more here[1]) that the next addition to our civilization should be a distributed system to evaluate, reward and compensate externalities. Open source software is a great example. It's free, it has massive benefits to users and for people reusing it for all sorts of projects, it's public. Yet we still can't find a great way to fund it. There are donations, and maybe that's all we need in some sufficiently enlightened society, but I think we should be addressing those more directly. And clearly there are technologies which generate friction and other social costs, that could be (differentially) quantified and prices. The same goes for pollution and a miriad of issues. Laws can help here, but laws tend to lack softness and specificity in my opinion, and laws are strictly punitive. If you're generating a negative externality, and the legal system is well designed, maybe you'll have to compensante for it. But that relies on quick lawmaking and judges evaluating something they're not specialists at. And there's no dual for punishment (actually compensation and reeducation), there's no intrinsic reward system. There are prizes and grants, and I'm sure they generate immense value for what they are, but they're still very unsystematic and unreliable, I think. I dream of a system where if you generate value for society, you will be recognized and make a comfortable living off it; if you need investment, you will also be supported. (I call this idea Elementalism; I'm not sure it's original) I think we need to be a little more open to careful, thoughtful changes to our social-economic system that can improve things. While Elementalism isn't a formal part of our system, each of us can do our part and give directly to what we understand needs the most. This is the core idea of Effective Altruism which I also extend to donating to Open Source (which I believe can be effective[2]) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29043752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29043752 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/comments/v7ma0d/why_philanthropy_isnt_just_for_billionaires/ibws24i/ https://www.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/comments/v7ma0d/w...