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Comment by lucasmullens | Hacker News Reader

> If everyone owns a slice of American value creation, everyone will want America to do better: collective equity in innovation and in the success of the country will align our incentives.

I kind of doubt that. At Google we're paid in part with shares of GOOG, but at Google's scale that's just treated as cash compensation. At my level, nothing I do affects the stock price, and most Googlers feel this way.

Sure, I want Google to do well, and I want America to do well too. Both of them doing well benefits me. But it doesn't really encourage me to do something different day-to-day.

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You never know. Butterfly effect and all that. It adds up. Best example I know of is when I was younger and playing WoW, my brother was explaining gemming your gear to me. I told him "what will a +4 intelligence gem do really?" But you add up all the gems on all the sockets on the gear and it makes a huge difference. The difference being the difference between a strong character and a weak one and living or dying. Each you in google is a potential gem in the system. Or you can be an empty socket. Add all those up and it does have a huge effect on the outcome of Google (and the stock price).

I apply this theory to many diverse subjects- voting, finances, human health and car maintenance (once one system is suboptimal or impaired, others often follow). Keep your sockets gemmed. :)

>You never know. Butterfly effect and all that. It adds up.

The butterfly effect affects most no physical systems, which contain incredible amounts of damping processes. The same thing happens with people - if a zillion of them want things that point in somewhat different directions, the net does not add up, it cancels.

Otherwise most physical systems would simply explode to infinities, but in practice they don't. They dissipate and become less useful.

Basically, the sum of noise is zero.

So nicely said. I read a quote somewhere about ancient big buildings... Like stonemasons that were crafting stones had to imagine each stone beating really important in the bigger picture. The quote said it better than me here.

Feeling basically neutral towards your employer (or nation) is probably how having reasonably aligned incentives feels at scale. If you were an hourly minimum wage worker for a large corporation, there's a good chance you'd spend a good part of your workday in a blind, passive-aggressive rage.

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