There's no fundamental difference between this and any other area of life where a wealthy network aids in success. Which is pretty much all of them.

Your standard seems to be that we eliminate the differential effects of wealthy relationships on success.

You don't really seem to be registering how deep we need to cut and how many fundamental social structures we need to destroy to even attempt to make this happen. The entire educational system, entire economy and all extant hiring practices everywhere, all social practices based around economic status.

Fundamentally the issue is that you've redefined racism from discriminatory acts to differential outcomes. It's a path to insanity and evil.

> There's no fundamental difference between this and any other area of life where a wealthy network aids in success. Which is pretty much all of them.

I can think of one rather prominent example where having a wealthy network doesn't help nearly as much as it does when you're "skipping the interview."

Job interviews. The thing that this product is trying to replace.

Also, you've stumbled past the is/ought distinction. Yes, it's true that being wealthy is an advantage in many areas of society. But that's very obviously a bad thing. Not only does it shut out potentially productive members of society and elevate wealthier incompetents, it fucks over vulnerable people and helps the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.

I see no good reason to engage in apologia for systems that favour the wealthy. "Oh but we would need to change lots of things to fix those systems" yeah we do need to change lots of things. Don't cry to me about how improving things is hard. If you have nothing constructive to contribute, at least don't pointlessly denigrate the idea of improving our society.

I didn't say anything 'ought' to be anything, so no stumbling occurred.

I said that a double standard is being applied. The payment-for-interview concept is being rejected because it links relationships and outcomes. However, nearly everything in society links relationships to outcomes. It makes no sense to say that this one thing is stupid-evil because of that, and not comment at all on all the other things that work the same way.

If you want to set your standard that "society should not allow anything that links relationships to outcomes" then do that honestly across the board. And acknowledge how much you need to destroy.

If you don't want to acknowledge that, then this argument makes no sense to apply only here. It's an isolated demand for fairness.

And it was never about how "improving things is hard". This isn't like studying for a test where you "just try harder" to get a better outcome. It's an engineering problem with tradeoffs - to gain one thing you must sacrifice others.

Changing society means sacrificing things - you need to acknowledge how much you want to sacrifice to serve your utopian ideals. And I can point out how dangerous and naive that makes you, just like all your utopian forebears dreaming of a socialist heaven.

Have you ever inherited an ungodly mess of a code base? Did you say "terrible code is just the way things are"? Or did you apply new standards to new code while slooooowly fixing the old code?

It also seems to me that you are arguing with a straw man you have constructed. Literally nobody in this entire thread had defended the status quo. Your standards seem to require people to be actively tearing down society due to it's injustices before they're allowed to offer a critique of an old problem in a new format