HN user
It is a bit hard to know what exactly he means by "socitech", but I don't think it the same as what you mean by "social". Things like writing maintainable code isn't provable, but something requires subjective considerations. Most of that knowledge doesn't come from math, but areas like systems thinking. Which is more towards social sciences.
When it comes to society level discussion it seems that it is often assumed that people make irrational decisions. I am not sure that is true. For a lot of people it makes sense to take a chance on something unknown rather than to face likely failure. That is presumably also why they think the game is rigged. Because if you ask the average person who didn't go to college they probably aren't doing particularly well either.
It makes a lot of sense in today's Sweden. Sweden is still a functioning welfare state, but egalitarianism is decreasing. A couple of hundred thousand dollars will be a major difference to your success rate in getting a good quality of life. Or to put it another way there is a lot of people in Sweden today who are denied opportunities because they don't have that kind of money. Which can be seen by the large amount of private debt.
I think you are missing the mark a bit. Ethics isn't first and foremost about deciding what should happen, it is about accounting for effects of your actions.
Emerging technology sometimes develops faster than accountability for said technology. That is true of Bitcoin, but also thing like oil and pesticides.
Nuclear is a pretty good example. Imagine if nuclear technology wouldn't have the history it has and instead we spent the time since it was invented solving its issues. Energy would probably cost far less than today, which means everything would. The result might be that our standard of living would have been double what it is today (which is hard to quantify, but this is a thought experiment).
So it might be alluring to be first, but in the grand scheme of things you are always paying the price in the end. The reason ethics is part of engineering isn't because it is fun, but because you get the best results.