I think that with a turing complete smart contract language and oracles that put info on chain, you could plausibly program really any value into money (in theory). But the ecosystem is only a few years old + not mature enough for that to happen yet.
In the meantime, tools for creating intersubjective consensus (like CoordinAPE, Gitcoin Grants, CLRFund) are a nice shim to make sure that financial rewards match our values.
Also checkout How do we scale our sensemaking? - which I think has some novel ideas about how to measure what we value.
Depends on context, their skillset, interests, and background. Also their reason for getting into the space.
Right now I’ve been getting very excited about Impact Networks
This is the book I used to learn solidity + build the MVP of Gitcoin.
Cryptoians by Laura Shin is a great history of the Ethereum launch.