Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc?
Not everything has to be perfectly efficient but it just saddens me to see all these great minds doing what, adversarially harvesting margin from the works of others?
At this point tech is probably worse than finance, at least in finance they dont pretend to be saving the world no matter what the giant squid says.
Which begs the question: what would actually be a good field to apply human potential towards? I agree that finance, sales and ads are very low on that list.
While the pharmaceutical industry is large, the marginal researcher does still seem to have a pretty positive impact from an outside view.
The most positive use of human time probably looks something like antiwar advocacy, but I don't really think that most quants have the social skills for that tbh.
How is finance not exactly that?
The markets have shown themselves to be an excellent way of applying human potential to things like crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines.
But FWIW, the comment I was replying didn't seem to be specifically critical of high frequency quants. Dismissing the entire field as something that doesn't contribute to society is beyond absurd.
I think we're probably roughly in alignment w.r.t. other forms of finance, but the market liquidity gained by a marginal HFT employee almost certainly isn't worth the marginal cost imo. Even in finance, you could do a lot better by expending that human capital into optimising the structure of the markets themselves (there's lots of research on how hideously inefficient the TSE is because of its coarse tick sizes, for example; but vested interests get in the way of fixing that).
stingraycharles•1h ago
Feels to me like it’s similar to dumping a binary with an image, the format being entirely custom.
And/or trying to decode a language or cipher, trying to recognize patterns.
cess11•34m ago