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?
We already have very efficient crop harvesting and Eli Lilly is nearly a $1 Trillion dollar company. Interestingly, the new medicine is designed to keep us from eating so many cheap calories (new weight loss drugs).
> 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?
The traders and investors who work in this space also go to where they are need, aka where the big money is. So few of these folks are trading corn and soybeans, though some do, rather most are trading drug stocks, tech stocks, and recently sovereign debt related trading (e.g. things like gold and bonds). The focus is around the big questions of our time, like "Are AI investments going to pay off?", or "Is the US going to default/soft default?", and so on.
Deciding how a society allocates its resources, or places its bets, is an important function. Otherwise, you end up with planned economies by disconnected leaders, which often leads to massive failures and large social consequences. Unfortunately, the US is trending in that direction to some degree with it's giant fiscal deficits, tariffs, and tribal politics creeping into economic policy. Nevertheless, traders will weigh these outcomes in their trades, and you'll see a quick reflection from any major change in policy almost immediately, which is a helpful feedback mechanism. For example, the tariff tantrums caused by trump proposing 100%+ china tariffs where he crashed the markets last spring, leading to a moderation in policy.
If these sectors offered competitive salaries - sure, talent would flock to them. As a former chemist, I struggled to find a job that didn't pay scraps, no matter the industry - from big pharma to advanced materials. Eventually, I just gave up and went into the IT, which is 3x-10x better paid (at the very least).
The biochem industry is extremely bad at creating things that increase the satisfaction and well-being of society; the vast majority of products are failures with few users. The reason tech companies make money is because they make things people actually want to use.
Wages simply go to the industries that make the most money. There’s nothing more insightful than that.
Ad blockers are not products of tech companies but enthusiasts, as I understand it.
I'd argue the "satisfaction" of society has been hijacked. We cannot even, as a society, understand the impact on medicine, nutrition, agriculture and the well-being we could harness from focusing on the long term, rather than seeking dopamine hits through screens.
I blame Moloch. https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
If you want to solve meaningful problems you need a different kind of intelligence; you need to be open to risk, have a lot of naivety, not status orientated, and a rare ability to see the forest among the trees (i.e. an interesting problem isn't necessarily a important one).
It’s also missing that advancements in one field, particularly computer science, computation, and AI creates significant infrastructure that can be applied to those tasks in never before seen ways.
And finally, physical problems evolve much more slowly and is more capital intensive and requires a lot more convincing of other people. Digital problems by comparison are more “shut up I’m right, here’s the code that does X”. It’s easier to validate, easier feedback resulting in quicker mastery, etc. Not saying it’s completely bulletproof in that way, but more true than in physical sciences these days. So just throwing more people at the problem may not necessarily yield results without correct funding which historically was provided by the government (hence the huge boom in the 60s) but as the low hanging fruit were picked and government became more dysfunctional, this slowed to a crawl.
For example, personally I probably could have ended up working on fusion research if I had more economic security growing up and it felt like the nuclear industry was booming instead of constantly underdeveloped (both fission and fusion). But instead I’ve worked with computers because I felt like it was a boom segment of the economy (and it has largely been while I’ve worked) and the problems felt interesting (I’ve worked on embedded OSes, mobile OSes, ML, large distributed systems, databases, and now AI) and like there’s always interesting products to build to help improve the world.
What they could achieve in spending their attention on real problem would be massive.
Of course the suspicion towards this is eternal. People always hated the traders as opposed to the farmers. But trade is crucial. And it relies on estimating what value things have and rewards correcting over the incorrect beliefs of uninformed people. This kind of information based knowledge work was always disliked by most people as it seems lazy. And for sure there are zero sum and rent seeking aspects or insider trading etc. But it's not so simple as to say that all investment and finance jobs are negative and working on farm efficiency is always better.
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.
Just look at what happened when AI took off in the US and our ongoing struggle to get global warming under control - only China is taking a serious stab at this which is why they’re absorbing AI more effectively than we are.
Also semiconductor manufacturing has clearly gotten way too concentrated and there’s not enough experimentation with new designs (eg throwing more at existing DRAM designs instead of building new designs like in-RAM compute to shift the power and performance by an order of magnitude or 2 thereby easing the pressure of how much is built).
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.
From this outsider's point of view it's failed to have a positive impact; people nowadays are far less healthy and happy than they were half a century ago when the pharmaceutical industry barely existed.
But as you pointed out, this is not the actual issue. Getting food to people who need it is almost entirely a political and logistical issue at this point. War (especially civil war), natural disaster, with local power stealing international aid, etc, are mostly the biggest responsible for hunger in the 21' century. We have the technology and logistics to accurately drop-ship huge amount of food in even the most remote places in the world, even when the local infrastructure is heavily damaged or inexistent. We cannot deal with local power decision to voluntarily starve a place.
- The carried interest loophole
- We could add small transaction taxes
- We could raise capital gains taxes
- We could be a little more focused on enforcing antitrust
- We could raise higher end marginal tax rates to reduce the relative attractiveness of off-scale payrate jobs
- We could provide better universal services to do the same
The onus is on the biomedicine industry to demonstrate it's capable of producing anything of societal importance because so far it's largely failed to deliver. There's nothing noble or scientific about throwing good money after bad into an industry that's continuously failed to deliver.
Also there is no such thing as 'cancer' it is '_____ cancer' which seems to be about one of a million different things. So technically you have to cure cancer a million times. Expanding our compute ability and smart algorithms to solve the medical issues are a far more scalable option than having humans work on it alone.
How is finance not exactly that?
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).
Do you think without HFT markets stop functioning properly?
What if they are one of the contributors of highly inflated valuations?
You could make the case that a neurosurgeon is contributing to the field by being a full-time reviewer of a research journal; like a quant, they are providing utility by assisting in the flow of information. But I suspect there are many people like me who think they would have a bigger impact by putting on scrubs and working in an operating room.
There is no value in pure finance.
The markets have shown themselves to be an excellent way of applying human potential to things like crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines.
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.
if the greatest minds of earth, in their wisdom, have all collectively concluded that the smartest thing for them to do is make as much money as humanly possible, then evidently the greatest calling for mankind is... to be wealthy!
and the older i get the harder it becomes to argue with such a perspective... hmm... maybe i am getting closer to wisdom? haha!
Under capitalism each of these individual systems needs to turn a profit to be deemed worthwhile instead of treating the system as a whole and taking into account the economic externalities and benefits to the entire system.
There's no such thing as free things, there's just some people paying for other people's things, and surprise surprise some people don't want to use their hard earned money to pay for other people's transport and healthcare.
> Alex had actually tried to brute force the hash earlier, but had downloaded a list of the top 10,000 most popular words to do it, which turned out not to be big enough to find it. Once he had a big enough word list, he got the answer.
They don't reveal the answer.
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.
https://x.com/1914ad/status/2026757796390449382
Haven't read it yet but seems spicey
> Bitcoin should be at least $150,000 right now and everyone knows it.
Based on what? I'm a fan of Bitcoin, but "should be" is utter nonsense. As is "everyone knows it". HN doesn't, for one.
> Every trading day at 10am Eastern, coinciding with the U.S. stock market open, Bitcoin experienced sudden and sharp sell-offs. The drops were precise, algorithmic, and wildly disproportionate to broader market conditions. They wiped out leveraged long positions, triggered cascading liquidations, and then reversed within hours.
> [...] This happened every day, day after day.
If these swings are so predictable, why isn't everyone else getting wildly rich off them at the expense of Jane Street?
> Selling into thin order books at the open would depress the price, trigger liquidation cascades among leveraged traders, and create buying opportunities at lower levels. The firm could then re-enter at the bottom of a move it had manufactured.
Yea well don't be overlevered on Bitcoin I guess?
> Simultaneously, the firm boosted its holdings of MicroStrategy stock by 473%, accumulating 951,187 shares worth roughly $121 million
> Basically, Jane Street has direct access to the pipe that connects the Bitcoin ETF to actual Bitcoin, and almost nobody else does.
You too can buy and sell MSTR and BTC.
> In either scenario, the firm has every incentive to use its privileged position as authorized participant to suppress the spot price, trigger liquidations, and harvest the spread.
Yea well don't be overlevered on Bitcoin I guess?
> In other words, the 21M cap only works if the market sitting on top of it is honest.
No. Hell no.
> It has been accused of running algorithmic sell programs that suppressed Bitcoin's price for months.
Cheap Bitcoin sponsored by Jane Street. Cry me a river.
I have strong math for the question they’re asking but f them.
No idea what would possess someone to do this, unless there's a market for "baked-in" HN accounts.