> It should be a formal logical fallacy to critique the economic activity of other people just because they're choosing not to engage in whatever your favorite

> It should be a formal logical fallacy to critique the economic activity of other people just because they're choosing not to engage in whatever your favorite flavor of saving the world entails. It should be a formal logical fallacy to pretend there is no difference between "not saving the world in someone's favorite flavor" and "doing something useless". > It always follows a simple formula: woe to the world that all these {brilliant scientists, talented engineers} decide to work in {high frequency trading, advertising, data mining} when they could be working on {curing cancer, solving climate change, helping the poor}. In order to be intellectually honest, you should replace the strawman "{curing cancer, solving climate change, helping the poor}" by "anything useful". > If you're not well enough acquainted with economic theory to appreciate why financial markets are at least somewhat useful then that's your problem, not anyone else's. Don't try to insinuate that society has lost something because some very capable people have decided to engage in work you won't even take the time to understand. There's no effort expended nor insight contributed here either. You not just refused to make an argument, you baselessly claimed that OP considers the work of Jane Street useless because they are stupid and not for reasons you don't even take the time to understand. That is simply disrespectful. Also, the statements "developing software to gather more money from the financial markets is useless" and "financial markets are useless" are not equivalent. No one claimed the latter. > It's simply disrespectful. There is no reason to respect useless work. > You also have no idea what kind of charitable work they like to do in their free time or what kind if philanthropy their salaries allow them to contribute to the world. They didn't say anything about what the workers at Jane Street do with their free time. > And this is all beside the fact that there are many secondary effects of company flush with money releasing excellent open source software and stewarding programming language development. That is merely a by-product. Also, it may very well be compensated by the fact that if Jane Street didn't have that money, someone else would.