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Is the benefit of Ethereum really larger than the value these intelligent people could be creating in non-crypto industries? I see the allure. They're super har

Is the benefit of Ethereum really larger than the value these intelligent people could be creating in non-crypto industries? I see the allure. They're super hard, super high-stakes problems. Is there really no other industry that provides this level of flow and excitement for these researchers?

urthor 5y ago
It's kind of the opposite. Highly intelligent people are most productive when they are tackling problems they enjoy. You cannot just order them around and tell them to go tackle climate change or whatever. As long as they enjoy tackling crypto shaped problems, they will keep jumping in until enough crypto shaped problems are solved that only really frustrating ones are left. If you want to change how things work, you have to change the environment for problem solving. Make it more or less enjoyable.
- goatsi 5y ago
  You don't need to change the environment, you need to change the compensation. Do you think that for the last 15 years highly intelligent people have found the most enjoyment in developing advertising software? Or found the most enjoyment in investment banking in the years before that?
  - urthor 5y ago
    The compensation is not just financial is how I would put it. The compensation for working in those fields is often that you're working alongside other smart people, in a situation where your work is highly valued. The money is just a factor in the equation, money equals respect in a lot of different ways. People want to work on projects where meaningfulness and respect flows to them. Money is one of the things you want to see flowing. Crypto offers that money, and offers a lot of technical challenges because programming distributed systems that must be error free is tricky. In terms of the ad tech, a lot of the work on ad tech happens because Facebook/Google/et all have cultivated environments that offer that kind of respect, and offer serious technical problems. Advertisements per se are not so much a part of it.
- hn-sucks 5y ago
emerged 5y ago
I’d probably rather they keep flocking to the crypto honeypot instead of doing weird pseudo intellectual crap to my teams code base.
- nefitty 5y ago
  Excuse my useless comment but lol

urthor 5y ago

It's kind of the opposite. Highly intelligent people are most productive when they are tackling problems they enjoy. You cannot just order them around and tell them to go tackle climate change or whatever. As long as they enjoy tackling crypto shaped problems, they will keep jumping in until enough crypto shaped problems are solved that only really frustrating ones are left. If you want to change how things work, you have to change the environment for problem solving. Make it more or less enjoyable.

goatsi 5y ago
You don't need to change the environment, you need to change the compensation. Do you think that for the last 15 years highly intelligent people have found the most enjoyment in developing advertising software? Or found the most enjoyment in investment banking in the years before that?
- urthor 5y ago
  The compensation is not just financial is how I would put it. The compensation for working in those fields is often that you're working alongside other smart people, in a situation where your work is highly valued. The money is just a factor in the equation, money equals respect in a lot of different ways. People want to work on projects where meaningfulness and respect flows to them. Money is one of the things you want to see flowing. Crypto offers that money, and offers a lot of technical challenges because programming distributed systems that must be error free is tricky. In terms of the ad tech, a lot of the work on ad tech happens because Facebook/Google/et all have cultivated environments that offer that kind of respect, and offer serious technical problems. Advertisements per se are not so much a part of it.
hn-sucks 5y ago

emerged 5y ago

I’d probably rather they keep flocking to the crypto honeypot instead of doing weird pseudo intellectual crap to my teams code base.

nefitty 5y ago
Excuse my useless comment but lol