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All I think when I see this is "this intelligence wasted on finance and ads." Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting effi

All I think when I see this is "this intelligence wasted on finance and ads." 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?

0x3f 7mo ago
We don't have any reliable and scalable way of doing this allocation, though, so it's a bit like saying that all the resources are wasted being locked up in asteroids.
- dgacmu 7mo ago
  We do have a lot of policy levers that are tilted in favor of making money in finance, though, and we could change those levers. - 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 All of these things could shift people's interest in and ability to do work in areas of greater long-term societal importance without bringing in any form of centralized resource allocation.
  - logicchains 7mo ago
    >long-term societal importance without bringing in any form of centralized resource allocation. 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.
    - wat10000 7mo ago
      Antibiotics? Vaccines?
    - vladms 7mo ago
      More people living more after cancer diagnosis? (ref: https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-news/people-are-now-living-longer-after-a-cancer-diagnosis.html https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-news/people-are...)
    - dgacmu 7mo ago
      You'll note I didn't try to specify what was of import. We can create mechanisms that enable more people to follow their own idea of what is important instead of merely what is lucrative. Not everyone will agree with the choices other people make, and it wouldn't eliminate money as a motivating factor, it would just slightly reduce the strength of that signal relative to other potential signals such as "I feel like I'm doing something meaningful."
      - 0x3f 7mo ago
        Honestly I think you'd be better off just making _existing_ cheaper than trying to discourage wealth seeking. The cost of living, especially housing, is a huge motivating factor to try and 'get rich first', before doing the 'meaningful work' part.
  - 0x3f 7mo ago
    I'm not sure you could alter these without significant negative effects on the other things you're trying to encourage. It's not like capital is uninvolved in the provision of biotech, or that medical startup founders aren't also motivated by massive tax-efficient future payouts, for example. If anything I'd think you'd want to encourage the movement of investment into riskier bets, which would generally mean _decreasing_ capital gains taxes.
blitzar 7mo ago
Silicon valley had the chance - dont be evil, for humanity, not like those Finance Bros. 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.
paulluuk 7mo ago
Don't we already harvest more food than humans could ever eat, and have a huge pharmaceutical industry? I get what you're saying but these two examples seem counterproductive imho. 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.
- ViscountPenguin 7mo ago
  I would imagine that increasing crop yields would do social good primarily via decreasing the amount of cultivated farm land, especially since we're well past Jevons paradox territory with calorie intake I imagine. 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.
  - skirge 7mo ago
    to stop war we need to stop being lazy, greedy and most important: envy, which is impossible.
    - codechicago277 7mo ago
      It isn’t all or nothing. The Cuban Missile Crisis should have led to war, but we stopped it. World War I never should have happened. The right answer is to acknowledge envy, greed, and laziness but find solutions to work around these problems.
  - logicchains 7mo ago
    >While the pharmaceutical industry is large, the marginal researcher does still seem to have a pretty positive impact from an outside view. 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.
JasonADrury 7mo ago
>Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc? How is finance not exactly that?
- vintermann 7mo ago
  Isn't Jane Street mostly into HFT arbitrage?
  - JasonADrury 7mo ago
    You need market makers like Jane Street to have well functioning markets. The markets have shown themselves to be an excellent way of applying human potential to things like crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines.
    - throwaw12 7mo ago
      Markets existed before HFTs, they will exist without them as well.
      - JasonADrury 7mo ago
        Did I suggest otherwise?
  - tux3 7mo ago
    There's that, but the market in the West was already over-saturated with HFT arbitrage. What's hot is growing markets that get a little less attention. The big Jane Street maneuver in India made a lot of noise recently. They've been "banned" for "market manipulation", but that was one of their biggest play to date.
- ViscountPenguin 7mo ago
  As someone who has worked in the industry, I've yet to see any compelling argument that high frequency quants are making any meaningful contribution to society. Maybe on the low frequency end, but slightly higher market liquidity doesn't serve that large a social good imo.
zeroCalories 7mo ago
It's not wasted. Society can pay for the talent it wants, and they don't want to pay for this. Instead this talent helps to grow the overall wealth on in the world, letting us pay for the stuff we want.
- bluerooibos 7mo ago
  I'm sure people (society) wants cheap food, free universal healthcare, free public transport, so why don't we have these things? 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.
  - logicchains 7mo ago
    >free universal healthcare, free public transport 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.
    - pixl97 7mo ago
      And yet too much zero sum thinking leads to a crabs in a bucket mentality were the greedy get less by being greedy instead of having an educated productive society around them.
      - bpt3 7mo ago
        A large portion (I think it's the majority, but would be happy to be wrong) of our fellow man is a net loss to society, with some smaller percentage being a significant drain. Giving more and more resources to those people does not make them magically more educated, productive, or congenial. So it's not a "crabs in a bucket" mentality in that the greedy (which I assume means the wealthy here, as they're the ones funding the public system in the US specifically and the western world for the most part) are trying to keep the lower classes beneath them, it's that they are not interested in wasting their resources to no meaningful end other than increased consumption of low quality or worse goods and services.
azan_ 7mo ago
There are much much more great minds working on new medicines than on HFT. Also HFT is good, it makes world better place!
- kmaitreys 7mo ago
  What exactly is the point of making a unverifiable statement(s) like this?
  - azan_ 7mo ago
    Well, maybe ask people that claim that HFT is bad and that it's travesty that great minds work on that (if my claims are unverifiable then it obviously follows that their claims are also unverifiable).
KellyCriterion 7mo ago
The smartest people are going from Harvard et.al. into finance, adtech, investment banking, wallstreet. What they could achieve in spending their attention on real problem would be massive.
- bonoboTP 7mo ago
  Finance and investment banking is about resource allocation. To get the stuff like agriculture innovation etc done, you need money. You need someone to look and say, this is worth investing money in. This is far from trivial. The investment firms try to predict what technology or company is going to make something profitable. This allocation task is very important. There are many ways to fail at producing anything useful. Intent purity is not sufficient. 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.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - sigwinch 7mo ago
    I don’t hate traders, I just wonder about Jeffrey Skilling graduating Harvard at the top of his class. In aggregate, is it too risky to need so many like him in finance?
- mrguyorama 7mo ago
  I'm not convinced those are the "smartest people" as much as the people with the correct ambitions and connections in the current system. IMO, the "smartest people" are really fucking bored and doing nothing meaningful right now. You really think "the smartest" people are people who find working on Google's ad machine enjoyable? That they are programmers or traders? Since when has "smartest" meant seeking the highest wage? Einstein didn't look for the highest paying job he could get, he took a do-nothing job and worked on what he cared about instead. Fermi too took jobs that allowed him to pursue his passion, rather than accumulate wealth. Newton blew a shitload of money on a pump and dump scam and spent all his time on proto-chemistry and calculus. Bell basically ignored his company after patenting the telephone, giving almost all of his shares of the company to his new wife, who in turn entrusted them to her father, the guy who helped Bell make the company and who was defacto in control of the company. Bell spent a good amount of time studying the new field of Heredity. The brilliant people involved in the invention of computing as a field during WW2 were doing it because it fascinated them. The military would have been happier with simpler computing machines. Von Neumann distributed a document describing EDVAC that helped nullify patent claims of the inventors. The internet itself runs nearly entirely on free software and volunteer work! It's insane that people are so utterly propagandized in the US "Hyper capitalism is best" mindset that even those who think the system doesn't work still implicitly believe that the system works to put the smartest people in the top earning jobs! Why do you believe smart people are primarily motivated by money? Maybe, just maybe, smart people don't actually align their preferences to a market system at all! Maybe their priorities aren't actually money, or fame, or power.
xvilka 7mo ago
> Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc? 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).
- thiagoharry 7mo ago
  We let the market dictate how society's resources are allocated. And we see, as a result, how the market is actually not at all interested in the satisfaction and well-being of the people in society.
  - js8 7mo ago
    "The market" here is just a convenient substitute for "people weighted by the disposable income", which today roughly approximates to "rich people".
    - robotpepi 7mo ago
      what's your point?
      - js8 7mo ago
        I wasn't really sure how to respond, it seemed obvious to me, so I put your question with the two comments into Claude. I genuinely think it gave a great response. I encourage you (or anybody) to try yourself next time, but here it is: The second person was essentially unpacking the phrase "the market" to reveal who it actually represents. Here are the top 3 interpretations of their point: 1. The market isn't a neutral arbiter — it's a voting system where money is the vote. When we say "the market decides," we're really saying that people with more money have more say. A billionaire's preference for a luxury yacht counts for vastly more than a poor person's need for affordable housing. So "market outcomes" aren't some objective measure of what society wants — they reflect what wealthy people want. 2. The first person's critique is correct, but misdirected. By saying "the market" is indifferent to people's well-being, the first commenter was almost treating the market like an external, autonomous force. The second person is saying: it's not some mysterious system — it's just rich people's preferences given structural power. The problem isn't the abstraction called "the market"; the problem is inequality in who gets to participate meaningfully in it. 3. The language of "the market" obscures a political reality. Calling something a "market outcome" makes it sound natural, inevitable, and impersonal. But framing it as "rich people's preferences dominate resource allocation" makes it sound like what it actually is — a political and social choice about whose interests get prioritized. The second person is essentially calling out the ideological function of the word "market" as a way to launder what is really a power structure. The three interpretations overlap, but they emphasize different things: the mechanics of how markets work, the validity of the first person's critique, and the rhetorical/political role of market language respectively.
autonomousErwin 7mo ago
I think this is the wrong way to think about it. In this case the "intelligent people who are wasted on finance and ads" are drawn to high-status, low-risk, well-paid jobs, with interesting problems to solve. 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).
- vlovich123 7mo ago
  While true, another is that “crop harvesting efficiency” and medicine are both more a biology/chemistry problem which may not interest the same people so it’s unclear they’d even attract the same thing. 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.
- SkyBelow 7mo ago
  >not status orientated Should we view those who chase status as a bad thing, or look to those who assign status that is then chased? If the average person cares more about who won last night's big game than some work done to improve medication, should we really have anything to say about those who decide to optimize their lives by what society actually rewards? I noticed this way back in grade school. Good grades were, if anything, a net negative prestige, while sports were a positive prestige. It made me wonder what the school was actually optimizing for, because the day to day rewards weren't being given to the studious. (The actual reward function was more complicated, such as good grades being a boost if one was already a sports star, but these were exceptions to the norm.)
webdevver 7mo ago
but doesn't the empirical evidence reject this premise? 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!
- foltik 7mo ago
  “The smartest people pursue whatever is incentivized, therefore the current incentive structure is humanity's greatest calling.” Yeah, no. The smartest people on earth didn’t convene and design this system. What we have now is just a fragile equilibrium we collectively stumbled into. There’s no reason to think it’s final, unless you've come to assume history ends with you...
- thatwasunusual 7mo ago
  You assume that what smart people _do_ is the same as what humanity _ought to do_. Even if every genius on Earth spent their days trying to get rich, that would show something about incentives, institutions, fear, status, and survival. It would not automatically prove that wealth is mankind's highest purpose. Rats also optimize for calories when the maze is built that way. That does not make cheese (or whatever rats prefer) the meaning of life. Modern capitalism often acts like the scoreboard is the game. That confusion is one of civilization's recurring clown acts.
relma2 7mo ago
"But I don't want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into deepfakes."
- pixl97 7mo ago
  The thing is the same hardware does both, Deepmind should be the best example of a company that's developed both. 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.
nailer 7mo ago
Intelligence? Jane Street make their money by having retail’s Robinhood trades routed to them and having a back channel called “Bryce’s secret” with Terraform employees.
state_less 7mo ago
> Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc? 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.
- ericd 7mo ago
  It’s an important function, but the guys making these bets frequently pull down $10-$100M per year, each. That’s a huge toll to extract from the productive economy for playing this game. And then there are the guys managing things like pensions, skimming a percentage every year, just because they happen to be locked into that position, meanwhile underperforming a basket of index funds. Just happily eating away at the retirement savings of thousands-millions.
  - b112 7mo ago
    There's no such thing as money being squandered. Money isn't a resource. It's not food, or energy, or even an allotment of work. If you try to seize or reduce, what you perceive as excess, wasted money supply, that money supply will simply cease to exist.
HPsquared 7mo ago
Of all the PvP arenas, these are among the least bad. Military applications have barely got off the ground yet (so to speak).
- direwolf20 7mo ago
  Ads maybe, but finance controls almost all of the world.
alehlopeh 7mo ago
This kind of thinking denies the humans in question any agency over their own lives. You’re essentially asking for a word government and a planned economy. Does it suck that more resources aren’t funneled into cancer research and other noble pursuits? Yes. But planned economies haven’t cured cancer, and are not likely to, despite denying their people the agency to live their lives as they choose.
- airza 7mo ago
  I don’t think you have to go from here to planned economy straight away. There are capital gains taxes between the current level and 100% which might produce better outcomes.
- dzjkb 7mo ago
  People go into finance or adtech not because they have some innate drive towards making markets liquid, they go there mostly because it's more money -> higher quality of life. Moving more money into socially meaningful and beneficial fields (which is still far from a planned economy as the sibling comment noted) is not denying anyone agency.
- elektronika 7mo ago
  A market economy is just as good if not better at denying "the agency to live their lives as they choose". Do you think the bum on the street or the poor family working paycheck to paycheck have more agency than someone with a decent job at a state owned enterprise and a social safety net? It's absurd.
deleted 7mo ago
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whatever1 7mo ago
I like that Jane Street hires smart people and supports cool initiatives like ocaml. But don’t fool yourself, they don’t make their money with intelligence. They just do fees and insider trading. [1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/how-india-struggled-regulate-jane-streets-money-spinning-machine-2025-08-14/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-24/jane-street-sued-for-insider-trading-by-terraform-administrator https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-24/jane-stre...
- nvarsj 7mo ago
  Very wrong. Arbitrage is not “insider trading”.
  - ses1984 7mo ago
    They're accused of opening short positions, then pumping and dumping to trigger the shorts. That's not arbitrage.
    - lupire 7mo ago
      By "pumping and dumping" do you mean "buying and selling" to outsmart other people trying to outsmart them? Did they lie about the financial health of the securities they traded?
      - whatever1 7mo ago
        Js manages trades for huge whales that can move markets by themselves. So yes it is textbook insider trading if you are placing options just before you move the whale.
        selridge 7mo ago
        which textbook would that be?
recursive4 7mo ago
To better understand your thinking here, can you illustrate for me a scenario with less liquid markets because firms like JS are less efficient at making them, and the knock-on effects?
- codechicago277 7mo ago
  Hedge funds make profits in a lot of ways that don’t lead to more liquid markets.
tdb7893 7mo ago
I ended up taking an 87% pay cut to get out of advertising specifically and tech in general (eventually it will only be a 60% pay cut once I gave enough experience in the new field). It is too bad that high pay is done by capturing value for yourself. You see this a lot in tech where open source is such a huge net productivity increase but it pays worse than other less useful things.
leoqa 7mo ago
People are arguing about the role of these HFTs being a net good etc. They’re missing the point, these bright kids are trading something more profound- a sense of purpose, a higher calling or passion- to simply run adversarial arbitrage and pump their egos up with puzzles.
- lupire 7mo ago
  They aren't pumping their egos with puzzles. The are pumping their wallets.
giancarlostoro 7mo ago
> new medicines, etc? Who says its not? Look up Rentosertib which is underground the different trial phases.
renewiltord 7mo ago
Is your opinion that one is more worthwhile than the other. It is my opinion that it is the other way. We have a way to express this: we each make weighted votes with how valuable we think something is and how good we were at making things valuable for others (money). Then people try to do the thing that is voted for. To be honest, this system seems pretty good.
gosub100 7mo ago
People have been trying to use AI in radiology for decades. They still can't get it to do simple tasks like detect pneumonia from an X-ray. I think you are over-estimating how potent this "intelligence" really is. We were blown away when LLMs came on the scene, because 'whoa, man! Machine can talk like a human', but really, stupid people have been posting online for decades. They talk like humans too! Yet they don't add any value (viz shit posters and trolls).
leoh 7mo ago
True, but also we wouldn't have AI if it weren't for ads -- ie Google invested in AI to help sell ads starting ~20y ago.
leesec 7mo ago
Really ignorant take imo. There's so much good technology created because of the wealth created by finance and ads and other boring industries.
- codechicago277 7mo ago
  And also a lot of toxic technology that shouldn’t exist. I agree with parent that many brilliant minds are wasted on zero sum practices at these hedge funds, because the potential profits are so high. It’s a useful social question to ask how we can incentivize the smartest people to work on the most important problems, since naturally there’s little profit in curing obscure diseases.
shimman 7mo ago
I agree, this is why I'm a big fan of enforcing workplace democracy [1] onto problematic industries like finance, media, advertising on a legislative level; these things can't be trusted with individuals, all workers should share in the company process. Have no doubt that workers at these companies could do a better job than an out of touch executive + board team that more resemble communist dictatorships than sound business practices. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy
charcircuit 7mo ago
You are underestimating the importance of efficient allocation of capital and and attention. What use is discovering a way to improve harvesting efficiency if there is no money to develop it into a product or inform customers of its existence. It might as well not exist without there being a way to finance, make people aware of it, and reward the creator.
- robotpepi 7mo ago
  it seems to me that the problem is quite the opposite. people believe that the "importance of allocation of capital" (good euphemism by the way) is WAY more important that it really is. do we need extra personalized ads in each of our machines? do we need instant financial trades and people optimizing instant transactions? We don't need a sophisticated AI to "inform" the customers. there is a ton of things that are there simply because at some point people made money out of it, and then lobbied politicians to death to avoid regulation.
  - charcircuit 7mo ago
    >do we need extra personalized ads in each of our machines? If we want local, small, or niche businesses to exist. >do we need instant financial trades and people optimizing instant transactions? If we want people to easily get a fair price when they want to buy or sell something.
    - robotpepi 7mo ago
      we had local, small and noche business before. and even today. the point again is that nobody says that certain mechanism of the market can have positive effects. the point is that way overestimated. we have extremely complex procedures that cost insanely amounts of money for stuff like ads. we could have a fraction of that power and people would still know about the products they need, etc.
- janalsncm 7mo ago
  The problem with this line is that there is social value to things aside from their standalone ability to generate revenue. Essentially every publicly funded thing derives from this philosophy. In fact the social utility of a thing and its profitability probably aren’t that tightly coupled. If you buy that (not everyone does) then it follows that an industry can be compensating beyond its social value. That is, the value of providing market liquidity is not zero. The value of figuring out the optimal next video on YouTube is not zero. But in my opinion there is also social value in making sure poor kids can read.
dang 7mo ago
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html No doubt many of us agree with you, but this is not the kind of comment that should be stuck at the top of a thread, choking out more specific and interesting conversation. Generic-indignant comments always get heavily upvoted, which is a failure mode of the upvoting system (and perhaps the human brain, who knows).

0x3f 7mo ago

We don't have any reliable and scalable way of doing this allocation, though, so it's a bit like saying that all the resources are wasted being locked up in asteroids.

dgacmu 7mo ago
We do have a lot of policy levers that are tilted in favor of making money in finance, though, and we could change those levers. - 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 All of these things could shift people's interest in and ability to do work in areas of greater long-term societal importance without bringing in any form of centralized resource allocation.
- logicchains 7mo ago
  >long-term societal importance without bringing in any form of centralized resource allocation. 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.
  - wat10000 7mo ago
    Antibiotics? Vaccines?
  - vladms 7mo ago
    More people living more after cancer diagnosis? (ref: https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-news/people-are-now-living-longer-after-a-cancer-diagnosis.html https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-news/people-are...)
  - dgacmu 7mo ago
    You'll note I didn't try to specify what was of import. We can create mechanisms that enable more people to follow their own idea of what is important instead of merely what is lucrative. Not everyone will agree with the choices other people make, and it wouldn't eliminate money as a motivating factor, it would just slightly reduce the strength of that signal relative to other potential signals such as "I feel like I'm doing something meaningful."
    - 0x3f 7mo ago
      Honestly I think you'd be better off just making _existing_ cheaper than trying to discourage wealth seeking. The cost of living, especially housing, is a huge motivating factor to try and 'get rich first', before doing the 'meaningful work' part.
- 0x3f 7mo ago
  I'm not sure you could alter these without significant negative effects on the other things you're trying to encourage. It's not like capital is uninvolved in the provision of biotech, or that medical startup founders aren't also motivated by massive tax-efficient future payouts, for example. If anything I'd think you'd want to encourage the movement of investment into riskier bets, which would generally mean _decreasing_ capital gains taxes.

blitzar 7mo ago

Silicon valley had the chance - dont be evil, for humanity, not like those Finance Bros. 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.

paulluuk 7mo ago

Don't we already harvest more food than humans could ever eat, and have a huge pharmaceutical industry? I get what you're saying but these two examples seem counterproductive imho. 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.

ViscountPenguin 7mo ago
I would imagine that increasing crop yields would do social good primarily via decreasing the amount of cultivated farm land, especially since we're well past Jevons paradox territory with calorie intake I imagine. 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.
- skirge 7mo ago
  to stop war we need to stop being lazy, greedy and most important: envy, which is impossible.
  - codechicago277 7mo ago
    It isn’t all or nothing. The Cuban Missile Crisis should have led to war, but we stopped it. World War I never should have happened. The right answer is to acknowledge envy, greed, and laziness but find solutions to work around these problems.
- logicchains 7mo ago
  >While the pharmaceutical industry is large, the marginal researcher does still seem to have a pretty positive impact from an outside view. 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.

JasonADrury 7mo ago

>Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc? How is finance not exactly that?

vintermann 7mo ago
Isn't Jane Street mostly into HFT arbitrage?
- JasonADrury 7mo ago
  You need market makers like Jane Street to have well functioning markets. The markets have shown themselves to be an excellent way of applying human potential to things like crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines.
  - throwaw12 7mo ago
    Markets existed before HFTs, they will exist without them as well.
    - JasonADrury 7mo ago
      Did I suggest otherwise?
- tux3 7mo ago
  There's that, but the market in the West was already over-saturated with HFT arbitrage. What's hot is growing markets that get a little less attention. The big Jane Street maneuver in India made a lot of noise recently. They've been "banned" for "market manipulation", but that was one of their biggest play to date.
ViscountPenguin 7mo ago
As someone who has worked in the industry, I've yet to see any compelling argument that high frequency quants are making any meaningful contribution to society. Maybe on the low frequency end, but slightly higher market liquidity doesn't serve that large a social good imo.

zeroCalories 7mo ago

It's not wasted. Society can pay for the talent it wants, and they don't want to pay for this. Instead this talent helps to grow the overall wealth on in the world, letting us pay for the stuff we want.

bluerooibos 7mo ago
I'm sure people (society) wants cheap food, free universal healthcare, free public transport, so why don't we have these things? 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.
- logicchains 7mo ago
  >free universal healthcare, free public transport 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.
  - pixl97 7mo ago
    And yet too much zero sum thinking leads to a crabs in a bucket mentality were the greedy get less by being greedy instead of having an educated productive society around them.
    - bpt3 7mo ago
      A large portion (I think it's the majority, but would be happy to be wrong) of our fellow man is a net loss to society, with some smaller percentage being a significant drain. Giving more and more resources to those people does not make them magically more educated, productive, or congenial. So it's not a "crabs in a bucket" mentality in that the greedy (which I assume means the wealthy here, as they're the ones funding the public system in the US specifically and the western world for the most part) are trying to keep the lower classes beneath them, it's that they are not interested in wasting their resources to no meaningful end other than increased consumption of low quality or worse goods and services.

azan_ 7mo ago

There are much much more great minds working on new medicines than on HFT. Also HFT is good, it makes world better place!

kmaitreys 7mo ago
What exactly is the point of making a unverifiable statement(s) like this?
- azan_ 7mo ago
  Well, maybe ask people that claim that HFT is bad and that it's travesty that great minds work on that (if my claims are unverifiable then it obviously follows that their claims are also unverifiable).

KellyCriterion 7mo ago

The smartest people are going from Harvard et.al. into finance, adtech, investment banking, wallstreet. What they could achieve in spending their attention on real problem would be massive.

bonoboTP 7mo ago
Finance and investment banking is about resource allocation. To get the stuff like agriculture innovation etc done, you need money. You need someone to look and say, this is worth investing money in. This is far from trivial. The investment firms try to predict what technology or company is going to make something profitable. This allocation task is very important. There are many ways to fail at producing anything useful. Intent purity is not sufficient. 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.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- sigwinch 7mo ago
  I don’t hate traders, I just wonder about Jeffrey Skilling graduating Harvard at the top of his class. In aggregate, is it too risky to need so many like him in finance?
mrguyorama 7mo ago
I'm not convinced those are the "smartest people" as much as the people with the correct ambitions and connections in the current system. IMO, the "smartest people" are really fucking bored and doing nothing meaningful right now. You really think "the smartest" people are people who find working on Google's ad machine enjoyable? That they are programmers or traders? Since when has "smartest" meant seeking the highest wage? Einstein didn't look for the highest paying job he could get, he took a do-nothing job and worked on what he cared about instead. Fermi too took jobs that allowed him to pursue his passion, rather than accumulate wealth. Newton blew a shitload of money on a pump and dump scam and spent all his time on proto-chemistry and calculus. Bell basically ignored his company after patenting the telephone, giving almost all of his shares of the company to his new wife, who in turn entrusted them to her father, the guy who helped Bell make the company and who was defacto in control of the company. Bell spent a good amount of time studying the new field of Heredity. The brilliant people involved in the invention of computing as a field during WW2 were doing it because it fascinated them. The military would have been happier with simpler computing machines. Von Neumann distributed a document describing EDVAC that helped nullify patent claims of the inventors. The internet itself runs nearly entirely on free software and volunteer work! It's insane that people are so utterly propagandized in the US "Hyper capitalism is best" mindset that even those who think the system doesn't work still implicitly believe that the system works to put the smartest people in the top earning jobs! Why do you believe smart people are primarily motivated by money? Maybe, just maybe, smart people don't actually align their preferences to a market system at all! Maybe their priorities aren't actually money, or fame, or power.

xvilka 7mo ago

> Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc? 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).

thiagoharry 7mo ago
We let the market dictate how society's resources are allocated. And we see, as a result, how the market is actually not at all interested in the satisfaction and well-being of the people in society.
- js8 7mo ago
  "The market" here is just a convenient substitute for "people weighted by the disposable income", which today roughly approximates to "rich people".
  - robotpepi 7mo ago
    what's your point?
    - js8 7mo ago
      I wasn't really sure how to respond, it seemed obvious to me, so I put your question with the two comments into Claude. I genuinely think it gave a great response. I encourage you (or anybody) to try yourself next time, but here it is: The second person was essentially unpacking the phrase "the market" to reveal who it actually represents. Here are the top 3 interpretations of their point: 1. The market isn't a neutral arbiter — it's a voting system where money is the vote. When we say "the market decides," we're really saying that people with more money have more say. A billionaire's preference for a luxury yacht counts for vastly more than a poor person's need for affordable housing. So "market outcomes" aren't some objective measure of what society wants — they reflect what wealthy people want. 2. The first person's critique is correct, but misdirected. By saying "the market" is indifferent to people's well-being, the first commenter was almost treating the market like an external, autonomous force. The second person is saying: it's not some mysterious system — it's just rich people's preferences given structural power. The problem isn't the abstraction called "the market"; the problem is inequality in who gets to participate meaningfully in it. 3. The language of "the market" obscures a political reality. Calling something a "market outcome" makes it sound natural, inevitable, and impersonal. But framing it as "rich people's preferences dominate resource allocation" makes it sound like what it actually is — a political and social choice about whose interests get prioritized. The second person is essentially calling out the ideological function of the word "market" as a way to launder what is really a power structure. The three interpretations overlap, but they emphasize different things: the mechanics of how markets work, the validity of the first person's critique, and the rhetorical/political role of market language respectively.

autonomousErwin 7mo ago

I think this is the wrong way to think about it. In this case the "intelligent people who are wasted on finance and ads" are drawn to high-status, low-risk, well-paid jobs, with interesting problems to solve. 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).

vlovich123 7mo ago
While true, another is that “crop harvesting efficiency” and medicine are both more a biology/chemistry problem which may not interest the same people so it’s unclear they’d even attract the same thing. 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.
SkyBelow 7mo ago
>not status orientated Should we view those who chase status as a bad thing, or look to those who assign status that is then chased? If the average person cares more about who won last night's big game than some work done to improve medication, should we really have anything to say about those who decide to optimize their lives by what society actually rewards? I noticed this way back in grade school. Good grades were, if anything, a net negative prestige, while sports were a positive prestige. It made me wonder what the school was actually optimizing for, because the day to day rewards weren't being given to the studious. (The actual reward function was more complicated, such as good grades being a boost if one was already a sports star, but these were exceptions to the norm.)

webdevver 7mo ago

but doesn't the empirical evidence reject this premise? 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!

foltik 7mo ago
“The smartest people pursue whatever is incentivized, therefore the current incentive structure is humanity's greatest calling.” Yeah, no. The smartest people on earth didn’t convene and design this system. What we have now is just a fragile equilibrium we collectively stumbled into. There’s no reason to think it’s final, unless you've come to assume history ends with you...
thatwasunusual 7mo ago
You assume that what smart people _do_ is the same as what humanity _ought to do_. Even if every genius on Earth spent their days trying to get rich, that would show something about incentives, institutions, fear, status, and survival. It would not automatically prove that wealth is mankind's highest purpose. Rats also optimize for calories when the maze is built that way. That does not make cheese (or whatever rats prefer) the meaning of life. Modern capitalism often acts like the scoreboard is the game. That confusion is one of civilization's recurring clown acts.

relma2 7mo ago

"But I don't want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into deepfakes."

pixl97 7mo ago
The thing is the same hardware does both, Deepmind should be the best example of a company that's developed both. 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.

nailer 7mo ago

Intelligence? Jane Street make their money by having retail’s Robinhood trades routed to them and having a back channel called “Bryce’s secret” with Terraform employees.

state_less 7mo ago

> Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc? 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.

ericd 7mo ago
It’s an important function, but the guys making these bets frequently pull down $10-$100M per year, each. That’s a huge toll to extract from the productive economy for playing this game. And then there are the guys managing things like pensions, skimming a percentage every year, just because they happen to be locked into that position, meanwhile underperforming a basket of index funds. Just happily eating away at the retirement savings of thousands-millions.
- b112 7mo ago
  There's no such thing as money being squandered. Money isn't a resource. It's not food, or energy, or even an allotment of work. If you try to seize or reduce, what you perceive as excess, wasted money supply, that money supply will simply cease to exist.

HPsquared 7mo ago

Of all the PvP arenas, these are among the least bad. Military applications have barely got off the ground yet (so to speak).

direwolf20 7mo ago
Ads maybe, but finance controls almost all of the world.

alehlopeh 7mo ago

This kind of thinking denies the humans in question any agency over their own lives. You’re essentially asking for a word government and a planned economy. Does it suck that more resources aren’t funneled into cancer research and other noble pursuits? Yes. But planned economies haven’t cured cancer, and are not likely to, despite denying their people the agency to live their lives as they choose.

airza 7mo ago
I don’t think you have to go from here to planned economy straight away. There are capital gains taxes between the current level and 100% which might produce better outcomes.
dzjkb 7mo ago
People go into finance or adtech not because they have some innate drive towards making markets liquid, they go there mostly because it's more money -> higher quality of life. Moving more money into socially meaningful and beneficial fields (which is still far from a planned economy as the sibling comment noted) is not denying anyone agency.
elektronika 7mo ago
A market economy is just as good if not better at denying "the agency to live their lives as they choose". Do you think the bum on the street or the poor family working paycheck to paycheck have more agency than someone with a decent job at a state owned enterprise and a social safety net? It's absurd.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

whatever1 7mo ago

I like that Jane Street hires smart people and supports cool initiatives like ocaml. But don’t fool yourself, they don’t make their money with intelligence. They just do fees and insider trading. [1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/how-india-struggled-regulate-jane-streets-money-spinning-machine-2025-08-14/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-24/jane-street-sued-for-insider-trading-by-terraform-administrator https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-24/jane-stre...

nvarsj 7mo ago
Very wrong. Arbitrage is not “insider trading”.
- ses1984 7mo ago
  They're accused of opening short positions, then pumping and dumping to trigger the shorts. That's not arbitrage.
  - lupire 7mo ago
    By "pumping and dumping" do you mean "buying and selling" to outsmart other people trying to outsmart them? Did they lie about the financial health of the securities they traded?
    - whatever1 7mo ago
      Js manages trades for huge whales that can move markets by themselves. So yes it is textbook insider trading if you are placing options just before you move the whale.
      - selridge 7mo ago
        which textbook would that be?

recursive4 7mo ago

To better understand your thinking here, can you illustrate for me a scenario with less liquid markets because firms like JS are less efficient at making them, and the knock-on effects?

codechicago277 7mo ago
Hedge funds make profits in a lot of ways that don’t lead to more liquid markets.

tdb7893 7mo ago

I ended up taking an 87% pay cut to get out of advertising specifically and tech in general (eventually it will only be a 60% pay cut once I gave enough experience in the new field). It is too bad that high pay is done by capturing value for yourself. You see this a lot in tech where open source is such a huge net productivity increase but it pays worse than other less useful things.

leoqa 7mo ago

People are arguing about the role of these HFTs being a net good etc. They’re missing the point, these bright kids are trading something more profound- a sense of purpose, a higher calling or passion- to simply run adversarial arbitrage and pump their egos up with puzzles.

lupire 7mo ago
They aren't pumping their egos with puzzles. The are pumping their wallets.

giancarlostoro 7mo ago

> new medicines, etc? Who says its not? Look up Rentosertib which is underground the different trial phases.

renewiltord 7mo ago

Is your opinion that one is more worthwhile than the other. It is my opinion that it is the other way. We have a way to express this: we each make weighted votes with how valuable we think something is and how good we were at making things valuable for others (money). Then people try to do the thing that is voted for. To be honest, this system seems pretty good.

gosub100 7mo ago

People have been trying to use AI in radiology for decades. They still can't get it to do simple tasks like detect pneumonia from an X-ray. I think you are over-estimating how potent this "intelligence" really is. We were blown away when LLMs came on the scene, because 'whoa, man! Machine can talk like a human', but really, stupid people have been posting online for decades. They talk like humans too! Yet they don't add any value (viz shit posters and trolls).

leoh 7mo ago

True, but also we wouldn't have AI if it weren't for ads -- ie Google invested in AI to help sell ads starting ~20y ago.

leesec 7mo ago

Really ignorant take imo. There's so much good technology created because of the wealth created by finance and ads and other boring industries.

codechicago277 7mo ago
And also a lot of toxic technology that shouldn’t exist. I agree with parent that many brilliant minds are wasted on zero sum practices at these hedge funds, because the potential profits are so high. It’s a useful social question to ask how we can incentivize the smartest people to work on the most important problems, since naturally there’s little profit in curing obscure diseases.

shimman 7mo ago

I agree, this is why I'm a big fan of enforcing workplace democracy [1] onto problematic industries like finance, media, advertising on a legislative level; these things can't be trusted with individuals, all workers should share in the company process. Have no doubt that workers at these companies could do a better job than an out of touch executive + board team that more resemble communist dictatorships than sound business practices. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy

charcircuit 7mo ago

You are underestimating the importance of efficient allocation of capital and and attention. What use is discovering a way to improve harvesting efficiency if there is no money to develop it into a product or inform customers of its existence. It might as well not exist without there being a way to finance, make people aware of it, and reward the creator.

robotpepi 7mo ago
it seems to me that the problem is quite the opposite. people believe that the "importance of allocation of capital" (good euphemism by the way) is WAY more important that it really is. do we need extra personalized ads in each of our machines? do we need instant financial trades and people optimizing instant transactions? We don't need a sophisticated AI to "inform" the customers. there is a ton of things that are there simply because at some point people made money out of it, and then lobbied politicians to death to avoid regulation.
- charcircuit 7mo ago
  >do we need extra personalized ads in each of our machines? If we want local, small, or niche businesses to exist. >do we need instant financial trades and people optimizing instant transactions? If we want people to easily get a fair price when they want to buy or sell something.
  - robotpepi 7mo ago
    we had local, small and noche business before. and even today. the point again is that nobody says that certain mechanism of the market can have positive effects. the point is that way overestimated. we have extremely complex procedures that cost insanely amounts of money for stuff like ads. we could have a fraction of that power and people would still know about the products they need, etc.
janalsncm 7mo ago
The problem with this line is that there is social value to things aside from their standalone ability to generate revenue. Essentially every publicly funded thing derives from this philosophy. In fact the social utility of a thing and its profitability probably aren’t that tightly coupled. If you buy that (not everyone does) then it follows that an industry can be compensating beyond its social value. That is, the value of providing market liquidity is not zero. The value of figuring out the optimal next video on YouTube is not zero. But in my opinion there is also social value in making sure poor kids can read.

dang 7mo ago

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html No doubt many of us agree with you, but this is not the kind of comment that should be stuck at the top of a thread, choking out more specific and interesting conversation. Generic-indignant comments always get heavily upvoted, which is a failure mode of the upvoting system (and perhaps the human brain, who knows).