4 ms·

While I want to cheer on esoteric languages and functional programming, this seems like just more smart people wasting their brains on zero-sum detrimental fina

by KingMob 13y ago

While I want to cheer on esoteric languages and functional programming, this seems like just more smart people wasting their brains on zero-sum detrimental finance games. At least for them, they'll probably make a lot of money.

_delirium 13y ago
Eh, could produce some more generally applicable improvements, though it depends on whether they share back any code or expertise to the community. Some stuff I don't much like has produced very useful ancillary advances (the U.S. military is probably the biggest example), though some tech+finance companies are kind of black holes that never publish code/data/anything, so depends.
confusedread 13y ago
"zero-sum detrimental finance games" That depends on the market, doesn't it? They didn't say they were explicitly building systems for Forex, right? And who are you to tell people what they should "waste their brains on"? A lot of programmers I know in research labs/academia speak condescendingly towards really intelligent SV programmers who "waste their brains" on moving pixels around a screen in order to make people click more ads.
- _delirium 13y ago
  Fwiw, that line actually came from someone in the tech industry, though no doubt some academics also like it. The oft-paraphrased quote is from Jeff Hammberbache, an early Facebook employee, who at the time of the comment was at Cloudera: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."
  - gjm11 13y ago
    So far, no one seems to have come up with an economic system that's more effective in harnessing the collective skills of the human race to improve the world (on balance) for everyone than the one we have at the moment. It has the regrettable feature that it strongly incentivizes some very smart people to spend their careers encouraging people to click on advertisements, and some other very smart people to spend their careers arranging for the profits from exploiting subtle equity mispricings to flow to one random set of rich people rather than another. But the net effect is pretty good, or more precisely less depressingly wretched than that of any other system found to date. (And some of those very smart people get rich by encouraging ad-clicking or exploiting equity mispricings, and then use their money and/or freedom to do neat things from which everyone benefits. Is that such a bad way for things to work?)
    - _delirium 13y ago
      I guess I have some doubt that the American economic system in particular is a local optimum. Something radically different carries risks, yes. But the American system is a bit of an extreme in its encouragement to do anything that makes a profit, even within the local space of variation of vaguely market-based mixed economies. In Denmark, we have a bit more "managed" economy, perhaps even "socialist" in a certain weak sense (there used to be more of a socialist ethos, alas). The country is a bit less focused on VC returns, big paydays, and "exits", and frowns a bit more on people doing mercenary nonsense for profit. You get paid to go to university, there is extensive arts funding, an industrial/scientific policy, etc., among other things that try to redirect energies elsewhere. And that historical "approximate equality for all, big profits for none, put your energy into something worthwhile" approach to an economy has really not been disastrous, quite the opposite.
      - gjm11 13y ago
        I didn't actually mean the American system specifically. (I'm in the UK, for what it's worth.) My own preferences are quite leftish and I would prefer the UK to be more like Denmark than it is. But, still, the US seems to be quite effective in producing new technological things, and maybe that's partly the entrepreneurial mercenary culture as well as the mere fact of being a rich country. Anyway, the "system" I had in mind was the (not necessarily well defined) global one of which the US, the UK and Denmark are all parts.
        eli_gottlieb 13y ago
        >But, still, the US seems to be quite effective in producing new technological things, and maybe that's partly the entrepreneurial mercenary culture as well as the mere fact of being a rich country. Speaking as a born USAian, I honestly believe it's more that the USA can and does brain-drain the entire rest of the world. When you actually raise people in an environment of mercenary capitalism, what you mostly get is poor people. When you let social-democratic states across the world raise and educate people, let them fund their research or their early attempts at businesses, and then steal those people when they get successful enough to be an easy bet and put them in a ruthless entrepreneurial environment, then you get a seemingly high concentration of high-talent, high-productivity businesses. It's kind of like how people outside Israel say we've become a high-tech powerhouse through the discipline of our military training, but actually the Israeli army is one of the world's worst bloated, effort-wasting bureaucracies for every soldier outside a tiny elite.
gaze 13y ago
Yes, I really don't like that they're dipping their toes into this crap. I like that it means we might get a better Repa or whatever but still.
gjm11 13y ago
> zero-sum detrimental finance games Except: 1. Fortunately we have taxation to turn highly profitable zero-sum professions into slightly less profitable positive-sum ones. 2. If doing stuff for the quantitative finance industry means more resources for building generally useful Haskell libraries, then everyone wins. 3. If you make a lot of money playing zero-sum detrimental finance games, then you can (a) retire and do more interesting or socially-useful things (like contributing to interesting software projects) and/or (b) give a pile of it away. On 3b, I'll remark that although I don't work in the finance industry (I've spent most of my career doing R&D for small technology companies), my salary has never been very large by present-day Silicon Valley standards, and my charitable giving isn't especially heroic, I think it very likely that I've done more net good to the world by giving away some of what I earn than I ever have by doing my actual job. If I were to move into finance (which isn't impossible -- I'm a mathematician and quite a lot of mathematicians do that) then it would probably be a net gain in global utility even if everything I did could correctly be called zero-sum detrimental finance games.
- judk 13y ago
  #1 is not how macroeconomics works, not without some quite controversial assumptions.
  - gjm11 13y ago
    Explain? Joe is a hedge fund manager. His job consists of arranging for one bunch of random rich people (his fund's clients) to get a little bit richer at the expense of another bunch of random rich people (other people trading in the same markets). For doing this, his clients pay him $10M/year. The government takes $3M/year of this (note: all numbers in this comment are made-up nonsense), which it uses for building roads and paying schoolteachers and paying for some people's healthcare. End result: Joe's clients, in exchange for Joe's skill at siphoning money out of the stock market (or wherever) to them, have in effect paid $7M to Joe and paid $3M to build roads, provide medical services to poor people, provide education to everyone, etc. What controversial assumptions are necessary to make that end result (1) plausible and (2) positive-sum despite the net uselessness of Joe's work? In some cases one can argue that the useful things done with tax revenue need to be offset against the reduced incentive to work created by the existence of taxes. Not in this case, I think. Joe's work is, to a very good approximation, completely valueless to society, and it does good overall only by being taxed. And if the prospect of being paid only $7M/year makes Joe quit hedgefundery in favour of some easier and less stressful but less well-paid profession, the chances are he'll do more good there. (More precisely: If the world's Joes collectively decide to do a bit less hedge fund management and a bit more engineering or something, that's probably all to the good.) (It may sound as if I'm criticizing Joe. I'm not. He's not doing any harm to speak of, I think his earnings do a lot of good by being taxed, and of course he may be doing other useful things with some of that money.)

by KingMob 13y ago

_delirium 13y ago

Eh, could produce some more generally applicable improvements, though it depends on whether they share back any code or expertise to the community. Some stuff I don't much like has produced very useful ancillary advances (the U.S. military is probably the biggest example), though some tech+finance companies are kind of black holes that never publish code/data/anything, so depends.

confusedread 13y ago

"zero-sum detrimental finance games" That depends on the market, doesn't it? They didn't say they were explicitly building systems for Forex, right? And who are you to tell people what they should "waste their brains on"? A lot of programmers I know in research labs/academia speak condescendingly towards really intelligent SV programmers who "waste their brains" on moving pixels around a screen in order to make people click more ads.

_delirium 13y ago
Fwiw, that line actually came from someone in the tech industry, though no doubt some academics also like it. The oft-paraphrased quote is from Jeff Hammberbache, an early Facebook employee, who at the time of the comment was at Cloudera: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."
- gjm11 13y ago
  So far, no one seems to have come up with an economic system that's more effective in harnessing the collective skills of the human race to improve the world (on balance) for everyone than the one we have at the moment. It has the regrettable feature that it strongly incentivizes some very smart people to spend their careers encouraging people to click on advertisements, and some other very smart people to spend their careers arranging for the profits from exploiting subtle equity mispricings to flow to one random set of rich people rather than another. But the net effect is pretty good, or more precisely less depressingly wretched than that of any other system found to date. (And some of those very smart people get rich by encouraging ad-clicking or exploiting equity mispricings, and then use their money and/or freedom to do neat things from which everyone benefits. Is that such a bad way for things to work?)
  - _delirium 13y ago
    I guess I have some doubt that the American economic system in particular is a local optimum. Something radically different carries risks, yes. But the American system is a bit of an extreme in its encouragement to do anything that makes a profit, even within the local space of variation of vaguely market-based mixed economies. In Denmark, we have a bit more "managed" economy, perhaps even "socialist" in a certain weak sense (there used to be more of a socialist ethos, alas). The country is a bit less focused on VC returns, big paydays, and "exits", and frowns a bit more on people doing mercenary nonsense for profit. You get paid to go to university, there is extensive arts funding, an industrial/scientific policy, etc., among other things that try to redirect energies elsewhere. And that historical "approximate equality for all, big profits for none, put your energy into something worthwhile" approach to an economy has really not been disastrous, quite the opposite.
    - gjm11 13y ago
      I didn't actually mean the American system specifically. (I'm in the UK, for what it's worth.) My own preferences are quite leftish and I would prefer the UK to be more like Denmark than it is. But, still, the US seems to be quite effective in producing new technological things, and maybe that's partly the entrepreneurial mercenary culture as well as the mere fact of being a rich country. Anyway, the "system" I had in mind was the (not necessarily well defined) global one of which the US, the UK and Denmark are all parts.
      - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
        >But, still, the US seems to be quite effective in producing new technological things, and maybe that's partly the entrepreneurial mercenary culture as well as the mere fact of being a rich country. Speaking as a born USAian, I honestly believe it's more that the USA can and does brain-drain the entire rest of the world. When you actually raise people in an environment of mercenary capitalism, what you mostly get is poor people. When you let social-democratic states across the world raise and educate people, let them fund their research or their early attempts at businesses, and then steal those people when they get successful enough to be an easy bet and put them in a ruthless entrepreneurial environment, then you get a seemingly high concentration of high-talent, high-productivity businesses. It's kind of like how people outside Israel say we've become a high-tech powerhouse through the discipline of our military training, but actually the Israeli army is one of the world's worst bloated, effort-wasting bureaucracies for every soldier outside a tiny elite.

gaze 13y ago

Yes, I really don't like that they're dipping their toes into this crap. I like that it means we might get a better Repa or whatever but still.

gjm11 13y ago

> zero-sum detrimental finance games Except: 1. Fortunately we have taxation to turn highly profitable zero-sum professions into slightly less profitable positive-sum ones. 2. If doing stuff for the quantitative finance industry means more resources for building generally useful Haskell libraries, then everyone wins. 3. If you make a lot of money playing zero-sum detrimental finance games, then you can (a) retire and do more interesting or socially-useful things (like contributing to interesting software projects) and/or (b) give a pile of it away. On 3b, I'll remark that although I don't work in the finance industry (I've spent most of my career doing R&D for small technology companies), my salary has never been very large by present-day Silicon Valley standards, and my charitable giving isn't especially heroic, I think it very likely that I've done more net good to the world by giving away some of what I earn than I ever have by doing my actual job. If I were to move into finance (which isn't impossible -- I'm a mathematician and quite a lot of mathematicians do that) then it would probably be a net gain in global utility even if everything I did could correctly be called zero-sum detrimental finance games.

judk 13y ago
#1 is not how macroeconomics works, not without some quite controversial assumptions.
- gjm11 13y ago
  Explain? Joe is a hedge fund manager. His job consists of arranging for one bunch of random rich people (his fund's clients) to get a little bit richer at the expense of another bunch of random rich people (other people trading in the same markets). For doing this, his clients pay him $10M/year. The government takes $3M/year of this (note: all numbers in this comment are made-up nonsense), which it uses for building roads and paying schoolteachers and paying for some people's healthcare. End result: Joe's clients, in exchange for Joe's skill at siphoning money out of the stock market (or wherever) to them, have in effect paid $7M to Joe and paid $3M to build roads, provide medical services to poor people, provide education to everyone, etc. What controversial assumptions are necessary to make that end result (1) plausible and (2) positive-sum despite the net uselessness of Joe's work? In some cases one can argue that the useful things done with tax revenue need to be offset against the reduced incentive to work created by the existence of taxes. Not in this case, I think. Joe's work is, to a very good approximation, completely valueless to society, and it does good overall only by being taxed. And if the prospect of being paid only $7M/year makes Joe quit hedgefundery in favour of some easier and less stressful but less well-paid profession, the chances are he'll do more good there. (More precisely: If the world's Joes collectively decide to do a bit less hedge fund management and a bit more engineering or something, that's probably all to the good.) (It may sound as if I'm criticizing Joe. I'm not. He's not doing any harm to speak of, I think his earnings do a lot of good by being taxed, and of course he may be doing other useful things with some of that money.)