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"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 a

"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.

_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.