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?
xvilka 15 minutes 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 10 minutes 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 2 minutes ago [-]
"The market" here is just a convenient substitute for "people weighted by the disposable income", which today roughly approximates to "rich people".
KellyCriterion 32 minutes 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.
0x3f 1 hours 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.
paulluuk 1 hours 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.
bumby 17 minutes ago [-]
It’s been a few years since I looked deeply into it, but I think we produce enough to have everyone survive but not necessarily thrive. At the time, it came out to something like 1700 kcal per person. Even if we did have enough, the next problem is logistics of allocating that food to everyone who needs it.
maeln 1 minutes ago [-]
A lot of food production worldwide is used by meat production, which is quite inefficient. It does generate some useful side product (manure), but also a lot of bad side product.
In some places, almost every field is dedicated to meat production.
Consuming less meat and shifting food production away from meat would be very good for the environment and instantly solve the issue of the amount of calorie produce.
But as you pointed out, this is not the actual issue. Getting food to people who need it is almost entirely a political and logistical issue at this point. War (especially civil war), natural disaster, with local power stealing international aid, etc, are mostly the biggest responsible for hunger in the 21' century.
We have the technology and logistics to accurately drop-ship huge amount of food in even the most remote places in the world, even when the local infrastructure is heavily damaged or inexistent. We cannot deal with local power decision to voluntarily starve a place.
ViscountPenguin 52 minutes 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 3 minutes ago [-]
to stop war we need to stop being lazy, greedy and most important: envy, which is impossible.
JasonADrury 1 hours ago [-]
>Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc?
How is finance not exactly that?
ViscountPenguin 58 minutes 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.
JasonADrury 53 minutes ago [-]
High frequency quants almost certainly don't directly provide a massive social good, but they're one of the many facilitators enabling the smooth functioning of markets that do.
But FWIW, the comment I was replying didn't seem to be specifically critical of high frequency quants. Dismissing the entire field as something that doesn't contribute to society is beyond absurd.
ViscountPenguin 44 minutes ago [-]
The context of the comment being a Jane Street blog post is why I singled out HFT.
I think we're probably roughly in alignment w.r.t. other forms of finance, but the market liquidity gained by a marginal HFT employee almost certainly isn't worth the marginal cost imo. Even in finance, you could do a lot better by expending that human capital into optimising the structure of the markets themselves (there's lots of research on how hideously inefficient the TSE is because of its coarse tick sizes, for example; but vested interests get in the way of fixing that).
throwaw12 35 minutes ago [-]
> facilitators enabling the smooth functioning of markets that do
Do you think without HFT markets stop functioning properly?
What if they are one of the contributors of highly inflated valuations?
lesam 16 minutes ago [-]
If markets were regulated to trade in coordinated 1s auctions, instead of nanosecond precision first-come-first-served matching of orders, markets would function just as well without needing a ton of what the HFT crowd does. It's a massive waste of brilliant minds.
bumby 29 minutes ago [-]
I didn’t read the OP as being entirely dismissive, but rather making a point about relative impact.
You could make the case that a neurosurgeon is contributing to the field by being a full-time reviewer of a research journal; like a quant, they are providing utility by assisting in the flow of information. But I suspect there are many people like me who think they would have a bigger impact by putting on scrubs and working in an operating room.
vintermann 1 hours ago [-]
Isn't Jane Street mostly into HFT arbitrage?
tux3 39 minutes 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.
JasonADrury 50 minutes 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 33 minutes ago [-]
Markets existed before HFTs, they will exist without them as well.
zeroCalories 1 hours 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 6 minutes 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.
blitzar 1 hours 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.
azan_ 59 minutes ago [-]
There are much much more great minds working on new medicines than on HFT. Also HFT is good, it makes world better place!
hal9000xbot 9 minutes ago [-]
The methodical approach Alex took here is fascinating - it mirrors real-world AI system debugging when production models behave unexpectedly. The key insight about treating the network as a constraint solver rather than trying to trace circuits by hand is brilliant. In production AI systems, we often face similar challenges where the "learned" behavior isn't actually learned but engineered, and you have to reverse engineer the underlying logic. The parallel carry adder implementation in neural net layers is particularly clever - it shows how you can embed deterministic computation in what looks like a black box ML model. This kind of mechanistic interpretability is becoming crucial as we deploy more complex AI agents in real systems.
stingraycharles 2 hours ago [-]
This is pretty cool, I wasn’t aware of these types of challenges. How does one even approach this?
Feels to me like it’s similar to dumping a binary with an image, the format being entirely custom.
And/or trying to decode a language or cipher, trying to recognize patterns.
cess11 1 hours ago [-]
TFA details a solution, it's pretty interesting. Basically the problem was to reverse engineer an absurdly obfuscated and slightly defect MD5 algorithm.
davedx 1 hours ago [-]
What does it do - front run crypto investors or pump and dumps?
kobieps 31 minutes ago [-]
Yeah I saw something fly by on my feed that they were responsible for big btc dumps
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?
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).
What they could achieve in spending their attention on real problem would be massive.
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.
But as you pointed out, this is not the actual issue. Getting food to people who need it is almost entirely a political and logistical issue at this point. War (especially civil war), natural disaster, with local power stealing international aid, etc, are mostly the biggest responsible for hunger in the 21' century. We have the technology and logistics to accurately drop-ship huge amount of food in even the most remote places in the world, even when the local infrastructure is heavily damaged or inexistent. We cannot deal with local power decision to voluntarily starve a place.
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.
How is finance not exactly that?
But FWIW, the comment I was replying didn't seem to be specifically critical of high frequency quants. Dismissing the entire field as something that doesn't contribute to society is beyond absurd.
I think we're probably roughly in alignment w.r.t. other forms of finance, but the market liquidity gained by a marginal HFT employee almost certainly isn't worth the marginal cost imo. Even in finance, you could do a lot better by expending that human capital into optimising the structure of the markets themselves (there's lots of research on how hideously inefficient the TSE is because of its coarse tick sizes, for example; but vested interests get in the way of fixing that).
Do you think without HFT markets stop functioning properly?
What if they are one of the contributors of highly inflated valuations?
You could make the case that a neurosurgeon is contributing to the field by being a full-time reviewer of a research journal; like a quant, they are providing utility by assisting in the flow of information. But I suspect there are many people like me who think they would have a bigger impact by putting on scrubs and working in an operating room.
The markets have shown themselves to be an excellent way of applying human potential to things like crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines.
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.
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.
Feels to me like it’s similar to dumping a binary with an image, the format being entirely custom.
And/or trying to decode a language or cipher, trying to recognize patterns.
https://x.com/1914ad/status/2026757796390449382
Haven't read it yet but seems spicey