"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - 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).

> 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.

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-regulat...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-24/jane-stre...

> 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).

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> new medicines, etc?

Who says its not? Look up Rentosertib which is underground the different trial phases.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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

How is finance not exactly that?