Call me crazy, but I think if bitcoin is ever broken they're more likely to move to a centralized ledger than a more secure decentralized ledger. Roughly nobody invested in bitcoin cares about the original mission, they just care about their asset prices.
I'd expect the US to be the main topic on the English speaking internet far after its global dominance ends. I highly doubt that Canada or Australia (let alone the UK) are going to take English speaking dominance any time soon.
The Pax thing generally covers economic, military, and cultural dominance in a hegemonic way (the "peace" part is very relative, especially if you consider Britannica and Romana times). China might compete on some of those but still pretty far, they have little cultural export and lack global trade/influence. Europe is pretty far behind in everything but it'd be cool if they got their shit together.
Llamas were used for some logistics, but they're not the most sturdy, modern Llamas can carry around ~40kg but I'm unsure if it would've been higher or lower with the breeds they used back then. Either way, better than nothing, but definitely no horse.
Good fucking on anthropic, I've long held that they seem like the AI company best handling existential risk, and this elevates that opinion. If you don't want terminator, not helping people invent terminator is a good first step.
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.
I have good news and bad news for you. Good news: we've known the solution to that for more than a century, which is to reduce livestock consumption, a cause which many smart people have dedicated their lives pushing vegetarian/vegan culture and producing alternatives. Bad news: from my point of view, the masses are not going to give up meat and eggs faster with each additional alternative meat.
As a side note, for many vegetarians and vegans, “alternative meats” actually mean hundreds of different legumes (fresh, dried, milled, split, fermented…) and other delicious plant foods. They’re packed with macro and micronutrients that can replace[0] those found in meat.
Taste is a bit trickier: nothing will ever taste more like flesh than… flesh — and taste is subjective anyway. Meat substitutes can be tasty, but they’re not the same. Which brings me to this:
the masses are not going to give up meat and eggs
That’s true. At first, giving up meat just to eat “fake meat” can feel like a downgrade. But the real key to change is curiosity. There are so many ingredients and recipes to explore. Classic egg-and-milk pancakes are great — but why eat the same thing all the time when there are so many combinations of plant milks and oils to try? I used to love pig and chicken. Now my favorite staples are fried tempeh and lentils with nutritional yeast.
0: I like to joke that meat replace beans, you get the idea. Fun fact: meat is viande in French, from latin vivenda which mean "which sustains life" and used to describe any edible. I think english meat have a similar etymology from mete.
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.
>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.
Life expectancy in developed nations is years higher today than 50 years ago. Pharma has contributed to that with things like new vaccines, antibiotics, antivirals, and statins.
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.
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.
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).
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.
HFT doesn't inflate or deflate any valuations. They operate at the market microstructure level and provide liquidity. HFT firms have no impact on the long-term value of assets.
HFTs can siphon away profits from the people actually doing good investing, but Not all HFT is created equal. There have been some pretty high profile instances where HFTs have increased market volatility and caused a "flash crash".
HFTs that trade at the microsecond scale probably aren't valuable to society.
That's all factually incorrect. The reason that HFT is valuable to society is exactly because it trades at the microsecond scale. That's how it provides the most liquidity.
Flash crash was transient and had no impact long term value. Neither does volatility.
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.
Moving money from one pile to another is only useful when the rest of us do actual work. The mistake that the west is making is assuming moving piles of money from one place to another is the actual work.
Unless the hard problem of consciousness was solved when I wasn't looking, we have absolutely no idea what class of objects are conscious. Given that a panpsychist would argue that even a rock has consciousness, I don't think you can easily dismiss the idea that incredibly complicated computations might experience Qualia
reply