Do you really believe it's meaningless to talk about time being misspent? Would you call it sinister for example to criticize someone for spending their time murdering people at random?
The financial sector at large is massive [1], and people seem to think that HFT is proportional in size, but its actually quite small, weighing in at ~2Bn in annual profits [2], which is a blip compared to Google's AdSense revenues. Google does all sorts of good things too though, so I'm not saying that we should reallocate all of Google's engineers to curing cancer, but I think the amount of discourse allocated to vilifying HFT and imagining ways to make "smart people do other things" is out of control.
Edit: Got to read pg's response to @joebadmo about what the dispute is -- No, I don't think its sinister to criticise. I think that's productive and great things start with discourse. I _do_ worry that when issues get blown out of hand people to change the lives of others in ways to coerce them to operate in ways congruent with their moral code. The criticism is fine, but exacting policy to prevent others from doing amoral things is problematic. The (likely bad) analogue for this is European and American cultural imperialism.
Obviously I don't think HFT is "immoral" as others have stated. (I do also think that HFTraders are compensated disproportionately highly w.r.t. their contribution to society, but that isn't unique to HFT's and is far more pronounced in other subfields in finance, and possibly startupdom).
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/26/friends-don%E2%80%99t-let-f...
I agree with the GP that the opportunity cost argument is so wholly dependent on the judgment of the debated activity that it doesn't really pertain one way or the other.
That said, HFT doesn't strike me as something that adds value to the economy.
A criticising B is not a problem.
A preventing B from doing something is sinister (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness).
I'm saying it depends on what A is criticizing about B. It is not sinister for A to criticize B's action. I'm not sure if it's sinister for A to criticize B's misallocation of time spent. It's a weird thing to think about. I think it's weird to think about because, as was my point earlier, the judgment of whether the time was misspent is wholly dependent on the judgment of the way the time was spent.
My personal opinion is that one is obliged to act in a way such that the world is not disadvantaged by one presence, but further obligations are dubious. It's not that I'm opposed to using one's talent "for good", it's that other people telling them what to do with their talent has been shown to be a very dangerous game. Particularly if the other people are motivated by the moral fashions of the times.
Title: Should high-frequency trading be banned?
OP: How about a tax on capital gains that is inversely proportional to the time the financial instrument is held? The biggest cost HFT imposes on the world is the brain drain.
This thread isn't about discussing the best use of talent, it's about whether talent should be forced to not do certain things, and your post reads naturally in that context.
You: Would you call it sinister for example to criticize someone for spending their time murdering people at random?
I read this as an equivocation, as though misuse of talent falls into the same category as murdering people.
I used murder as an instance of misuse of talent. It is an extreme case, obviously, but if you want to prove the existence of something (in this case the possibility of wasting one's talents), the fastest way to do it is to use an extreme example, since for existence proofs any example will do.
Normally it's fruitless to argue about these sorts of things, but I kind of want to see if anyone disagrees with my 'heuristic of conversational originalism'. I'm pretty fond of it myself; it's been very helpful for me.
It's a threaded comment system, rather than a flat comment system. To me this implies that the search for context should begin with the most tightly bound scope. By default I assume a comment is a direct reply to its parent, as the writer of the comment made a deliberate choice to place it there.
While the larger context informs the tone and examples which will be used, it's the background scenery, not the subject.
> In a sustained conversation it's unreasonable to expect readers to perform a context-shift every time someone says something
Maybe I'm reading this too strongly, but how else can you have a conversation? Every statement is, most immediately, in the context of the directly preceding statement, that's what a dialog is.
> especially when the in-context reading (particularly the murder comment) is more natural than the out-of-context reading.
Again, maybe I'm completely misreading you here. But what exactly do you mean by the 'in-context' reading in this case? The subject as I read it was: "Humans will always be underemployed from some perspective ("Oh but she could be doing X"). Penalizing them for not operating in a way that is consistent with your (or anyone's) world view is far more sinister."
With a larger context of the validity of 'wasting time' as a criticism, the implication that what constitutes a waste of time is purely subjective, and the background example given being HFT vs. Ad revenue. (The choice of HFT as an example being the result of the overall context of the article)
As requested, that's what this hacker thinks.