So many intelligent people applied for something that has no value whatsoever to humanity regardless of how you look at it.
What did bother me, and was acknowledged by my coworkers, was how much top talent was being pulled away from productive tasks to essentially wank around. Not just technologists either, but all sorts of mathematicians and scientists were drawn to the flame.
We as a society have managed to allocate so many of the “best and brightest” to either fintech wankery or placing ads in front of eyeballs. It’s enough to make one want to give up on capitalism, except that everything else appears to be worse.
The problem with ads is not that they're useless, it's that it is an industry prone to scams and grift. (Because doing advertising right requires all sorts of actual science, and ain't nobody got time for that when there's money to be made.)
t. Worked for 20 years and adtech.
There is 0 social impact. That’s the downside of course - but hey, how many jobs out there are really having any kind of positive social impact ? Not 0, but close to it.
Intraday financial games are zero-sum. What HFTs gain, they leech away from mutual funds and pension funds and retail investors and market makers who operate over a longer horizon.
Regarding social impact, the world does have some demand for liquidity and price discovery. Providing those services is both essential and extremely difficult. It's definitely not the most social good I could be doing with my talents, but I think it's weakly positive.
Those things have driven a load of proprietary and open source tech that helps everyone else.
That depends on how you measure it.
Obviously this would mean that countries that previously relied on subsidised labour from those third world countries would have to start paying up. I'm not suggesting that it is a zero sum game however.
It's nothing to do with "we as a society". I'm a quant trader and know many others, and the vast majority are in the industry because we care about making money not some leftist save the world crap. Even if socialists managed to completely destroy the financial market, we'd just find another way to make money without trying to save the world (e.g. like the mostly corrupt officials in Russia and China when they were communist). "Society" can't change human nature; even mass brainwashing on the scale attempted by Maoist China failed.
I.e. the best and brightest will always work where they want to work, not where leftists like you want to "allocate" them.
Cut the fascist bullshit. Everyone can comment about how society should be run, even people that are very successful financially.
If you try to exclude greed from the design of your societal system, it will immediately fail. In large numbers, economics shows us that altruistic people wash out of the model and everyone operates in their own self-interest (greed).
> Cut the fascist bullshit. Everyone can comment about how society should be run, even people that are very successful financially.
It's not financial success that precludes someone from commenting on how society is run, it's blatant, deliberate anti-social actions. This is the foundation of a social contract. It's the same reason you'll get locked up if you go around punching people in the face.
Also, I don't think you know what "fascist" means.
It doesn’t seem like fascism to you because you’ve done some mental gymnastics to pretend you’re not just crushing intellectual opposition, but that’s all it is in the end. Op is not punching anyone in the face. He/she is just blatantly unsupportive of socialism.
Please, I want to know; what benefits do the actions of the op have for "societal planning"? The person he was replying to was at least honest in admitting that this behavior "served little social good".
Once again, I think you'd do well to actually read what fascism actually stood for. The propaganda of fascism had a lot more to say about nationalism, "shared history" and the good of corporations than it did to say about things being "anti-social" or even mentioning "selfish greed".