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Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

I actually do think it would be great if we didn’t have so much IQ concentration in so many rather niche, high-competition, low-impact-on-daily-life arenas. A lot of these people are competing in zero-sum games where their intelligence is all but canceled because of one another.

If we could take half the 120+ IQ folks working at high frequency trading firms or on online advertisements and scatter them to work in local trade businesses, restaurants, civil services, etc, I think it’d be a net positive.

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This. So much brain-waste in professions that generate little to no value for society. How many highly intelligent people waste their lives as lawyers doing endless corporate lawsuits or minority shareholder lawsuits or whatever other useless court proceedings? Society could allocate the resources spent on stuff like that to train more engineers or researchers. Or accounting, so many highly intelligent people spending years navigating endless mazes of occult tax law or useless bureaucratic nothingburgers who could otherwise be engineers or researchers.

Such a waste

How is it that society is preferentially allocating resources to creating lawyers rather than engineers or researchers? It seems to me that people chose to become lawyers, engineers, or researchers of their own free will. Sure, many researchers are government funded, so you could draw more people to that field with more resources, but I'm not seeing how society is pushing people into law over engineering at least.

> How is it that society is preferentially allocating resources to creating lawyers rather than engineers or researchers?

money.

“If you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain, do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set?”

Like another commenter suggested, money. These professions are generally rather high paying and come with quite a bit of prestige. "Lawyer" is listed up there with doctor with the stereotypical aspirational jobs.

Sure, I guess I’m conflating society with government. Yeah, doctors and lawyers make more money than other professions, but those incomes are a result of innumerable positive and negative incentives (eg, cost of education, opportunity cost of education, work/life balance, “meaningfulness”). It seems nearly impossible to intentionally modify those incentives in a specific direction without causing unintended consequences elsewhere.

Example: society wants more quality teachers, so society chooses to increase the federal education budget to increase teacher salaries. Consequently, more highly educated people choose to become teachers, however, this unintentionally exacerbates the doctor shortage and further increases corporate lawyer salaries due to decreased supply of lawyers.

I dont think i get your point. you view tech as low-impact, then offer restaurants or civil cervices as an alternative? why are those higher impact?

for what it is worth, IQ of 120 is pretty tame e.g. 1 in 10 people and I think there are lots of smart people that DO work in trades, restaurants, and civil services. I am friends with many .

Not all tech, of course, but a lot of tech (eg, HFT and adtech) is zero-sum, so it's low impact by definition.

I think I see. You are framing impact ( I think) as something similar to net positive utils in a utilitarian framework

If I am an HFT engineer, making a faster trading platform literally has very little impact. It doesn't create any value, it just moves value from the slower guy to the faster guy. Then all the HFT companies hire smarter engineers and all improve their latency just as much, and there is literally zero impact to society.

I get the zero sum part, it is the other part that was less clear to me. Eg having an iq 120 dmv teller or server at brunch or

But then again, I disagree with your premise that these other careers are intelligence starved - some of my smartest friends do them.

I think rather those careers are simply more stifling and less creative. That is to say your HFT seems flashy because they are doing novel work in a developing area. If they were in the civil service, they probably wouldn't be reinventing the wheel, but just an efficient bureaucrat.

Obviously people sort on intelligence into different industries. You’re looking at a paper on similar/probably-mostly-identical sorting happening between specific firms.

I don’t believe everyone working in e.g. food service is dumb (nor that everyone working in adtech or HFT is smart), only that the distribution is probably quite extremely uneven.

There is plenty of space for creativity and novel thinking within bureaucracies, trades, service industries, etc., and that is exactly the reason it’d be great to have a more even distribution of smart people into them.

An efficient bureaucrat can navigate themselves to the right place to make a huge amount of impact on people’s actual daily lives at scale. That’s a good thing!

HFT provides liquidity, makes markets more efficient, prices more accurate and narrows spreads. Moving money around as accurately as possible increases the accuracy of allocating funds where they should be. Everything in the World and economy is connected. Accurate prices, efficient trading conditions allow for better allocation of funds on targets worthwhile pursuing.

On the whole you can think that there's Company A and Company B, where both produce different amounts of value. There's an optimal state of how much each company should be funded in order for optimal value production from both together. The more accurate you are with allocating funds the best are the gains.

So in that sense it's not zero sum.

> a lot of tech (eg, HFT and adtech) is zero-sum

It's zero sum within the system. The existence of HFT as a whole is positive sum, though I agree that the compensation differential attributed to it outclasses that sum by a large measure.

The existence of HFT definitely is a net positive, but I think it's a tough argument to say that further latency reduction still has any real positive offshoot, so I'd say that it's now as a whole in a zero-sum regime - anyone winning, on the margin, only makes them profit as much as someone else is losing, whereas earlier you could say that tighter spreads and more liquidity helps other market participants.

> it's a tough argument to say that further latency reduction still has any real positive offshoot

There’s an element of Feinman’s spinning, wobbling plates [1]. The problems one must solve to push latency ever lower have knock-on effects.

> whereas earlier you could say that tighter spreads and more liquidity helps other market participants

The guarantee of being nipped curtails entire classes of dirty behaviour. Chunking out an order is smart, but it wasn’t always done. HFT, in this model, serves an adversarial regulatory function.

We also have the basic fact that, in a Ricardian sense, folks are trading with that HFT shop over their slower competitors. At some infinitesimal level, the counterparty chose (and was delivered on) that preference.

[1] https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp/article-abstract/75/3/240/1056...

I don’t think someone choosing an available preference is de facto validation that the preference was made available by anything close to a globally optimal allocation of resources.

Of course I’m suspicious of any system that claims to be able to globally optimize in this way, but I do think it’d be better for almost everyone if we could.

I didn’t say tech, nor did I suggest there aren’t intelligent (sometimes even extremely intelligent) people working in trades etc. Nor do I think we need supergeniuses working at restaurants.

What I’m suggesting is that we shouldn’t have, increasingly, one end of our economy operated largely by 90-110 IQ folks and one end operated largely by 120+ IQ folks. Especially when the end operated by the 90-110 folks is the one that 99% of people are actually interacting with on a daily basis and when the 120+ IQ end has a propensity to produce extremely intense, near-zero sum competitions that drive the net value of their intelligence to near-zero.

> for what it is worth, IQ of 120 is pretty tame e.g. 1 in 10 people

If I am understanding your definition of "tame", you think that being a 1-in-10 person in terms of intelligence is not significant, right?

If so, I beg to differ; coming first in a race of 10 people is a huge differentiator of abilities.

That wasn't what I meant. I mainly meant that it wasnt particularly rare, and as a result, there are tons of people with 120+ IQ in all sorts of roles. The baseline is 10% and because sorting isnt perfect, my priors would lead me to guess that large numbers in most occupations.

>If so, I beg to differ; coming first in a race of 10 people is a huge differentiator of abilities

IQ, by its very nature, doesnt shed much light on comparative performance. I would say there are big differences top to bottom, but you probably wouldnt be able to tell the difference in ability between the 1st and 2nd person out of 10.

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