(Replying to PARENT post)
You're way off the mark with your examples. More appropriate ones would be military weapons, multi-level marketing, payday loan firms with ridiculous interest rates, scummy advertisement firms. You might not remember that in the Middle-Ages a large portion of intellectuals were spending most of their time debating religion such as is God really omnipotent and what a specific verse in Bible meant.
Now sure you can argue that they were doing only what the society and themselves considered valuable. But one can only wonder if those smart people had been putting their best effort into other things, say developing agriculture or better industrial processes.
I myself did a little day-trading at one period in my life and while I made money, I thought it was the most useless thing I could spend my life in. I was just creating money out of thin air doing basically nothing. Maybe HFT is intellectually more interesting than day-trading but I don't believe it to be very gratifying at deeper level. Perhaps it requires a certain type of person to enjoy that kind of pursuit. I'm definitely not one of those.
👤tekkk🕑4y🔼0🗨️0
(Replying to PARENT post)
The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.
— Daniel Yankelovich, "Corporate Priorities: A continuing study of the new demands on business" (1972).
👤jdc🕑4y🔼0🗨️0
(Replying to PARENT post)
the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between chocolate & HFT. you imbecile. you fucking moron"
👤TheNorthman🕑4y🔼0🗨️0
(Replying to PARENT post)
One of my friends made this argument. He was working in ad tech.
👤cscurmudgeon🕑4y🔼0🗨️0
(Replying to PARENT post)
Actually, I somewhat agree with you. In the interest of time, I had to just stop at "Obviously, this can be difficult to measure". I find this allocation of resources problem very interesting, but I don't claim to know the answer. You can even flip it around the other way and say "Actually there really isn't anything more valuable they could be doing." It sure seems however there is a ton of brain power being used for things that would benefit society more elsewhere, but who knows.
👤bigredhdl🕑4y🔼0🗨️0
(Replying to PARENT post)
After all, these people could surely be creating something more valuable.
If you want to make an argument based on opportunity cost, it generally should have specific alternatives and a viable cost metric. Without that, it's not an argument, just an opinion.