Hacker News Reader

Comment by justforfunhere | Hacker News Reader

[offtopic rant]

Coronavirus is hitting back hard on behalf of nature.

Pollution levels in worst hit areas have come down. Industries have shut down and economic activity has subsided.

Coronavirus is in a way a ironic fk you to Humans. Its the kind of enemy that we as a civilization are worse prepared for.

Even after all the technological breakthroughs, we are still nowhere.

With our current technology we can easily tell whether there is a cat or a dog in a picture, but can't tell quickly enough whether a asymptomatic person standing right in front of you has Corona infection. Way to go! Let's make some more bright graduates to work on making people click more ads, yeah.

View on HN

This is a bizarre post. You've ignored all of the plagues and catastrophes that humanity has survived. You're forgetting that you're posting messages to a server located somewhere in the world with a latency on the order of seconds. We're doing space stuff at a quicker pace than any other time.

This isn't a rant, it's devoid of any factual thinking and perspective. What you have here is a desperate attempt to be angry at something.

The greatest tragedy is we have 50 years of lost geniuses doing Quant work for Wallstreet instead of making scientific breakthroughs.

Being fair, efficient allocation of capital is important. it creates wealth, which improves human life.

There are definitely lots of bulshit jobs out there, but I wouldn't call quants among the highest tier in terms of waste of human talent. I'd probably look at adtech for that.

This would make sense if our markets were optimising for something useful other than how to extract wealth from workers & consumers whilst providing as little as possible in return.

Practically everything on this site is about moats & branding. Of waves of VC money swamping an ingrained industry with the hope of carving out a monopoly. Of google smashing existing competitive markets giving away a better product for 'free' in order to have better surveillance of phools so google can sell their spending.

None of this is "efficient allocation of capital". Unless your goal is wealth concentration and the destruction of democratic liberal society.

We need a cultural change to lauding regulation that enforces competition in our markets and politics. Otherwise we're on a rapid track to feudalism.

Fortunately, that's not all of it, it's a circle:

markets optimize production and take from workers

workers enjoy what markets provide and optimize the production and specifically production value of human work, taking from those who are producing

production optimizes what markets will sell and take from them.

And in practice it's 100000x more complex than this, mostly because such complexity is necessary.

Adtech, aka predicting what people will like and driving consumption (allocation of resources) improves human life too, for the same reason.

I had been reading about cities of Silk Road (Merv, Balkh, Khorasan, Buchara etc). Large, rich cities surrounded mostly by hostle enviroment (desert, dry steppe).

They had always inflow of citizens and stratified social structure.

Wars and plagues opened possibilities for social mobility however. Elites died same as poor people (or more in times of conquest) and that opened possibilities for lower class individuals to move up.

We are not prepared, but there was people warning about it. See this Ted talk from Bill Gates, 5 years ago. It's impressive how the details are similar to coronavirus.

https://youtu.be/6Af6b_wyiwI

When looking at Nature as a system, it seems obvious to me that this virus is some kind of attempt to address the current imbalance. I'm personally curious how long it will take for nature to understand the feedback from what the virus is doing.

This is an area of research that I wish I could focus on. It would be beneficial to us if we could understand what inputs nature is using to determine if the system is balanced.

What? No. The system just is. There's not attempting at balance whatsoever. Any appearance of a balance is emergent from the individual parts trying to optimize for reproduction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com