As opposed to making the world a better place by optimizing remote databases to speed the distribution of semi-nude selfie photographs or something?

Don't know how to break it to you, but I am pretty sure we're all just on a very brief stint scurrying around pointlessly on a rock near an unregarded yellow sun located at the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy.

>As opposed to making the world a better place by optimizing remote databases to speed the distribution of semi-nude selfie photographs or something?

Yes, that's not the same thing if you believe that people should generally work towards improving social utility[1]. It takes some significant mental gymnastics to convince yourself that getting a market edge over other funds to improve your hedge fund's performance at the expense of theirs is improving social utility. It's just concentrating wealth from some rich people (one fund's shareholders) to other rich people (your fund's shareholders). Maybe if you're lucky you'll even be taking money from retirement accounts.

Even if you argue that someone else would take the money if you didn't, that's not enough to offset the loss of so many people doing something so wasteful from an intelligence perspective. The current incentives draw significant portions of intelligent people away from doing something constructive for society (science, medicine, engineering, math) to competing in an information game for rich people.

1. https://www.quora.com/What-is-social-utility

It doesn't take mental gymnastics at all. One could easily make the argument that market intelligence improves the allocation of capital and makes the world more productive. One could also argue that creating web apps for wealthy westerners is even less useful to society. One could note that being a subsistence farmer doesn't really contribute to anything or leave much of a mark for the future at all, and be ok with that too. All of these are just ways of surviving, and none of them seem particularly indefensible morally. You gotta do something to get by.

As for your link to Quora, that's a completely incomprehensible rant, just FYI.

Ok, try to make that argument. How is pouring the limited resources of very intelligent people into deriving information correlated with unreleased sales figures making the market that much more efficient to offset that cost? It's effectively the same thing as having them wiretap company executives, just much less efficient.

Just FYI, it was an explanation of the term 'social utility'.

Supposedly one early use of radio telegraphs were to mount them on speedboats and race out to meet freighters. This to give the stock traders a early insight into the cargo coming.