Their argument was a (totally defensible IMHO) personal expression of disappointment about all the brain work going into something whose impact seems to have peaked (in that those who want it already have it, and the rest of us don't have a problem it can solve).

Sure, Facebook is a utility to millions or even billions of people, but so is electricity. I think the analogy is if thousands of brilliant engineers were working for a fossil-fuel power company - it would be a natural reaction to say "Gee I wish all those boffins were working on renewable energy instead".

You might not agree with it, but it is a legitimate sentiment.

This really disappoints me. Sure, somebody needs to work in Finance for the sake of liquidity and other things I don't understand. But, 35% or so of my social group that are pursuing degrees in Physics are headed to Finance instead of research. I'd much rather seem them expand human knowledge than profit and live an easy life.

My perspective is that of a Junior CS & Physics major reaching towards grad school and some sort of research be it academia or elsewhere.

Every cloud has a silver lining, and this one is as bright as it gets. Until the rise of e.g. finance and actuarial science, getting a physics or math degree meant just going into academia. Now, with more demand for math or physics majors, there will be more demand for physics or math professors, which ultimately means more money going into math and physics research.

The existence of the medical and legal professions contributes vastly to the funding of schools of medicine and law, and this is no different. It's good, not bad, that there are other things you can do with a degree in advanced mathematics besides "teach grad students advanced mathematics and vie for increasingly-scarce federal grant money".

>I'd much rather seem them expand human knowledge than profit and live an easy life.

It's too bad we don't live in a country full of self-sacrificing saints, huh?

The "other" option isn't dusty academia and obscure research anymore. It also doesn't involve being a self-sacrificing saint and giving up any chance of ever having a nice car, though finance may still pay better in some cases than a high-math-content tech career.

If people want to pursue money, who are you to judge?

See, I don't think you quite get how much this sentiment pisses me off. I'm 19. I just got a bachelor's in physics. I've done research in a bunch of fields. And I'm going into graduate school next year.

People who think I'm somehow obligated to pursue anything beyond money can go blow a goat. Am I? You're goddamn right I am. I'm looking at tenure track or something similar because I love the people in academia, and because I love the work that I do. I love the people in academia because they don't think like this. They aren't generally judgmental pricks who will fault someone for pursuing their own interests. "generally".

I've dealt with so much shit from people who treat me like some sort of fucking alien for being good at goddamn math. Every-fucking-body else in this fucking country is more self-centered than a gyroscope. If I could reach you, right now, I'd strangle you. Seriously. God-fucking-damnit.

It's bad enough that I get to watch the ivory tower crumble around me. It's worse when people act like I'm obligated to live there.

In conclusion, go fuck yourself. You have no ground to stand on being 'disappointed' in me or any of my peers.

But "finance" means theft these days. It's only wildly profitable because our economic/justice system is fundamentally flawed and nobody is allowed to stop playing.

That would be disappointing to see a useful person seduced by. Not because your skills make you a national resource or anything, but because the job is a net negative to society. We'd be better off if you took up mugging.

'tis the voters' fault, though, isn't it? The quants didn't ask for the system to be the way it is.

If anything, they, by exploiting this flaw, act to expose it, making it more visible and more likely to be fixed. Imagine if more grad students did this. You'd drive the stock market to collapse so many times -- at least in theory, 'cuz you're basically draining it like a pool, and it's a finite pool -- the government would be -forced- to give up on its newfound policy of Too Big to Fail.

Conversely, the fact that students continue to enter grad school despite the skyrocketing financial inadvisability therein, this only serves to swell what is apparently a labor excess even further. If universities had to compete for grad students on price, stipends would increase! Those who enter grad school out of some sense of altruism actually do their fellow students a disservice.

...so, having read that, what the fuck am I doing, you ask? Well, I'm just avoiding people I can't stand to be around. I like professors; I hate managers. My perceived-value-of-research is skewed. As an added bonus academics posess a level of freedom on par with the super-rich; if some University wants you to immigrate to a country in order to do research, you're waived right in. A PhD carries the sort of international mobility that's I think is kind of useful having been born in a sinking ship. In America it's called the O-1, but most countries have an analog. Paul Erdos was one of the only people who could cross the Iron Curtain unscathed. My aunt and uncle, who inspired me to go into physics, worked whatever hours they felt like and could wear t-shirts and sandals to work -- they were physicists working for the US Navy.

Not the voters. Voting can't fix anything because politicians can't be held to their campaign promises.

But it is the citizens' fault in that we don't do something about the existing laws that cover this malfeasance that aren't being used to stop it, or more importantly, about how voting doesn't work.

> If anything, they, by exploiting this flaw, act to expose it, making it more visible and more likely to be fixed.

That line of reasoning is only valid if those same quants would accept me emptying out their bank accounts by exploiting some bank vulnerability. (Such as your birthday and mother's maiden name always being used as the master identity check.)

> the government would be -forced- to give up on its newfound policy of Too Big to Fail.

Reality based government. Sigh. That would be nice. I thought they always had that policy where banks were concerned though?

> Imagine if more grad students did this.

If they were trying to bring it down, like exploiting a security flaw to get it fixed, it would only take one.

> academics posess a level of freedom on par with the super-rich; if some University wants you to immigrate to a country in order to do research, you're waived right in.

Good point, freedom and a license for eccentricity in one package. Very helpful in a world quickly stuffing air-travelers into terrorist/not-terrorist boxes based on your sense of humor inside the airport, etc.

> A PhD carries the sort of international mobility that's I think is kind of useful having been born in a sinking ship.

Makes me think of the Titanic, too big to sink!

Got any idea where to go? Start a hacker/scientist enclave in an abandoned mine?

The reason for this is primarily that there are simply not enough jobs right now for them in academia.

When I was an idealistic undergrad physics major I honestly never once thought about the job market. I assumed that you'd just go get your PhD and you'd become a physics professor, sort of like going to med school and getting a job as a doctor. You'd follow all of the steps and you'd be set...

Now being on the verge of finishing my PhD, I have a very different perspective and am fortunately in a decent position with employment options. Some of my friends are only now scrambling to make sense of their options.

Are there enough research positions to employ the majority of current physics and math students? I doubt it.

If you choose Finance as your desired profession, and Finance sees physics and math as a good source of new talent, then it's very rational to choose a physics or math major to get into Finance. As pointed out in a sibling comment, upside to physics and math departments is demand that wouldn't otherwise be there.

While markets and liquidity are helpful to the world the finance workers don't deserve credit for it - they're just workers in someone else's system for one, and usually predators at that.

Running trading algorithms would be pretty pants, but managing risk is not quite so ignoble.

What?

scut work: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/scut+work Noun 1. scut work - trivial, unrewarding, tedious, dirty, and disagreeable chores; "the hospital hired him to do scut work" shitwork chore, job, task - a specific piece of work required to be done as a duty or for a specific fee; "estimates of the city's loss on that job ranged as high as a million dollars"; "the job of repairing the engine took several hours"; "the endless task of classifying the samples"; "the farmer's morning chores"

Your friends are smart enough to know that grad school in Physics is a blackhole. Once you finish the PhD, it becomes an endless round of hunting for poorly pair post-doc jobs.

Facebook has an order of magnitude less than just about any other similarly sized organization. It's bigger than Wikipedia, though.

* Made up number.

In fact, there are billions of users that don't have access to Facebook but would benefit greatly from it. Many of these potential users have 1/2G mobile phones, with little or no access to a PC. Much of what Facebook needs to do to achieve growth targets will be extending it's platform to these users by creating a consumable experience on such technically limited devices. That takes innovation.

Those were by no means "new inventions", it has all been there before on the web just on a different scale.. and now the non-techs are catching up and celebrating all the "great, new technology".

But the last truly revolutionary inventions and "paradigm shifts" certainly did not happen during the last 5-10 years and yes, on the whole the web IS pretty stale IMHO - and I dare to say you can see just how stale it really is by how much every new "genius" website gets praised and hyped as if it was an invention like electricity and just lifted us from the dark ages into the future.

As far as I can tell, what is really useful and really hard about maintaining and extending Facebook is that Facebook presents all the facilities of the Internet without the factors which tend to make these facilities feel "stale" in their 'native' form.

Facebook presents the equivalent of blogs, websites and emails in an appropriately filtered form. Their job is the job of a good host at a good party - keeping the conversation going without being visible oneself. And thus Facebook keeping its algorithms current is a very hard but fairly invisible job (the visible stuff is so simple a competent php programmer could do it in a month).

While exchanging data over the internet is obviously nothing new, having large organizations provide easy programmable access to their private databases was somewhat revolutionary. The whole App craze was born out of being able to create new interfaces to existing services, thanks to Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 was nothing new from a technical perspective, but it was a revolutionary social shift.

You could do a lot if not all of that before as a tech and not-so-much tech but chances were that you did not. "Blog" made it hip and cool for everyone to write a lot about usually not a lot - but if you wanted to have a website you could very well do so before.

I assume you mean RSS and what followed the blogs back then - but this was not really the main idea of Web 2.0. Web services were happening at the same time but they are not "the" web 2.0, in my opinion.

Civil dissent overthrows governments. Ubiquitous communication methods certainly help organise civil dissent - but let's not forget that the French in 1789 managed it with pamphlets and soapboxes.

Also Facebook sucks privacy-wise. You write something and everyone sees it. You don't want your police and ruling-party friends see your pics at a protest and criticizing your government.

When people are already on the streets - then its on Facebook. Which is an effect not a cause.

I was just down at FB headquarters last week. Great space. Tons of smart people. Tons. But... I used to be a big believer in FB, but after I started developing apps on their platform, I just started seeing things that I didn't like. You could log into one of our servers, flip on the logging, and just watch all kinds of crap from people I had no connection to scroll by. Besides the fact that most of it was pointless, mindless, drivel (I was saddened by humanity at this point), the fact that this was a 'workaround' around FB's privacy - I dunno, it didn't sit with me well.

I haven't personally used FB in a while - over a year - and yet when I glance at my fiancé's wall, god, the most ridiculous crap is on there and it's consistent. I asked her "jesus, does anyone have a fucking life..?!".

But beyond that, I just feel like FB is a talent vortex. I went around last week and met so many smart, excited people, yet, I felt they were just suckers. Sure, they're all going to be rich, no doubt about that. And maybe, some will leave to actually start revolutionary companies. But the fact that they're all there coding away on ways to make me the ad or figuring out more efficient ways to share my information (even if I specifically have said not to) - to me, it just seems a waste. It's great for Zuck because, after all, FB owns the copyright to so much of the things that are 'shared'. But it's not great for everyone else. It's not a 'social revolution', it's just about money and, really, conning it out of people in ways they don't understand (yet, ever?).

Apparently, my aversion to advertising is so strong that FB doesn't even put any on my page.

He was aghast.

He ran down a list of current commercials for popular products, ones that he had been paying attention to, nothing.

We went to his Facebook page and his was full of advertisements, mine? Not a one.

"How was this possible? I'm starting to have doubts about the effectiveness of an ad campaign?"

It was then that we both realized that FB and Google are almost entirely ad supported and I must be a very bizarre outlier, never to be used as a benchmark for ad effectiveness.

The truth is, Facebook obviously provides some value, since people use it. But because of the sheer number of users using it, the value it provides is multiplied by a lot. The overall value to the world is huge, simply because so many people derive value from it.

I do agree that we hear more about FB because it's highly visible. My friend once told me that a startup that could make the world a whole lot better, is to create something that improves traffic conditions by 10%. Especially in countries with heavy traffic, this would literally save millions of hours for people. But it's not a "sexy" field, so it's doubtful anyone would ever hear about it.

P.S. Sorry to hear about your mother, hope she's doing well.

For instance they could put traffic info on everybody's page (with option to disable, of course), that would indicate the probability of encountering congestion on their usual travel routes in the next few hours. People could then use this info to plan their journeys better and thus relieve the strain on the roads. Since 'everyone' has Facebook and checks it multiple times per day, the service would have massive reach from the onset.

It's also big enough to sign deals like integrating FB into the cars themselves. Imagine buying a car that would read out your FB voicemail or wall posts as you drive along, voice controlled. If it wasn't something big like FB, the technology could be there but people wouldn't care.

My family's found that to be true. I grew up in San Diego but all the rest of my extended family lives abroad and FB's been a huge boon. It's way richer than email and more convenient than phone or IM.

I asked if he wanted any apps or movies. He said those would be nice, but he needed email and Facebook.

(Your estimate of their cash impact is mostly correct, though: $2B in revenues for Facebook, http://schoolcenter.k12albemarle.org/education/components/la...; claims to serve ~12.000 kids in a county on ~$145M requested budget, and I could see a city having ten times as many kids.)