I think we're probably roughly in alignment w.r.t. other forms of finance, but the market liquidity gained by a marginal HFT employee almost certainly isn't worth the marginal cost imo. Even in finance, you could do a lot better by expending that human capital into optimising the structure of the markets themselves (there's lots of research on how hideously inefficient the TSE is because of its coarse tick sizes, for example; but vested interests get in the way of fixing that).

While the pharmaceutical industry is large, the marginal researcher does still seem to have a pretty positive impact from an outside view.

The most positive use of human time probably looks something like antiwar advocacy, but I don't really think that most quants have the social skills for that tbh.

I'm bullish on the ai aging case though, regenerative medicine has a massive manpower issue, so even sub-ASI robotic labwork should be able to appreciably move the needle.

I have trouble seeing LLMs making meaningful progress on those frontiers without reaching ASI, but I'd be happy to be wrong.

I was quite enjoying it, but then the paywall hit me right in the middle of the chemical synthesis section.

I have no problem with you wanting to earn money from your work, but it's a bit odd to post an unreadable article to hn (odd enough that I assume it was by mistake?).

The biggest issue with the scheme is the fact that it was structured to explicitly favour media incumbents, and is therefore politically unpopular.