Don't we already harvest more food than humans could ever eat, and have a huge pharmaceutical industry? I get what you're saying but these two examples seem counterproductive imho.

Which begs the question: what would actually be a good field to apply human potential towards? I agree that finance, sales and ads are very low on that list.

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ViscountPenguin 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would imagine that increasing crop yields would do social good primarily via decreasing the amount of cultivated farm land, especially since we're well past Jevons paradox territory with calorie intake I imagine.

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.

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cyberrock 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

>decreasing the amount of cultivated farm land

I have good news and bad news for you. Good news: we've known the solution to that for more than a century, which is to reduce livestock consumption, a cause which many smart people have dedicated their lives pushing vegetarian/vegan culture and producing alternatives. Bad news: from my point of view, the masses are not going to give up meat and eggs faster with each additional alternative meat.

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skirge 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

to stop war we need to stop being lazy, greedy and most important: envy, which is impossible.

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logicchains 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

From this outsider's point of view it's failed to have a positive impact; people nowadays are far less healthy and happy than they were half a century ago when the pharmaceutical industry barely existed.

	▲	wat10000 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Life expectancy in developed nations is years higher today than 50 years ago. Pharma has contributed to that with things like new vaccines, antibiotics, antivirals, and statins.

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vlovich123 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think energy is actually the most underserved sector, with maybe high tech manufacturing as a hidden second.

Just look at what happened when AI took off in the US and our ongoing struggle to get global warming under control - only China is taking a serious stab at this which is why they’re absorbing AI more effectively than we are.

Also semiconductor manufacturing has clearly gotten way too concentrated and there’s not enough experimentation with new designs (eg throwing more at existing DRAM designs instead of building new designs like in-RAM compute to shift the power and performance by an order of magnitude or 2 thereby easing the pressure of how much is built).

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bumby 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s been a few years since I looked deeply into it, but I think we produce enough to have everyone survive but not necessarily thrive. At the time, it came out to something like 1700 kcal per person. Even if we did have enough, the next problem is logistics of allocating that food to everyone who needs it.

	▲	maeln 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		A lot of food production worldwide is used by meat production, which is quite inefficient. It does generate some useful side product (manure), but also a lot of bad side product. In some places, almost every field is dedicated to meat production. Consuming less meat and shifting food production away from meat would be very good for the environment and instantly solve the issue of the amount of calorie produce. But as you pointed out, this is not the actual issue. Getting food to people who need it is almost entirely a political and logistical issue at this point. War (especially civil war), natural disaster, with local power stealing international aid, etc, are mostly the biggest responsible for hunger in the 21' century. We have the technology and logistics to accurately drop-ship huge amount of food in even the most remote places in the world, even when the local infrastructure is heavily damaged or inexistent. We cannot deal with local power decision to voluntarily starve a place.
	▲	wat10000 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		According to this, it’s more like 3,000kcal/person/day: https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-production#explore-d...