Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

Post by hnlmorg » Fri, Feb 27, 2026, 2:25 PM UTC

logicchains wrote: post #41

thiagoharry wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We let the market dictate how society's resources are allocated. And we see, as a result, how the market is actually not at all interested in the satisfaction and well-being of the people in society.

>the market is actually not at all interested in the satisfaction and well-being of the people in society. The biochem industry is extremely bad at creating things that increase the satisfaction and well-being of society; the vast majority of products are failures with few users. The reason tech companies make money is because they make things people actually want to use.

Post by sigwinch » Fri, Feb 27, 2026, 2:27 PM UTC

bonoboTP wrote: post #53

KellyCriterion wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The smartest people are going from Harvard et.al. into finance, adtech, investment banking, wallstreet. What they could achieve in spending their attention on real problem would be massive.

Finance and investment banking is about resource allocation. To get the stuff like agriculture innovation etc done, you need money. You need someone to look and say, this is worth investing money in. This is far from trivial. The investment firms try to predict what technology or company is going to make something profitable. This allocation task is very important. There are many ways to fail at producing anything us…

Post by direwolf20 » Fri, Feb 27, 2026, 2:32 PM UTC

HPsquared wrote: post #64

wittyusername wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I think when I see this is "this intelligence wasted on finance and ads." Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc? Not everything has to be perfectly efficient but it just saddens me to see all these great minds doing what, adversarially harvesting margin from the works of others?

Of all the PvP arenas, these are among the least bad. Military applications have barely got off the ground yet (so to speak).

Post by wat10000 » Fri, Feb 27, 2026, 2:36 PM UTC

logicchains wrote: post #45

ViscountPenguin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

Post by wat10000 » Fri, Feb 27, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

bumby wrote: post #25

paulluuk wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.