[yummyfajitas]

...we need to compute the value at risk so we know how much capital to set aside in case of defaults. Why in the world would I need that ? Well since....I can go on and on...

And if you went one step further, you'd have realized: "to reduce the risk of a bank failure and potentially saving thousands of jobs."

But to pretend that what I'm doing is on the same plane of someone say vaccinating a kid with malaria in the tropics...

Lets think about the guy vaccinating a kid to prevent malaria.

But lets think a few steps back. Rather than thinking about the guy with the needle, think about the guy in the lab coat. He's currently sitting in a lab somewhere, fucking around with gene assays in order to create antibodies. Why does he do this? Because some other guy might use the antibodies to stimulate an immune response to malaria parasites in rats. And the other guy might find out the first guy was wasting his time.

The vast majority of people who are trying to do exactly what you ask (creating a malaria vaccine) are "building things 'we don't need', throwing stuff at the wall and hoping something will stick."

And if you back up a couple steps more, you realize all this was only possible because someone built biologist tools (e.g. gene sequencing machines, bioinformatics software) which are neat and cool and bullet points on a CV and also completely useless to "real people".

[dxbydt]

Tremendously enjoyed your post, particularly the part about fucking around with gene assays. My wife is a physician, and sometimes I rile her by saying she is not helping real people because she is just a glorified hashmap. She does a lookup on the disease and returns a drug prescription. She says that's still better than fucking around with gene assays in a labcoat :) I'm completely familiar with your line of reasoning. Its just that the number of nodes needs to traverse from a styloot to a vaccine is significant. Its not zero. Most companies get around this by simply making large philanthropic donations from time to time. But you'll still agree that's not the same. Some of my classmates got their math & physics PhDs and then gave it all up and returned to India to feed the poor and work with the homeless. When I look at that and then look at the fact that I'm messing around with sobol sequences....it just irks me, that's all. I think that was the point of the article - dealing directly with the real world full of real people, and not via some long indirect causal mechanism.