[paulluuk]

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.

[ViscountPenguin]

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.

[cyberrock]

>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.

[aziaziazi]

Thanks for that.

> each additional alternative meat

As a side note, for many vegetarians and vegans, “alternative meats” actually mean hundreds of different legumes (fresh, dried, milled, split, fermented…) and other delicious plant foods. They’re packed with macro and micronutrients that can replace[0] those found in meat.

Taste is a bit trickier: nothing will ever taste more like flesh than… flesh — and taste is subjective anyway. Meat substitutes can be tasty, but they’re not the same. Which brings me to this:

the masses are not going to give up meat and eggs

That’s true. At first, giving up meat just to eat “fake meat” can feel like a downgrade. But the real key to change is curiosity. There are so many ingredients and recipes to explore. Classic egg-and-milk pancakes are great — but why eat the same thing all the time when there are so many combinations of plant milks and oils to try? I used to love pig and chicken. Now my favorite staples are fried tempeh and lentils with nutritional yeast.

0: I like to joke that meat replace beans, you get the idea. Fun fact: meat is viande in French, from latin vivenda which mean "which sustains life" and used to describe any edible. I think english meat have a similar etymology from mete.

[skirge]

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

[codechicago277]

It isn’t all or nothing. The Cuban Missile Crisis should have led to war, but we stopped it. World War I never should have happened. The right answer is to acknowledge envy, greed, and laziness but find solutions to work around these problems.

[logicchains]

>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]

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.

[vlovich123]

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).

[bumby]

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]

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.

[bumby]

>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.

The problem with this statement is that it implies all calories are equal in terms of nutrition. Meat is very protein dense compared to most plant foods and that can be important. That’s not to say it’s impossible to live healthily on only plants, but it’s not as simple as swapping calorie sources.

[maeln]

Fun fact, some plant like Bulgur or Lentil are almost as calorie dense as some meat. But to my understanding, they lack “complex” protein or something ? Regardless, your don't have to cut meat entirely. The issue is that we consuming way too much of it. In many developed country, eating meat every day is very common. Eating meat once or twice a week is enough to get all the right nutrient and not having deficiency in things like B12.

[bumby]

They lack all the essential amino acids, but you can easily circumvent that by combining sources. People have been doing so with combinations like rice and beans for generations. But the question is whether the calories cited come from enough variety to meet those nutritional needs. Again, all calories aren’t created equal.

I don’t disagree that western societies probably eat too much meat. But that is the trend of any burgeoning middle class, and it’s doubtful it will change.

[wat10000]

According to this, it’s more like 3,000kcal/person/day: https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-production#explore-d...

[bumby]

Where are you seeing that value in the link?

The average per capita is closer to 2,600 kcal/day. Not sure how that breaks down when normalized by the individual country population. It also doesn't include waste. In the US at least, waste is near 40%.

[wat10000]

At the top, under FOOD, select "All food." In the country list, select "World." Above the map, click "Line." Finally, mouse over the graph to see the values. The latest value they have is for 2023 and shows 3,005.52kcal/day. Awful lot of significant figures there....