>As a result, it attracts people who should be out there curing cancer, developing new technologies, researching fundamental sciences, and so forth.
I'm in HFT, and I'm confident in speaking not only for myself when I say that if HFT didn't exist I'd be doing something else fun and profitable (e.g. investment banking, non-high-frequency trading), not something boring and/or poorly compensated like medical research. People on this site have no right to tell other people how to live their lives, especially when they themselves probably work on something like ad-tech which is arguably actively very harmful to democracy and society.
I'm in HFT, and I'm confident in speaking not only for myself when I say that if HFT didn't exist I'd be doing something else fun and profitable (e.g. investment banking, non-high-frequency trading), not something boring and/or poorly compensated like medical research. People on this site have no right to tell other people how to live their lives, especially when they themselves probably work on something like ad-tech which is arguably actively very harmful to democracy and society.