[SoftTalker]

Elsewhere, “quants” with PhDs in astrophysics collate historical data with information about geography, weather, stock prices, and ship movements, searching for opportunities to place stock market bets on global trade.

I know that this is just an inevitable/necessary part of a functioning market, but it somehow it also seems a little bit sad that this kind of human intellectual horsepower is spent on things like this. I could say the same thing about the smart people who spend their time doing things such as making social media more addictive.

[ravi-delia]

Theoretically market quants are pushing the market to the limit of available info, smoothing over inefficiencies and reallocating risk. In practice they absolutely are not doing that at all and it's all a staggering drain, but the concept is cool. Like futures trading is probably a net positive, though that's the exception.

[labcomputer]

Well... that's what happens when academia depends on poorly-paid grad student labor. They accept too many people into PhD programs (relative to the demand for PhDs in academia) for the cheap labor. The over-supply also makes it easier to exploit tenure-hungry assistant professors and adjuncts. It's how colleges have managed to make faculty costs go down (in real-dollar terms) for three decades.

Lots of PhDs end up in high paid jobs not because that's particularly what they want to do, but because they literally can't find a job in academia. The fact that finance and tech pay well is just a bonus.

[blitzar]

Elsewhere, “quants” with PhDs in astrophysics collate historical data with information about geography, weather, stock prices, and ship movements, searching for opportunities to place ads on mr beast videos.

[FredPret]

We should spend more horsepower on high-level resource allocation, not less.

[throwawaylinux]

We'll let the market be the judge of that.

[FredPret]

Could not agree more.

But my feeling is that there is far too much money sloshing around naively trusting in fortune 500 managements when owners ought to be much more proactive. There is room for more active ownership and capital management.