There’s a pretty narrow band of intelligences in quant: any dumber and you can’t make 400k a year playing games for children, any smarter and you start to be able to make 400k a year curing disease or building a reusable rocket or any number of other actually interesting jobs.
> any smarter and you start to be able to make 400k a year curing disease or building a reusable rocket or any number of other actually interesting jobs.
A co-founder of something like Jane Street must be making a great deal more than $400k/year. Its probably small change for him.
You cannot make that much money doing those "interesting jobs". You might by financing and employing the people doing them.
A smart person going into finance will definitely make a lot more money than that same person going into another field. Going into finance from an "interesting" field has made a lot people rich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons
I interpreted the comment as saying someone sufficiently smart would really that maximizing income isn't the optimal path in life, and instead would apply their brains towards higher pursuits. But perhaps I'm wrong.
I do agree that maximising income is not the optimal path. I sacrificed a lot of income for time with my kids and it was definitely the right decision.
It's pretty sad that this is something that many people consider "wrong".
There is always some sort of nonsense about being able to do more with money because it gives you power or something like that.
And of course, we keep hearing "greed is good". We are very fortunate that some people could see beyond that in the past because we are resting on their financial "sacrifice". Thankfully there are still people who still think that way today, but it is always infuriating to hear people pretend some are stupid for not choosing the path that would maximize their earnings.
I think it is a sort of projection from "small minded" people who cannot see anything beyond what they would do, precisely because they are intellectually limited and thus cannot properly reason about those "issues".
Man can we do sway with the notion that competence in one area translates to another?
Being able to identify market arbitrage has little to do with biology and rocket science, and smart people are already working on such problems with the limitations of current fields well known. Throwing "smart” people at solving cancer isn't going to magically solve cancer.
What's with the anti-intellectualism? Not having people work on cancer definitely isn't going to solve it, and given the choice, we probably want smart people working on cancer vs having dumb people do it. It might take a decade for someone to go back to school and retrain to a different field, but if that's what they want to do, who are we to stop them?
it's not even about intelligence as much as it is about the background of these people. A lot of them are gifted kids coming out of academic households, prep schools and ivy league colleges and quite a few are on the spectrum.
When people were confused why Sam Bankman Fried behaved as stupidly as he did and thought this was all an act, no they genuinely are like overgrown kids who don't know what guile is, they couldn't survive in a rough neighborhood of New York let alone deal with South Sudanese arms dealers.
I think it is? I have an uncle who made his career in it, he only started hitting 400k+ when he hit the director and C suite level. Meanwhile I started making 400 when I was 28 and that’s considered late for SWEs - it’s less than what Jane Street pays out of college.
If we're going to talk about it in terms like these, what does it say about the evolution of this our own field since that was colonized by finance beginning around 2000?
Smart people can be deceived too. Without devolving the conversation into semantics, Garry Kasparov is also someone we would consider to be “smart” by many definitions.
Wow, gotta admire the epic ambition of this conspiracy theory, they just went for it :)
> The new chronology is a pseudohistorical theory proposed by Anatoly Fomenko who argues that events of antiquity generally attributed to the ancient civilizations of Rome, Greece and Egypt actually occurred during the Middle Ages, more than a thousand years later.
> The theory further proposes that world history prior to AD 1600 has been widely falsified to suit the interests of a number of different conspirators, including the Vatican, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Russian House of Romanov, all working to obscure the "true" history of the world centered around a global empire called the "Russian Horde".
> The lawyers accused authorities of selectively prosecuting two Black men, even though support also came from Granieri and Garry Kasparov, the chess champion and prominent Russian dissident. The US hasn’t accused either of them of wrongdoing.