[graemep]

> 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

[jghn]

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.

[graemep]

Did not read that way to me.

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.

[seec]

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".

[PaulHoule]

You might get paid $100M from Meta to not work on LLMs for OpenAI!

[raverbashing]

Yes, a co-founder. Not your average quant

[graemep]

I am pretty sure the average quant also makes a multiple of what the average person in something like science or engineering research.