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The greatest tragedy is we have 50 years of lost geniuses doing Quant work for Wallstreet instead of making scientific breakthroughs.
by ngold 7y ago
The greatest tragedy is we have 50 years of lost geniuses doing Quant work for Wallstreet instead of making scientific breakthroughs.
- jlawson 7y agoBeing fair, efficient allocation of capital is important. it creates wealth, which improves human life. There are definitely lots of bulshit jobs out there, but I wouldn't call quants among the highest tier in terms of waste of human talent. I'd probably look at adtech for that.
- Super_Jambo 7y agoThis would make sense if our markets were optimising for something useful other than how to extract wealth from workers & consumers whilst providing as little as possible in return. Practically everything on this site is about moats & branding. Of waves of VC money swamping an ingrained industry with the hope of carving out a monopoly. Of google smashing existing competitive markets giving away a better product for 'free' in order to have better surveillance of phools so google can sell their spending. None of this is "efficient allocation of capital". Unless your goal is wealth concentration and the destruction of democratic liberal society. We need a cultural change to lauding regulation that enforces competition in our markets and politics. Otherwise we're on a rapid track to feudalism.
- candiodari 7y agoFortunately, that's not all of it, it's a circle: markets optimize production and take from workers workers enjoy what markets provide and optimize the production and specifically production value of human work, taking from those who are producing production optimizes what markets will sell and take from them. And in practice it's 100000x more complex than this, mostly because such complexity is necessary.
- 0xferruccio 7y agoAdtech, aka predicting what people will like and driving consumption (allocation of resources) improves human life too, for the same reason.