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That sounds as if you can jump into a field without spending 10-20 years of learning and do cutting-edge research. I'm not sure whether someone who has done qua

That sounds as if you can jump into a field without spending 10-20 years of learning and do cutting-edge research. I'm not sure whether someone who has done quant finance can make meaningful contributions to the actual science. So if your role ends up spending money and doing top-level management, why not just fund companies that do and stay in finance? [edit] To add one prominent example - it's doable, as Jeff Hawkins demonstrated. Founded Palm, made money, then created his own brain research lab. As far as I understand, the neurological community has not embraced his ideas with open arms, but they are at least intrigued by his universal computational model of the brain. So that's a pretty big accomplishment.

j7ake 4y ago
You’re overestimating the technical skills needed to do cancer research: there’s a reason why many wet labs allow high school students to come and help with research. It’s mostly grunt work and whatever technical skills can be learned by a high school student over a summer. I would venture to say the average Jane street worker has done more good for society than the average cancer researcher or Alzheimer’s researcher. For fusion research, the quantitative skills from many Jane Street people can easily transfer to make meaningful contributions to fusion research.
- uniqueuid 4y ago
  But that's not the interesting part, right? That would be like saying that tech is simply assembling prototypes. The really interesting decisions are the strategic ones that require both a high-level overview of the opportunity landscape and some foundational knowledge of its feasibility. Or am I mistaken and it's simply brute force trials?
  - j7ake 4y ago
    Yeah you’re right. My point is that the technical bar for entry is low, and can be attained maybe by spending one year in a top lab. You then skip the hazing ritual that is the PhD and postdoc and directly start your own small lab. Spend your money attending conferences to make connections and get yourself updated in the field. Hire technicians to help with your grunt work. Spend your days reading research papers, discussing science at conferences, and setting up new experiments.
    - mattkrause 4y ago
      The bar for doing some experiments, in an environment with tons of logistical, technical, and intellectual support, is indeed pretty low. A high school student could certainly learn to run a gel in a week or two; patching a neuron might take a few months.However, the physical "act" of collecting data, especially in the happy case where all of the conditions have been worked out and the results look "as expected", is a very small part of being a scientist. More often, you are trying something that hasn't been done before and you're getting results that don't quite make sense. Here, experience and background knowledge seem key, and I'm not sure that you'll pick up much of that in a year, even in a "top lab" because experiments are slow. On top of that, you'll need to learn how to design experiments and analyze/present their results in ways that your peers find convincing, which is in itself a non-trivial skill. All this presumes that you're even able to find your way into a "top lab", but that's not a foregone conclusion either: these places can be incredibly selective even among people with a decade of experience in the same field. Put another way, your answer assumes there's a lot of fat to trim in the PhD/postdoc stages. What is it and can it really be cut down by 90% as you propose?
      - j7ake 4y ago
        Long postdocs are a modern phenomenon due to the oversupply of biomedical researchers. Historically people did shorter PhDs and skipped postdocs. There are stories of old timers saying they got their faculty position based on just one or two papers, unthinkable these days. If you’re independently wealthy, you don’t need to go through the modem hazing ritual and you can start your own lab much earlier. I’m not saying you can start immediately and be an effective researcher, you will initially suck like everyone else. But you will have a better time learning how to fail if your career/livelihood is not on the line.
- geoalchimista 4y ago
  > It’s mostly grunt work and whatever technical skills can be learned by a high school student over a summer. Who do you think is supervising the high school student? Where does the idea for the project come from? Where does the money supporting the high school intern' experiments come from?
- arcturus17 4y ago
  So you can do break-through research after having done a little bit of wet work in a cancer research institute, as a 30-year old who has been coding quant systems for a decade, and then become equivalent to a PhD in the field? Or you can take your ~10M or whatever in earnings during a decade as an OCaml programmer at Jane Street and fund a cutting-edge cancer research lab? Are you reading yourself after you type?
- data_maan 4y ago
  What good has Jane Street done to a person living in Madagascar? This is just blatant Jane Street (and more generally, hedge fund) propaganda. Yes, you serve some role within the financial system, but you're not really relevant to society imminently and to non-western societies generally.
  - ChadNauseam 4y ago
    What good has cancer research done to a person living in Madagascar?
    - data_maan 4y ago
      So you've established: People in Madagascar don't get cancer.
      - harha 4y ago
        Nope, just no treatment (not fact checked of course, but it sounds likely that they wouldn't get top notch treatment that an average person say in Western Europe could expect)
      - shakow 4y ago
        Well, they don't get cutting edge treatment for sure.
      - orbifold 4y ago
        I think it is fair to say that most people discussing Madagascar here, have no conception of how it is like to live there.
      - selimthegrim 4y ago
        Well given the periwinkle was found there, not entirely without merit.
      - data_maan 4y ago
        It seems none of the people that posted here understood the intention of my comment: The parent comment by ChadNauseam implies that Madagascar citizens somehow would not benefit from cancer research (they would!), which could only be true if they don't get cancer. In my comment I pointed out this last end of this logical chain of conclusions to show how ridiculous the parents' post was.
- TrackerFF 4y ago
  > I would venture to say the average Jane street worker has done more good for society than the average cancer researcher or Alzheimer’s researcher. Might be one of the more arrogant things I've read. And I frequent WallStreetOasis.
  - j7ake 4y ago
    Are you up to date with the current state of Alzheimer’s research ? Much of it has been shown to be fabricated ie average alzheimer researcher has probably made zero impact. https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabricatio... Also I said the average researcher, meaning taken from the global population, ie not from a top institute. Jane Street is highly concentrated in talent that produce real results in the world. The average cancer researcher has probably done more good than the average trading firm worker though.
    - fiprofessor 4y ago
      It's wildly inaccurate to say that much of Alzheimer's research has been shown to be fabricated. The article you link to is about one person's work. Even though he is a very influential researcher, there must be at least thousands of people doing research on Alzheimer's disease, if not more.
  - pyb 4y ago
    I wonder if this is somewhat representative of what JS workers think, or not ?
- bglazer 4y ago
  I do cancer research. You're right, the technical skills for basic wet lab stuff are not hard to learn. The hard part of cancer research is not learning how to pipette, it's learning how to ask and investigate worthwhile questions. Experimental design is subtle and requires wide ranging knowledge of sources of biological and technical confounders. Growing cells might be easy, but do you know how to debug a fluorescence microscopy experiment; in fact, do you even know how to recognize that it needs to be debugged? This is stuff you can learn over the course of a few years in a phd program, but it takes longer to become a true expert. Finally, what do you investigate? Cancer? What tissue type, which cell type, which proteins, DNA structures, or RNA structures are most important and least understood? Just absorbing a small fraction of the literature so that you don't ask stupid or boring questions is a lifelong task.
data_maan 4y ago
I think Hawkin's work (including things done at Numenta, his company) is highly controversial in neuroscience. I have read some of the articles and claims and the biggest issues is that he produces a lot of vision papers, that contain no actionable models and thus ultimately are useless. So either he's withholding whatever concrete insight he found, or he hasn't found it yet - I believe the latter is more likely.
- andbberger 4y ago
  whatever you may think about his work, he founded redwood and they do incredible work
serioussecurity 4y ago
Hawkins is a notorious con artist with nothing to show for almost two decades of work.
- uniqueuid 4y ago
  I can't judge that from an outside perspective, but to be fair, having nothing to show for two decades of work is an intrinsic occupational risk of science.
  - adamsmith143 4y ago
    > I can't judge that from an outside perspective, but to be fair, having nothing to show for two decades of work is an intrinsic occupational risk of science. How? In today's academic environment you won't survive even a few years without publishable research results.
    - uniqueuid 4y ago
      Oh you can publish innumerable things whose content is nothing to show for, yet you publish something :)
mellavora 4y ago
> as if you can jump into a field without spending 10-20 years of learning and do cutting-edge research. I know multiple people who have done this. If you want a famous person, look at Paul Erdős. Always jumping into new areas of mathematics and solving problems at the cutting edge. Or, to get to the current subject, Taleb using his background as a trader to jump to a career in academia, where many consider(ed) his research cutting edge.
- pinerd3 4y ago
  I agree that a smart, ambitious person can become expert in more than one field in their life — but jumping to a new area of mathematics is on an entirely lower level than jumping from algorithmic finance to cutting edge biomedical, especially at the time Erdős was working.
  - kyawzazaw 4y ago
    There are a few people who did a complete switch to study rare diseases with no background. Sonia Vallabh, and her husband, Eric Minikel are the strongest examples of these type of highly smart and ambitious people. > Sonia Vallabh ... had just graduated from Harvard Law School. > [Eric Minikel] ... had recently gotten a degree in urban planning from M.I.T https://www.broadinstitute.org/bios/sonia-vallabh https://www.broadinstitute.org/bios/sonia-vallabh https://www.broadinstitute.org/bios/eric-minikel https://www.broadinstitute.org/bios/eric-minikel https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/health/rare-diseases.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/health/rare-diseases.html
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  >Taleb He already had a PhD so it's not surprising he was able to enter Academia. But outside his books I'm not aware of anyone talking about his Research much.
  - matred 4y ago
    I’ve never see his research brought up amongst quants or traders, but I like his writing. Does anyone who works in this field know of it being currently applied?
adamsmith143 4y ago
Jeff Hawkins probably also had a several Hundred Million Dollar payout. That's in a totally different class than a Quant who cashes out at 30 with MAYBE $10M in the bank.

j7ake 4y ago

You’re overestimating the technical skills needed to do cancer research: there’s a reason why many wet labs allow high school students to come and help with research. It’s mostly grunt work and whatever technical skills can be learned by a high school student over a summer. I would venture to say the average Jane street worker has done more good for society than the average cancer researcher or Alzheimer’s researcher. For fusion research, the quantitative skills from many Jane Street people can easily transfer to make meaningful contributions to fusion research.

uniqueuid 4y ago
But that's not the interesting part, right? That would be like saying that tech is simply assembling prototypes. The really interesting decisions are the strategic ones that require both a high-level overview of the opportunity landscape and some foundational knowledge of its feasibility. Or am I mistaken and it's simply brute force trials?
- j7ake 4y ago
  Yeah you’re right. My point is that the technical bar for entry is low, and can be attained maybe by spending one year in a top lab. You then skip the hazing ritual that is the PhD and postdoc and directly start your own small lab. Spend your money attending conferences to make connections and get yourself updated in the field. Hire technicians to help with your grunt work. Spend your days reading research papers, discussing science at conferences, and setting up new experiments.
  - mattkrause 4y ago
    The bar for doing some experiments, in an environment with tons of logistical, technical, and intellectual support, is indeed pretty low. A high school student could certainly learn to run a gel in a week or two; patching a neuron might take a few months.However, the physical "act" of collecting data, especially in the happy case where all of the conditions have been worked out and the results look "as expected", is a very small part of being a scientist. More often, you are trying something that hasn't been done before and you're getting results that don't quite make sense. Here, experience and background knowledge seem key, and I'm not sure that you'll pick up much of that in a year, even in a "top lab" because experiments are slow. On top of that, you'll need to learn how to design experiments and analyze/present their results in ways that your peers find convincing, which is in itself a non-trivial skill. All this presumes that you're even able to find your way into a "top lab", but that's not a foregone conclusion either: these places can be incredibly selective even among people with a decade of experience in the same field. Put another way, your answer assumes there's a lot of fat to trim in the PhD/postdoc stages. What is it and can it really be cut down by 90% as you propose?
    - j7ake 4y ago
      Long postdocs are a modern phenomenon due to the oversupply of biomedical researchers. Historically people did shorter PhDs and skipped postdocs. There are stories of old timers saying they got their faculty position based on just one or two papers, unthinkable these days. If you’re independently wealthy, you don’t need to go through the modem hazing ritual and you can start your own lab much earlier. I’m not saying you can start immediately and be an effective researcher, you will initially suck like everyone else. But you will have a better time learning how to fail if your career/livelihood is not on the line.
geoalchimista 4y ago
> It’s mostly grunt work and whatever technical skills can be learned by a high school student over a summer. Who do you think is supervising the high school student? Where does the idea for the project come from? Where does the money supporting the high school intern' experiments come from?
arcturus17 4y ago
So you can do break-through research after having done a little bit of wet work in a cancer research institute, as a 30-year old who has been coding quant systems for a decade, and then become equivalent to a PhD in the field? Or you can take your ~10M or whatever in earnings during a decade as an OCaml programmer at Jane Street and fund a cutting-edge cancer research lab? Are you reading yourself after you type?
data_maan 4y ago
What good has Jane Street done to a person living in Madagascar? This is just blatant Jane Street (and more generally, hedge fund) propaganda. Yes, you serve some role within the financial system, but you're not really relevant to society imminently and to non-western societies generally.
- ChadNauseam 4y ago
  What good has cancer research done to a person living in Madagascar?
  - data_maan 4y ago
    So you've established: People in Madagascar don't get cancer.
    - harha 4y ago
      Nope, just no treatment (not fact checked of course, but it sounds likely that they wouldn't get top notch treatment that an average person say in Western Europe could expect)
    - shakow 4y ago
      Well, they don't get cutting edge treatment for sure.
    - orbifold 4y ago
      I think it is fair to say that most people discussing Madagascar here, have no conception of how it is like to live there.
    - selimthegrim 4y ago
      Well given the periwinkle was found there, not entirely without merit.
    - data_maan 4y ago
      It seems none of the people that posted here understood the intention of my comment: The parent comment by ChadNauseam implies that Madagascar citizens somehow would not benefit from cancer research (they would!), which could only be true if they don't get cancer. In my comment I pointed out this last end of this logical chain of conclusions to show how ridiculous the parents' post was.
TrackerFF 4y ago
> I would venture to say the average Jane street worker has done more good for society than the average cancer researcher or Alzheimer’s researcher. Might be one of the more arrogant things I've read. And I frequent WallStreetOasis.
- j7ake 4y ago
  Are you up to date with the current state of Alzheimer’s research ? Much of it has been shown to be fabricated ie average alzheimer researcher has probably made zero impact. https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabricatio... Also I said the average researcher, meaning taken from the global population, ie not from a top institute. Jane Street is highly concentrated in talent that produce real results in the world. The average cancer researcher has probably done more good than the average trading firm worker though.
  - fiprofessor 4y ago
    It's wildly inaccurate to say that much of Alzheimer's research has been shown to be fabricated. The article you link to is about one person's work. Even though he is a very influential researcher, there must be at least thousands of people doing research on Alzheimer's disease, if not more.
- pyb 4y ago
  I wonder if this is somewhat representative of what JS workers think, or not ?
bglazer 4y ago
I do cancer research. You're right, the technical skills for basic wet lab stuff are not hard to learn. The hard part of cancer research is not learning how to pipette, it's learning how to ask and investigate worthwhile questions. Experimental design is subtle and requires wide ranging knowledge of sources of biological and technical confounders. Growing cells might be easy, but do you know how to debug a fluorescence microscopy experiment; in fact, do you even know how to recognize that it needs to be debugged? This is stuff you can learn over the course of a few years in a phd program, but it takes longer to become a true expert. Finally, what do you investigate? Cancer? What tissue type, which cell type, which proteins, DNA structures, or RNA structures are most important and least understood? Just absorbing a small fraction of the literature so that you don't ask stupid or boring questions is a lifelong task.

data_maan 4y ago

I think Hawkin's work (including things done at Numenta, his company) is highly controversial in neuroscience. I have read some of the articles and claims and the biggest issues is that he produces a lot of vision papers, that contain no actionable models and thus ultimately are useless. So either he's withholding whatever concrete insight he found, or he hasn't found it yet - I believe the latter is more likely.

andbberger 4y ago
whatever you may think about his work, he founded redwood and they do incredible work

serioussecurity 4y ago

Hawkins is a notorious con artist with nothing to show for almost two decades of work.

uniqueuid 4y ago
I can't judge that from an outside perspective, but to be fair, having nothing to show for two decades of work is an intrinsic occupational risk of science.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  > I can't judge that from an outside perspective, but to be fair, having nothing to show for two decades of work is an intrinsic occupational risk of science. How? In today's academic environment you won't survive even a few years without publishable research results.
  - uniqueuid 4y ago
    Oh you can publish innumerable things whose content is nothing to show for, yet you publish something :)

mellavora 4y ago

> as if you can jump into a field without spending 10-20 years of learning and do cutting-edge research. I know multiple people who have done this. If you want a famous person, look at Paul Erdős. Always jumping into new areas of mathematics and solving problems at the cutting edge. Or, to get to the current subject, Taleb using his background as a trader to jump to a career in academia, where many consider(ed) his research cutting edge.

pinerd3 4y ago
I agree that a smart, ambitious person can become expert in more than one field in their life — but jumping to a new area of mathematics is on an entirely lower level than jumping from algorithmic finance to cutting edge biomedical, especially at the time Erdős was working.
- kyawzazaw 4y ago
  There are a few people who did a complete switch to study rare diseases with no background. Sonia Vallabh, and her husband, Eric Minikel are the strongest examples of these type of highly smart and ambitious people. > Sonia Vallabh ... had just graduated from Harvard Law School. > [Eric Minikel] ... had recently gotten a degree in urban planning from M.I.T https://www.broadinstitute.org/bios/sonia-vallabh https://www.broadinstitute.org/bios/sonia-vallabh https://www.broadinstitute.org/bios/eric-minikel https://www.broadinstitute.org/bios/eric-minikel https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/health/rare-diseases.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/health/rare-diseases.html
adamsmith143 4y ago
>Taleb He already had a PhD so it's not surprising he was able to enter Academia. But outside his books I'm not aware of anyone talking about his Research much.
- matred 4y ago
  I’ve never see his research brought up amongst quants or traders, but I like his writing. Does anyone who works in this field know of it being currently applied?

adamsmith143 4y ago

Jeff Hawkins probably also had a several Hundred Million Dollar payout. That's in a totally different class than a Quant who cashes out at 30 with MAYBE $10M in the bank.