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Define your terms - what theory are you talking about? You said most financial services and economics is useless but seem to be taking about a specific part of

Define your terms - what theory are you talking about? You said most financial services and economics is useless but seem to be taking about a specific part of that world. Portfolio theory? Seriously? You’re clearly thinking that consumer retirement investing == financial services. Totally wrong. “ Like, 90% of economics and finance is absolute nonsense.” -you I disagree - you may be bitter from your experience but from where I sit this world falls apart without financial services in particular.

danielmarkbruce 2y ago
Not bitter, I love finance. The specific nonsensical theory I call out there. Those are course names (ie every business school has a course called something like those names). You can disagree, but you seem to have taken none of the courses... the vast majority of financial services are based on very basic financial theory developed 10 thousand years ago. I never said financial services are nonsense - the academic fields are largely nonsense. Respectfully - you have something like Gell-Mann amnesia. Not quite the same, but similar. It seems like you know just enough to be dangerous, maybe enjoy the shallow knowledge, but can't go deep enough to realize the massive amount of nonsense. It's kind of lame to appeal to authority, but go through all Warren Buffett's letters to the shareholders - he also calls out the nonsense.
- eduction 2y ago
  I don’t dispute that there is a lot of BS taught in business school and shoveled in economics. But the MBA pipeline is distinct from the actual financial services industry. There is a lot of basic lifting and moving in financial service that gets done by people who did not attend ivy league schools or get mbas or get massive year end bonuses and that has helped make the US economy particularly dynamic and resilient. Try spending time in specific industries and you will start to see entire ecosystems of financing. (Sometimes you will even see a message board.)
  - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
    At this point you are being disingenuous. Actually read comments if you are going to reply to them. The specifics of financing oil and gas are called out...It's not nonsense, but it's based on financial theory so elementary it's taught in the first couple weeks of 101. 10% of financial and economic theory (at most...) powers 99% of financial services. People (like me..) take entire degrees in this stuff and one class would have more than sufficed. That is absolutely not true in computer science, for example.
    - kelvinjps10 2y ago
      You could say that a single class of programming where is teached loops, variables, data structures is enough for most of the work in the industry as well.
      - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
        That's true - but if they take a class on networking or operating systems or distributed systems or (insert lots of courses here) they aren't being taught nonsense that doesn't work... and those disciplines mentioned are used to build the systems that applications run on top of, ie those areas are foundational to the overall system. In finance & economics, all the courses one doesn't need to take isn't material that they can just build on top of because of nice abstractions - they are nonsense that literally isn't used in industry... maybe they are akin to research done in software engineering rather than computer science...
        Pannoniae 2y ago
        Actually that's kinda true. In software, the vast majority (maybe the 90%) of things they teach and people learn are either snake oil, cargo culting or just suboptimal. I think it's true for many other fields, too.
  - nobodyandproud 2y ago
    > There is a lot of *basic lifting and moving * in financial service that gets done by people who did not attend ivy league I have no dog in this quarrel, but you seem to have agreed with the OP. It’s mostly all fundamental/basic knowledge.

danielmarkbruce 2y ago

Not bitter, I love finance. The specific nonsensical theory I call out there. Those are course names (ie every business school has a course called something like those names). You can disagree, but you seem to have taken none of the courses... the vast majority of financial services are based on very basic financial theory developed 10 thousand years ago. I never said financial services are nonsense - the academic fields are largely nonsense. Respectfully - you have something like Gell-Mann amnesia. Not quite the same, but similar. It seems like you know just enough to be dangerous, maybe enjoy the shallow knowledge, but can't go deep enough to realize the massive amount of nonsense. It's kind of lame to appeal to authority, but go through all Warren Buffett's letters to the shareholders - he also calls out the nonsense.

eduction 2y ago
I don’t dispute that there is a lot of BS taught in business school and shoveled in economics. But the MBA pipeline is distinct from the actual financial services industry. There is a lot of basic lifting and moving in financial service that gets done by people who did not attend ivy league schools or get mbas or get massive year end bonuses and that has helped make the US economy particularly dynamic and resilient. Try spending time in specific industries and you will start to see entire ecosystems of financing. (Sometimes you will even see a message board.)
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago
  At this point you are being disingenuous. Actually read comments if you are going to reply to them. The specifics of financing oil and gas are called out...It's not nonsense, but it's based on financial theory so elementary it's taught in the first couple weeks of 101. 10% of financial and economic theory (at most...) powers 99% of financial services. People (like me..) take entire degrees in this stuff and one class would have more than sufficed. That is absolutely not true in computer science, for example.
  - kelvinjps10 2y ago
    You could say that a single class of programming where is teached loops, variables, data structures is enough for most of the work in the industry as well.
    - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
      That's true - but if they take a class on networking or operating systems or distributed systems or (insert lots of courses here) they aren't being taught nonsense that doesn't work... and those disciplines mentioned are used to build the systems that applications run on top of, ie those areas are foundational to the overall system. In finance & economics, all the courses one doesn't need to take isn't material that they can just build on top of because of nice abstractions - they are nonsense that literally isn't used in industry... maybe they are akin to research done in software engineering rather than computer science...
      - Pannoniae 2y ago
        Actually that's kinda true. In software, the vast majority (maybe the 90%) of things they teach and people learn are either snake oil, cargo culting or just suboptimal. I think it's true for many other fields, too.
- nobodyandproud 2y ago
  > There is a lot of *basic lifting and moving * in financial service that gets done by people who did not attend ivy league I have no dog in this quarrel, but you seem to have agreed with the OP. It’s mostly all fundamental/basic knowledge.