Comment by auntienomen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by auntienomen | Hacker News Reader

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I can't speak for throwawaymath, but the people I knew who went there generally were academics who had already done great things or from whom great things were expected. I don't have much use for the term genius, unless we're talking about Grothendieck or Witten. But yes, we're talking about people who stood out among the crowds of extraordinarily smart people in top tier academia, and who'd actually managed to _do something_ with their intelligence.

I think it's fair to say they were generally recruited via social networks. They knew what RenTec was, they knew someone who worked there (maybe an old grad school colleague or a former student), and when they reached out, RenTec already knew who they were. I don't know of anyone who went there who didn't already have a reputation in academia.

So contrary to astazangasta's original claims, they do seem to me to have something of a monopoly on brains. There are other smart people at other firms, but I don't know of any other place that has such a concentration. (Aside from Jeff Dean's office, I suppose. ;)

I'm not one of those people that have a moral objection to making money, or holds to crazy conspiracy theories about hedge funds, or anything like that. But it does seem kind of sad when you lay it out like that.

We do have rather interesting incentives in our society to induce so many talented people to do essentially zero-sum game trading instead of science or math.

Commercial work will always pay better than academia. Roles like trader/quant where your value is measurable & portable will always pay better than being a drone in a big machine like Google. If anything, front office finance roles aren't underpaid: people with similar skill sets are underpaid elsewhere.

I don't work in trading anymore, so I'm not talking my book here. Trading is zero-sum at a transactional level, but has knock on benefits beyond profit and loss:

-Making it easy for companies to raise capital through IPOs or offerings (without a robust secondary market for securities, people will be less likely to invest)

-In commodities: Letting businesses bear the risks they want and insure against the ones that aren't their core business

-Liquid markets let real people trade in and out of investments without friction at fair prices

-Providing accurate price signals to other businesses and the broader economy

So I don't think I was saving the whales, but I don't think it was wasteful, either.

Also, as a mildly clever OCD math guy who's semi-good at writing fast C++ code, I don't think I would have been curing cancer anyway.

ETA: At least in the case of HFT, if you accept that markets need intermediaries of some sort, it seems more efficient to have a few dozen tech/math guys do the same job thousands of guys in mesh vests were doing years ago, and cheaper.

I knew, or at least knew of, some of the vest guys as fathers of people I grew up with. As in any group it’s a mixed bag, but I feel pretty confident that none of them were missing their true calling in pushing forward the boundaries of our understanding of hidden markov models or getting speech recognition to work. We’ve used those kind of resources to free up people to, I don’t know sell whole life insurance policies or something. I’m sure there’s a sense it which it is efficient, like I said I’m not a centrally planned economy guy, but there does seem to be something off about it.

I mean there are computational cancer models that need to be written and optimized.

Eh, these aren't people who were forced out of academia because of scarce resources. They left because they wanted to work on the kinds of problems RenTec provides, in the kind of setting RenTec provides. When they left, they freed up funding for someone who wanted to stay in academia.

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