Comment by yieldcrv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yieldcrv | Hacker News Reader

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That's an interesting perspective and I wholly disagree with the conclusion

You are saying that tough problems with no applicability are useful because people that you happen to respect got good by their curiosity and pursuit of trying to solve these kinds of problems and failing, but branching off into other cognitive areas as mathematicians

Now if I know anything about math for the sake of math, and academics, these are the same people that lament the idea of intelligent people going to the finance sector or any other trade they just happen not to respect as much

The similarity being that their exact criticism of why, something they don't respect and view as having little utility, is the exact reasoning presented here now that AI can solve their pointless problems

What I'm seeing is that human mathematicians have a laundry list of problems they have failed to solve for decades, centuries, which is what they are funded and employed to do. "Computer" used to a human job title too.

This leads me to being excited about AI one-shotting these problems, let move on to something else.

> Now if I know anything about math for the sake of math, and academics, these are the same people that lament the idea of intelligent people going to the finance sector or any other trade they just happen not to respect as much

IME a vastly more common sentiment among mathematicians regarding mathematical talent leaving the nest to apply their skills in other fields is that those other fields are lucky to get them!

I think you've slightly straw manned the lamentation there. Not that I agree with the lamentation, but using your talent to make the rich richer (which is what quants do, they are paid a fixed amount to provide a larger value up the chain), as opposed to advancing human knowledge, is the reason for the lament, not some sort of respectability issue.

Quants benefit from substantial bonus structure as part of their compensation.

Well exactly.

One way to make money is to create a great product that solves a problem people have and market it effectively. That's a sort of idealised situation, an aspiration, but it's what I would call socially valuable. Another way is to help people who are already rich move their money around so that they become richer, in return for a fraction of the increase in wealth. I personally have no problem with that, everybody has to make a living, but that is not socially valuable. It is debatable how socially valuable pure mathematics research is. But you take a fixed fee and all your best work is public domain.

> but that is not socially valuable.

Liquidity is extremely socially valuable from my perspective

I view the concept of "the market" as a construction project, that isn't finished. Not finished until every device around you can be traded instantly, with fractional shares even, with high liquidity and a capability for to the second price discovery, and there is a liquid options market on top of that.

The price of anything is not really resolved, its ability to be collateral and access a more liquid form of exchange at any time is not resolved.

Time is valuable, all of this reduces the time. There are still people waiting 90 days to access cash tied up in their home's equity, when another part of the market has split second collateralized lending. All of the market for anything should be that way.

The ability to exchange is valuable and wealthy people have liquidity issues. Poor people have liquidity issues. Everyone has a liquidity issue and doesn't know it.

Anything that slows things down slows down the whole construction project. A market with five 8 hour trading sessions a week with settlement the next day moves far slower than a market with three times as many trading sessions during the same time frame, where the trade is the settlement. The opportunities become endless for people aiming to accumulate more, the liquidity of traders to do actual business and negotiation and acquire goods and services and raise capital becomes vastly greater and far faster. Proving a new venture all the way to an exit becomes far faster, and results in the wealth distribution to the employees, vendors, and everyone else far faster and far greater.

That's what I see and look forward to. That has extremely high social value. Promoting liquidity and promoting velocity of transactions helps solve the actual reservations people have about the market at all. More paths for people on the poorer side of the bell curve to afford things.

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