[dsq]

Aren't they supposed to be the smartest of all quant firms?

[QuadmasterXLII]

There’s a pretty narrow band of intelligences in quant: any dumber and you can’t make 400k a year playing games for children, any smarter and you start to be able to make 400k a year curing disease or building a reusable rocket or any number of other actually interesting jobs.

[graemep]

> any smarter and you start to be able to make 400k a year curing disease or building a reusable rocket or any number of other actually interesting jobs.

A co-founder of something like Jane Street must be making a great deal more than $400k/year. Its probably small change for him.

You cannot make that much money doing those "interesting jobs". You might by financing and employing the people doing them.

A smart person going into finance will definitely make a lot more money than that same person going into another field. Going into finance from an "interesting" field has made a lot people rich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons

[corimaith]

Man can we do sway with the notion that competence in one area translates to another?

Being able to identify market arbitrage has little to do with biology and rocket science, and smart people are already working on such problems with the limitations of current fields well known. Throwing "smart” people at solving cancer isn't going to magically solve cancer.

[Barrin92]

it's not even about intelligence as much as it is about the background of these people. A lot of them are gifted kids coming out of academic households, prep schools and ivy league colleges and quite a few are on the spectrum.

When people were confused why Sam Bankman Fried behaved as stupidly as he did and thought this was all an act, no they genuinely are like overgrown kids who don't know what guile is, they couldn't survive in a rough neighborhood of New York let alone deal with South Sudanese arms dealers.

[dguest]

Which people curing diseases are making 400k a year? If you're talking about academic research I'd expect around 300k to be the high end.

[lesuorac]

I don't think anything hardware related is reliably 400k out of college unless you're self-employed.

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/spacex/salaries

[throwanem]

If we're going to talk about it in terms like these, what does it say about the evolution of this our own field since that was colonized by finance beginning around 2000?

[cyanydeez]

Any smarter and you have moral problems with social cannibalism.

There is a band, but whats termed intelligence.

[IIAOPSW]

well, normal stupid doesn't get duped into funding AK47s for a coup. It takes brilliance to be this stupid.

[BoxFour]

Smart people can be deceived too. Without devolving the conversation into semantics, Garry Kasparov is also someone we would consider to be “smart” by many definitions.

[sam_lowry_]

Smart in chess.

But he said and did lots of embarassing things.

I guess that's part of the definition of genius.

[oersted]

I'm missing something, what's wrong with Kasparov? I've done some searching but didn't find much I'd consider significant...

EDIT: My bad, I didn't realize he was part of the article, didn't take the time to deal with the paywall.

[Der_Einzige]

You're thinking of RenTec.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies

[JohnFen]

Being competent in one specialty does not mean you're competent outside of that specialty.

[jackthetab]

So I hear. And we all know smart/rich people can never be duped or make a mistake outside their areas of expertise. /s