The main idea when you become a quant is that a computer is less prone to pitfalls than a human.<p>Computers and humans are prone to <i>different</i> pitfalls. Humans have far too many biases to count - see for example, the works of Kahneman and Tversky and most of social psychology.<p>Computers, on the other hand come with a whole host of different problems (perhaps because they're made by humans). The essential advantage a human has is the eye, which is extremely well adapted to picking out patterns. That, and an ability to go beyond the model or completely change it. This is something that computers have difficulty with (unless of course they're programmed for it - i think genetic algorithms claim to do this, but I'm not particularly knowledgeable about those).<p>Nonetheless, i agree with the thesis that this kind of analysis will invade the rest of the social sciences. In fact, that's one of the reasons I learned to program.
Oh boy, the financial wizard porn articles are being peddled again, right when the markets are supposedly OK. I hope we all don't have such short term memories.
The article was very interesting, with the exception of the occasional technical non-sense that made it suspect. I'm talking about things like:
“Personally,” he replied, “I would run the connectors outside the cloud machine.”
"her boss mentioned that he could never work out the simultaneous price and position of a trade" - price and position ? - this sounds like something written by someone who heard about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Then "a cosine formula from physics useful for measuring electromagnetic waves", yup, sure sounds smart.
Wishful thinking, but I would love to see scientists like these searching for computational solutions to either stabilizing the financial system, or robustifying it and its essential ecosystem (government, banking, lending) against inevitable, reflexive instability.<p>I wish they'd take a step up the hierarchy of needs from simply trying to find ways to make more money by predicting the future, to instantiating a safer, more robust, more resilient global economic system.<p>If their funding and earnings need to be guaranteed by governments instead of offered by industry in order to incent and achieve that shift, then so be it. When the entire world and the lives of everyone in it is your lab because it's too complex for isolated simulation and testing, then re-evaluation of your priorities and conflicts of interest is in order.
that's cool and all, but it seems like a waste of talent to learn all that stuff to shuffle money around and occasionally destroy the world economy.<p>it's interesting that it's 80 percent men. it's obviously going to be very lucrative.