Peripherally some Wall Street companies involved had an insatiable hunger for physicists and mathematicians. There was bemoaning that the brightest minds were going to Wall Steeet instead of research. The company thinking that they could apply all of the scientific modeling to markets. It worked until the 2008 crisis hit and then it didn't and they lost their shirts and were living out of their Lexuses.

Personally I suspect the underlying issue is a fundamental lack of concern for truth and its origins just wanting to make money so they throw resources at it without concerns about the why and how to get what they want to hear short term.

That trend is repeating itself in other sectors with misuse of neural networks - and I mean that in a functional sense as opposed to an ethical one. Regardless of the ethics of facial recognition in law enforcement it simply doesn't scale to huge data sets and is being treated as "has to be right" instead of viewing it as the coarse filter it is will lead to problems unless one is sociopathic enough to consider that a feature.