I think Hawkin's work (including things done at Numenta, his company) is highly controversial in neuroscience. I have read some of the articles and claims and the biggest issues is that he produces a lot of vision papers, that contain no actionable models and thus ultimately are useless.

So either he's withholding whatever concrete insight he found, or he hasn't found it yet - I believe the latter is more likely.

whatever you may think about his work, he founded redwood and they do incredible work

> as if you can jump into a field without spending 10-20 years of learning and do cutting-edge research.

I know multiple people who have done this.

If you want a famous person, look at Paul Erdős. Always jumping into new areas of mathematics and solving problems at the cutting edge.

Or, to get to the current subject, Taleb using his background as a trader to jump to a career in academia, where many consider(ed) his research cutting edge.

I agree that a smart, ambitious person can become expert in more than one field in their life — but jumping to a new area of mathematics is on an entirely lower level than jumping from algorithmic finance to cutting edge biomedical, especially at the time Erdős was working.

There are a few people who did a complete switch to study rare diseases with no background.

Sonia Vallabh, and her husband, Eric Minikel are the strongest examples of these type of highly smart and ambitious people.

> Sonia Vallabh ... had just graduated from Harvard Law School.

> [Eric Minikel] ... had recently gotten a degree in urban planning from M.I.T

https://www.broadinstitute.org/bios/sonia-vallabh

https://www.broadinstitute.org/bios/eric-minikel

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/health/rare-diseases.html

>Taleb

He already had a PhD so it's not surprising he was able to enter Academia. But outside his books I'm not aware of anyone talking about his Research much.

I’ve never see his research brought up amongst quants or traders, but I like his writing.

Does anyone who works in this field know of it being currently applied?

I spent most of my career in finance including a hedge fund and several international banks.

Personally I really enjoy his books and recommend them to my friends and family. Professionally, I have never heard his name being mentioned.

You find the same 'fluffy' management books on trader desks (varies between firms).

- Some translation of "the art of war". - Tribal leadership and their whole "Tribe of tribes" nonsense - its name escapes me at the moment, but some leadership book written by a US marine? Because this maps directly to finance? - six sigma

Usually they are "management" focused chanting type material.

I'm not away of Erdos being at the cutting edge. There are far better examples of people moving between fields and doing very high-level stuff. For example, David Mumford, who has a great blog by the way.

Hawkins is a notorious con artist with nothing to show for almost two decades of work.

I can't judge that from an outside perspective, but to be fair, having nothing to show for two decades of work is an intrinsic occupational risk of science.

> I can't judge that from an outside perspective, but to be fair, having nothing to show for two decades of work is an intrinsic occupational risk of science.

How? In today's academic environment you won't survive even a few years without publishable research results.

Oh you can publish innumerable things whose content is nothing to show for, yet you publish something :)

Jeff Hawkins probably also had a several Hundred Million Dollar payout. That's in a totally different class than a Quant who cashes out at 30 with MAYBE $10M in the bank.

You’re overestimating the technical skills needed to do cancer research: there’s a reason why many wet labs allow high school students to come and help with research. It’s mostly grunt work and whatever technical skills can be learned by a high school student over a summer.

I would venture to say the average Jane street worker has done more good for society than the average cancer researcher or Alzheimer’s researcher.

For fusion research, the quantitative skills from many Jane Street people can easily transfer to make meaningful contributions to fusion research.

I do cancer research. You're right, the technical skills for basic wet lab stuff are not hard to learn. The hard part of cancer research is not learning how to pipette, it's learning how to ask and investigate worthwhile questions. Experimental design is subtle and requires wide ranging knowledge of sources of biological and technical confounders. Growing cells might be easy, but do you know how to debug a fluorescence microscopy experiment; in fact, do you even know how to recognize that it needs to be debugged? This is stuff you can learn over the course of a few years in a phd program, but it takes longer to become a true expert. Finally, what do you investigate? Cancer? What tissue type, which cell type, which proteins, DNA structures, or RNA structures are most important and least understood? Just absorbing a small fraction of the literature so that you don't ask stupid or boring questions is a lifelong task.

So you can do break-through research after having done a little bit of wet work in a cancer research institute, as a 30-year old who has been coding quant systems for a decade, and then become equivalent to a PhD in the field?

Or you can take your ~10M or whatever in earnings during a decade as an OCaml programmer at Jane Street and fund a cutting-edge cancer research lab?

Are you reading yourself after you type?

> I would venture to say the average Jane street worker has done more good for society than the average cancer researcher or Alzheimer’s researcher.

Might be one of the more arrogant things I've read. And I frequent WallStreetOasis.

Are you up to date with the current state of Alzheimer’s research ? Much of it has been shown to be fabricated ie average alzheimer researcher has probably made zero impact. https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabricatio...

Also I said the average researcher, meaning taken from the global population, ie not from a top institute. Jane Street is highly concentrated in talent that produce real results in the world.

The average cancer researcher has probably done more good than the average trading firm worker though.

It's wildly inaccurate to say that much of Alzheimer's research has been shown to be fabricated. The article you link to is about one person's work. Even though he is a very influential researcher, there must be at least thousands of people doing research on Alzheimer's disease, if not more.

I wonder if this is somewhat representative of what JS workers think, or not ?

What good has Jane Street done to a person living in Madagascar?

This is just blatant Jane Street (and more generally, hedge fund) propaganda.

Yes, you serve some role within the financial system, but you're not really relevant to society imminently and to non-western societies generally.

What good has cancer research done to a person living in Madagascar?

What has a baker living down my street done for a person living in Madagascar?

So you've established: People in Madagascar don't get cancer.

I think it is fair to say that most people discussing Madagascar here, have no conception of how it is like to live there.

It seems none of the people that posted here understood the intention of my comment: The parent comment by ChadNauseam implies that Madagascar citizens somehow would not benefit from cancer research (they would!), which could only be true if they don't get cancer. In my comment I pointed out this last end of this logical chain of conclusions to show how ridiculous the parents' post was.

Nope, just no treatment (not fact checked of course, but it sounds likely that they wouldn't get top notch treatment that an average person say in Western Europe could expect)

Well, they don't get cutting edge treatment for sure.

Well given the periwinkle was found there, not entirely without merit.

What good has your comment done to a person living in Madagascar?

Well, that person can now learn Ocaml because Jane Street uses Ocaml.

> It’s mostly grunt work and whatever technical skills can be learned by a high school student over a summer.

Who do you think is supervising the high school student? Where does the idea for the project come from? Where does the money supporting the high school intern' experiments come from?

But that's not the interesting part, right? That would be like saying that tech is simply assembling prototypes. The really interesting decisions are the strategic ones that require both a high-level overview of the opportunity landscape and some foundational knowledge of its feasibility. Or am I mistaken and it's simply brute force trials?

Yeah you’re right. My point is that the technical bar for entry is low, and can be attained maybe by spending one year in a top lab. You then skip the hazing ritual that is the PhD and postdoc and directly start your own small lab.

Spend your money attending conferences to make connections and get yourself updated in the field.

Hire technicians to help with your grunt work. Spend your days reading research papers, discussing science at conferences, and setting up new experiments.

The bar for doing some experiments, in an environment with tons of logistical, technical, and intellectual support, is indeed pretty low. A high school student could certainly learn to run a gel in a week or two; patching a neuron might take a few months.However, the physical "act" of collecting data, especially in the happy case where all of the conditions have been worked out and the results look "as expected", is a very small part of being a scientist.

More often, you are trying something that hasn't been done before and you're getting results that don't quite make sense. Here, experience and background knowledge seem key, and I'm not sure that you'll pick up much of that in a year, even in a "top lab" because experiments are slow. On top of that, you'll need to learn how to design experiments and analyze/present their results in ways that your peers find convincing, which is in itself a non-trivial skill. All this presumes that you're even able to find your way into a "top lab", but that's not a foregone conclusion either: these places can be incredibly selective even among people with a decade of experience in the same field.

Put another way, your answer assumes there's a lot of fat to trim in the PhD/postdoc stages. What is it and can it really be cut down by 90% as you propose?

Long postdocs are a modern phenomenon due to the oversupply of biomedical researchers. Historically people did shorter PhDs and skipped postdocs. There are stories of old timers saying they got their faculty position based on just one or two papers, unthinkable these days.

If you’re independently wealthy, you don’t need to go through the modem hazing ritual and you can start your own lab much earlier.

I’m not saying you can start immediately and be an effective researcher, you will initially suck like everyone else. But you will have a better time learning how to fail if your career/livelihood is not on the line.