more r/physicsmemes ?

@ZeroTheHero These examples are I think closer related to economics than they are to finance (sure, some of the Nature Physics special issue looks to be related to networks of some kind in finance, but I'd say that's still a very economics-like take on the subject).

@alarge you could be right. This is not what Tiggers do best, and certainly there is a strand of literature on this that looks at the modelling of decision making process with imperfect information through some methods of quantum mechanics.

that would be closer to economics and quant finance.

I'm mostly just "aware" of this rather than even an amateur student of this topic.

(although I did sit on several seminars on this topic...)

@ZeroTheHero So I guess the exact topic of discussion matters, but in quant finance the idea is to, first and foremost, write models that by construction exactly hit the market---only after achieving this would one look at its behaviour. This is quite different from physics, I think, where one tries to write out some equations and then see where they go and what kind of things they imply.

I do find it very surprising that the equations of physics can quantitatively describe nature with such a few variables (though this does kind of break when you start taking more interactions and try to describe them, like in stat mech etc.)

@alarge I dunno enough to these applications. I know some former officemates who have transitioned very smoothly into finances and they recommended the aforementioned articles.

@alarge check out aip.org/statistics/whos-hiring-physics-phds

@ZeroTheHero So I'm surely guilty of having occasionally been the physicist from the xkcd strip, but if doing thing X is your goal, I'd read literature written by people in X, rather than that written by physicists to fit their own background and experiences.

under "business" there are quite a bit of employers in the financial sector.

(xkcd.com/793 this being the xkcd strip; I did manage to find it)

Also, working in the financial sector doesn't necessarily mean that you're one of the ones to do any mathematics there; I would bet the vast majority of physicists working in the financial sector are not doing anything related to any kind of quant finance.

@alarge I don't know enough to take that bet. I can certainly tell you that the people I know are deep into portfolio modelling, risk management and that kind of stuff. I can't say if they are a representative sample.

And not least because there nowadays are degree programmes specifically tailored to those needs (similarly, I think the door is slowly closing on physicists wanting to get into data science in that there's now so many people who are specifically taught the methods and so a physicists general aptitude to pick up new stuff to compensate for lack of education is less valuable)

@ZeroTheHero It all depends on what those terms exactly mean, right. I have friends working in, say, "market risk" at big banks and maths-wise what they need to know is the Taylor expansion (though I bet if you read the job description, it would sound like something very advanced).

granted we can't exactly go by titles these days.

Also, a quant doesn't mean a quant, either and Wikipedia will list several different kinds. You have the guys doing theorem - proof and stochastic calculus because they've decided that no-arbitrage is the framework to work in and that's then very mathematically rigorous; and then you have the guys doing algotrading where you're doing stats and trying to find signals.

I mean, that makes sense if you think about how the buy side and sell side in principle operate, right; one "takes risk", the other "sells risk and hedges it away" in very crude terms.

As in, one makes a bet and wins or loses; the other is the bookie and always wins the spread.

@alarge That APS survey aggregates data from 2009 to 2016. It's quite possible things were not in steady state during the survey period so the picture presented is an average that does not reflect the current state of affairs.

Certainly one former officemate (Tony) has never looked back. He may not be representative of the typical PhD graduate as he was recognized as a ace master programmer.

(I mean: everyone agreed this guy was good at programming...)

The title of this one oh my goodness

@ZeroTheHero Sure it's mentally stimulating, but wouldn't it be a better world if incentives were such that those brilliant and highly trained people were working on environmentally stable energy sources, transportation systems, or warp drive engines?

@DanielSank How do you make incentives so that "important" things get prioritized, and who should be deciding what counts as "important"?

lol its called the "invisible hand" of capitalism which is sometimes mindless :o ... oh and now its all turbocharged into neoliberalism :o

@alarge A mix between the free market and the government.

Governments are around to do things that benefit everyone but are unsuitable for free market economics.

Clearly, preserving the natural environment is not suitable to the free market. With abundant fossil fuel, it hasn't be a great idea for anyone to make/sell/buy other sources of energy. It's also no really worth any individual's time/money to produce realistically useful public transportation in already-developed areas like California.

IMHO, governments are supposed to look at situations like this and say "Ok, we're all going to suffer unimaginably if we persist in generating carbon dioxide. Nobody can or will fix this on their own. Therefore, we deem it "costly" to produce carbon dioxide and will now represent that with a tax, which we will spend subsidizing development of alternative energies."

Or something.

I mean, honestly based on the UN's report, I think human civilization needs to say "That's it, we're banning fossil fuels after 2050. Make your economic decisions with that in mind". It might cause trouble, but it would avoid catastrophe and I think with that much lead time the markets will do just fine.

30 years is actually a pretty long time.