Metadata
- Author: Benn Stancil
- Full Title:: A Very Particular Set of Skills
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://benn.substack.com/p/a-very-particular-set-of-skills
- Finished date:: 2024-08-17
Highlights
Simons, who taught math at Harvard and MIT, was well connected to lots of mathematicians and scientists. He initially tried to make them financial analysts, and use their skills to help him pick stocks. He discovered they weren’t especially good at that, but they were very good at math. And he realized that, if he could make financial markets a math problem rather than an analytical problem, he could—and then, did—make a lot of money. (View Highlight)
To me, that means giving up the goal of being “data-driven,” at least as it’s currently understood. It’s dropping our attachment to numbers and statistical rigor, and realizing that good decisions don’t need to trace their origins to spreadsheets. They can also come from careful observation and research—which are things that LLMs are good at. We don’t need to quantify something to be smart about it. (View Highlight)