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Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

> then what is all the higher education for?

How exactly does a PhD in Biology help you understand investments?

Perhaps it doesn't, but that's the point. Education should prepare you to engage with society gainfully. If one makes it through 20 years of rigorous school but at no point acquired the necessary cognitive skills to discern scams from legitimate opportunities, then the education itself is the scam.

Yeah, financial education should be considered a standard subject and taught all years of high school and all degrees, in my opinion. Far more important and practical than almost any other basic subject. Even more important than trying to teach everyone to code. Teach everyone how the financial systems work and principles of personal finance.

The most obvious scams should be easy to identify, but if you think about how easy it is for even "accredited investors" to lose a lot of money. Just look at the list of people affected in Madoff's Ponzi Scheme⁰

Based on this evidence and many similar cases, I'm entirely in favor very stringent rules on who gets to place big bets on financial securities.

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0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoff_investment_scandal#Affe...

Because intelligence is general and correlates well across fields, and intelligence has a loose causal link with a PhD in biology. So I wouldn’t say it "helps" with investment per se but there is a connection there.

Ben Carson.

One counterexample doesn’t make a point. I could list many people who are simultaneous experts in multiple fields and it wouldn’t help my argument either.

A very small connection. Investments aren't exactly just intuitive knowledge one can grasp just by being "smart". It takes specialized training to know what you're doing – and even among those who study finance, you won't find consensus on any single investment.

To be fair, a PhD in biology likely makes the individual more savvy when it comes to certain classes of investments (e.g. BioTech startups) than most full-time investors... so the criticism cuts both ways. Case in point: Theranos.

Maybe not biology, but maybe biotech or biochemistry.

A fundamental understanding of the primary scientific literature and patents necessary for a technology to be viable, can all be used to determine if a new technology will be profitable for a company, beyond the scope of overall risk and investment numbers. Both of which are used extensively in graduate research.

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