A Billionaire Mathematician’s Life of Ferocious Curiosity
mobile.nytimes.com
mobile.nytimes.com
But make no mistake - when he says he wasn't as fast as some of the others, it's a whole different ballgame. He's a world class genius with creativity and personality to boot. He's also a good guy who is quite generous.
It would seem more appropriate to point out that despite his tremendous capabilities, he still has faults and has experienced awful tragedy. The article veers that way towards the end.
Sounds like good people; glad to read about someone with substantial means helping drive education and science.
[1] http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140624-fluid-tests-...
People on HN work in ever more prestigious and/or difficult to get in companies that this.
Sure. But any other motive for doing such a thing is probably less smart too.
Not to mention that such a choice most likely satisfies passion and honor within a person.
If you are saying that any person that satisfies his passions and honor is considered smart, or that a person that works in something that gives him satisfaction is considered smart, then you are just twisting the definition of smart.
The hardest part of training is building up your level, but once you're there you keep it. I'm a sedentary 31 year old now, but I bet I could still pass the basic test at optimum levels, with a couple months training. I certainly won't be motivated to do the next stages though.
http://www.sealswcc.com/navy-seals-buds-training-stages-over...
I think you really underestimate the barrier to entry into the SEALs, and how that correlates to what the OC was trying to portray with his comparison.
Thing is, my background is in physics, so I'm more interested in what physicists call "sociology": how institutions are put together, what the incentive structures are, how individual personalities affect outcomes, etc., and I found Weatherall's descriptions of such things lacking. His analysis tends towards hagiography of individual scientists, with less attention for context. This intensely biographical approach to the history of science is a common-enough failing in books that focus on the science, not the history---it reminded me a bit of those boxes about the lives of prominent scientists that dot some introductory textbooks---but it's still frustrating.
I actually found Roger Lowenstein's /When Genius Failed/ much more illuminating---he gives more attention to institutions, incentives, and personalities, and how they interact.
Edit: missing word, style
My super simple experience here relates to optimizing portfolios along the efficient frontier (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_frontier) which is a relatively simple problem, but I am interested in knowing what I don't know.
One decent general idea was that RenTec was willing to entertain purely statistical signals with no intuition to back them up (or, alternatively, unintuitive signals which you can explain in plain language but sound stupid).
There was an intesting quote from Simons about how astronomers are the best suited hires because they are used to making measurements/hypotheses purely from observation, without the chance to do controlled experiments. It was also noted that they seemed to employ a lot of NLP specialists, although consensus was that this was down to pattern recognition rather than anything to do with language.
The best suggestion (or at least the best sounding one) was that they were doing hidden-markov models which took into accound second and third order effects. And then there's always just the 'best execution' argument (doing basic market making but engineering better systems than anyone else).
However information on them is so scarce I sometimes wonder if most of what we hear is pure myth.
Seems to me the status quo of regulation means a constant game of catch-up. No governing body has the ability to say 'You can't do that' until it's too late.
I don't know any algebraic topology; the idea of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homology_%28mathematics%29
looks extremely clever to me but I can see where this subject matter would start to get challenging to explain.
A better place to start might be de Rham cohomology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Rham_cohomology
Of course he used some of this money for good purposes, but still.
But I think HFTs in a marketplace where execution speed is equal can serve to provide liquidity, not siphon it out.
I could be wrong, but I'll wait to be more enlightened on the subject to change my opinion.
If you are an investor (as opposed to an HFT trader), what problem of yours does it solve if you can buy/sell in 1min or 10s or 1s, as opposed to in 0.001s or 0.0012s? If not your problem, then maybe of the society as a whole, or some group within it, excluding those who benefit from HFT trading as such?
There are a lot of reasons Silicon Valley is what it is, and institutional investors and even (horrors!) hedge funds are part of it.
There's always going to be a situation where a market maker on a 'floor' has an edge in analyzing short-term flow and setting a market-clearing price second by second, and a big upstairs institution has an edge in size and longer-term analysis, and the upstairs guy is paying something for liquidity.
I don't think the market-maker is providing 0 value, but probably better if less energy gets spent on guessing what everyone else is doing and spy vs. spy gaming the system, and the more level and transparent the playing field is the better.
Axu -> _u_: A_u_y
(those are supposed to be underlines indicating imperatives.) This is the same sort of convention that Harry Gensler uses to prove the Golden Rule using his Formal Ethics system. (I should note I am not a logician and this is probably only a rough approximation - not sure whether it's appropriate to use A instead of a, etc.)
I was thinking first of the game of Telephone. "James Simons is a mathematician, pass it on!"
Near the bottom you see this guy talking about his startup ideas and Drew Houston replies and asked him if he wants to help with Dropbox.
(See this recent post on tarsnap: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953 )
Well, I was happy. I didn't finish my hw that week. :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3927653
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2850967
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2843203
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1884988
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196370 - Actual commentsAxcom was run by James Ax, and jointly owned by Ax & Simons. (Axcom was a 'trading advisor'. They made recommendations to Renaissance, which managed a fund based on these recommendations.) Ax was in essence hired by Simons to explore & develop quantitative trading ideas Simons & Baum had come up with while they were making more traditional trades.
Berlekamp came along several years later, as a consultant. One can find claims that he developed a lot of RenTech's IP, but as far as I can tell these claims are sourced from Berlekamp himself. Since Berlekamp's own fund went out of business after a few years of operation, I'm inclined to dismiss these claims as marketing.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=nw&pname=mm_0108_stor...
I believe Simons in particular funds areas of computational biology that strive to gain insight into the cascade effect. This occurs in many diseases, which make them seem nearly incurable, like sepsis or cancer. For example, when TNF (tumor necrosis factor0 activates inappropriately on the periphery of a cell it, to dramatically simplify, leads to growth during inappropriate stages of your life (adulthood), and triggers a cascade of thousands of events. When one event is altered, the cascade goes through a different direction, to the same goal. So understanding the pathway, and how everything interacts, is something I know the Simons foundation has funded in the past. With the hope that one day medications that properly fight the cascade can be achieved.
> Dr. Simons now runs a tidy universe of science endeavors, financing not only math teachers but hundreds of the world’s best investigators, even as Washington has reduced its support for scientific research.
A predictable consequence of reducing government spending is that the population becomes dependent on, and concentrates power in the hands of, a few wealthy citizens. For example, I've read that if you need funding for research, you should seriously consider networking with the very wealthy. If you run a charity, probably you need to focus on the same. Will these patrons support academic freedom? An organization that challenges the social order? What if your research upsets someone; is your career/organization at risk? Will their ideas and whims serve the nation and world?
(I'm not criticizing of Simons' philanthropy; I'm against shrinking government investment in research and other social goods.)
Mine is: You're probably a troll and nobody should feed you.
How does your post support this opinion?
Penicillin was discovered by Alexander Fleming as part of research in a public institution (St. Mary's Hospital). [2]
I guess my larger point (which you deftly avoided addressing) is that the government is not a boogeyman creating evil technologies nor does it have a monopoly on evil shit. I also have a hard time imagining a motive for a for-profit organization to eradicate a disease world-wide. Something that government organizations have achieved almost twice (polio is nearly wiped out).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Eradication [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennicilin#Discovery
But you know, whatever...
The original comment listed some issues with free-market financing but gov backing is not suddenly more altruistic/fair because it's not coordinated by 'free-market' billionaires. There are many many billionaires (and billion-dollar companies) who influence what the gov invests in and a significant number of them come from the DoD side.
It's even a problem among researchers in England: http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/david-mccoy/universi...
I agree (though I don't think it's a 'free market' in sense of the economic term of art), however the issue is political power and control. Do we want a few citizens to have that much influence over our society, such as deciding which good works get funded, and who gets the funding? What happens when a donor threatens to reduce funding for the local hospital if the city council passes a law that impacts the donor's business?
Also, I tend to think the NSF will do a better (if not perfect) job of evaluating grant proposals than the random philanthropist.
You are right that the wealthy already have outsized influence; that's not a reason to give them more.
This is rubbish, because it also funds research that leads to medicine, better roads and health, the Internet, and all number of other things that are absolutely positive things. The balance is by far on the good, not the bad.
Private research brought us things like the Maxim gun, the Gatling gun, most of the shitty food you can buy today, lots of unhealthy chemicals, and all sorts of other things.
It's a comparison that, even if executed properly, is hard to make--and you failed to execute.
Google. Facebook.
I'm not trying to minimize what the NSA has done; what they do is supposedly done in our name, which is offensive, and they have more power than any company to do harm with what they collect, which is frightening. And I'm not trying to attack the companies; they have every right to what I give them, most of which is not private even if I would wish it to be, and they do provide useful services with that information.
But if you are upset about an organization collecting information to use in some way that may be other than your best interest, the two are pretty equal.
Gestapo. Stasi.
WMD is such a stupid thing to bandy about, anyways--how many more are killed with cigarettes and cars than have died from these superweapons that rot in silos and labs?
PRISM, as somebody else has pointed out, is a stupid example because massive data mining is literally the business model for vast swathes of industry.
Just stop.
that's the sort of charming naïveté I look for in a date.
If medical research relied on government dollars, nothing much would happen except for wheel spinning at vast cost. It would be even more of a full employment program for connected research institutes than is already the case.
That is not even to start on the fact that the existence of big government funding comes with the existence of the FDA, an entity that enormously increases the cost of research and development, outright blocks many lines of work, makes others so unprofitable as to scare away for-profit funding at all levels, and so on.
Look at that, asking pointed rhetorical questions is easy!
Also, all of your questions regarding the motives of the wealthy should be asked of the government with equal scrutiny. After all, government is made up of individuals, each with his/her own level of bias and ideology.
> democratically elected government officials ... answerable to the electorate
The heads of the government agencies are appointed by the administration, and most (all?) other employees of the agencies are not. Thus, the only accountability of, say, the research funding administrators at NIH or NSF is to their immediate superiors. That is, they are far removed from the scrutiny of the electorate.
Of course, we should never stop criticizing government (aka democracy). But don't take it for granted either.
What might make governments even more accountable are the threats of loss of tax revenue (people and companies doing business elsewhere) and loss of campaign contributions. This is similar to how corporations are held accountable by shareholders (CEO compensation), employees (take their talents elsewhere) and customers
Of course, educating taxpayers would be helpful, so they can make better decisions. Along with educating Congress critters, and as far as K Street goes, either finding sympathy (unlikely) or planning to send some of your money there (more likely to work).
Compared to those 3 challenges, finding a benefactor sounds a whole lot easier!
Also, I don't know that 'benefactors' are any less corrupt than politicians or lobbyists (if we can paint any group with such a broad brush).
'The world's largest project to unravel the mysteries of the human brain has been thrown into crisis with more than 100 leading researchers threatening to boycott the effort amid accusations of mismanagement and fears that it is doomed to failure.'
And.
'But it proved controversial from the start. Many researchers refused to join on the grounds that it was far too premature to attempt a simulation of the entire human brain in a computer. Now some claim the project is taking the wrong approach, wastes money and risks a backlash against neuroscience if it fails to deliver.'
€1.2bn could solve any number of problems. And in a free market that's how the resources would be put to use. Solving human problems. Instead, there's a grand spectacle.
Many wealthy individuals got that way via judicious resource allocation. The same can't be said of the monumental leaders of our fine countries. They got that way via looking good in public. To expect them to excel at speech giving and resource allocation is quite the ask!
> €1.2bn could solve any number of problems. And in a free market that's how the resources would be put to use. Solving human problems. Instead, there's a grand spectacle.
I think this argument idealizes the "free market".
* There is plenty of waste and spectacle there too -- look at other news headlines, or just remember our recent financial crisis
* The 'free market' doesn't exist. First, it's an amalgam of an incredible number and diversity of people and organizations. Second, it's not free; I was trying to think of examples of social goods not funded at all by taxpayers (for the point below), but it's hard to name any. And many 'free market' companies get tax breaks and other support from government (EDIT: including laws and regulations made in their favor).
* The marketplace does not care prioritize solving human problems; it prioritizes money and power. Sometimes that happens to solve problems (discovering a new vaccine, clean energy), sometimes it happens to cause them (increasing the cost of vaccines, climate change), sometimes it's just money for money's sake (slashing a ms off response time in computerized securities trading).
Financial crisis == moral hazard. And, come on! There's an economic theory that predicted the crisis, and explains it. I.e. ABCT (Austrian business cycle theory). My point being, it's not as clear cut when there's 'crony capitalism' and other market distortions.
'Free', as in freedom!
Everyone knows the 'free market' is made up of individuals. Or groups of individuals, such as a firm, which is formed to reduce transaction costs -- as per Coase's description in his Nobel winning (1991) The Nature of the Firm (1937).
Money is a medium of exchange. We use it to trade. And by definition: when people trade freely, they are both better off (otherwise they wouldn't trade!).
Money also has the functions of 1) store of wealth 2) unit of account. But that's by the by.
Problems are always going to occur, but because humans are motivated to solve the problems, solutions are found. And a profound way to facilitate such solutions is a market-based economy.
Without subjectivity, there's no marginal utility. And that takes us back to classical economics. I.e pre-marginal revolution.
The information, or the lack thereof is also reflected in the price.
No. People who like the theory saw real world events that kind of sort of looks like ABCT could explain them, and then made a post facto observation.
Unless Mises et al. made some sort of prediction based upon at the time non-existent financial instruments, ABCT did not predict the 2008 sub-prime financial collapse. Period.
To the extent that ABCT predicted anything, it was a "something bad will happen; not sure when!" with the preconditions in play since about 1980. Color me unimpressed; I bet some random fortune teller got more accurate than that on accident.
Now, maybe some economic philosophers who likes the model applied it, which provided the basis their prediction of actual real world events. I don't know.
But then, proponents of regulation predicted the collapse as well. In fact, a lot of people accurately predicted the (actual) collapse, and to various degrees the cascade effects.
> it's not as clear cut when there's 'crony capitalism' and other market distortions.
"Oh yes, if only the world met all of our Axioms. Then everything would be grand!" said every failed political economic project ever.
> Problems are always going to occur, but because humans are motivated to solve the problems, solutions are found.
And as it turns out, lots of times those people are working in government funded research labs and universities, or applying research funded in those labs and universities.
You'll excuse us mere mortals for drawing such wildly wrong conclusions from something as banal as observation! You see, it's just that we've lost our list Axioms and now our only reference point is reality... perhaps you could lend us your map to drill on?
Like Mark Spitznagel, who took a billion dollar derivatives position on the 2008 stock market crash!
>Unless Mises et al. made some sort of prediction based upon at the time non-existent financial instruments, ABCT did not predict the 2008 sub-prime financial collapse. Period.
Here's an article from the Mises Institute on the subject. Period. http://mises.org/daily/4072
> "Oh yes, if only the world met all of our Axioms. Then everything would be grand!" said every failed political economic project ever.
Politicians must come up with excuses of some sort.
> And as it turns out, lots of times those people are working in government funded research labs and universities, or applying research funded in those labs and universities.
And those resources may be more effective in an alternate configuration.
> You see, it's just that we've lost our list Axioms and now our only reference point is reality... perhaps you could lend us your map to drill on?
My map (in reference to the Alfred Korzybski quote 'the map is not the territory') consists of any economic school, or any other information I happen across. Empirical is fine with me. But it depends on the circle I'm talking to. If one was to mention vanilla observation to a group interested in medicine, then there'd be a combination of recoil and disgust (in most cases), for example.
But in this case, Praxeology suits me fine!
The article to you link to is much more clear headed about the role of the model. It's a useful tool, not a glass ball.
There's a hell of a huge difference between a model predicting something, and people applying/adopting the model -- together with a LOT of other tools and insights -- to predict something.
It's as stark as the difference between executing a program and getting an exact output, and using a programming language, together with some bits of math, to write a program which computes a result for you.
Back to the point: since lots and lots others made similar predictions about the housing market (and beyond), I'm much more inclined to believe that it was a strong focus on data and observation -- not any particular model per say -- that allowed smart people to accurate predictions.
I don't believe the Austrian school has any such formal models.
A free market would be perfectly OK spending that money on dating apps, more ads for "alternative medicines" that sell well but never shown to work, or disinformation campaign against (government-funded) scientists pointing out that your product causes cancer. Free market sometimes works, but it's no silver bullet.
At least the messaging app would work!
I think the bigger issue is that private philanthropy of science is at least ~2 orders of magnitude smaller than yearly philanthropic donations. The US spends ~$100B/year, while I would be surprised if private philanthropy totals $1B/year to R&D. Commercial R&D expenditures on the other hand are probably higher in aggregate. Thus the role of private philanthropy on a lot of research has been catalytic funding for new ideas.
Just a few years back I was very optimistic that we would correct our course back to democracy, but a cursory review of history shows incontrovertible proof of our destination.
Humans are primates, and primates fight viciously to form status hierarchies using any mechanism available to them. In the 21st century, that mechanism is capital. And its power and influence know no bounds.
The brief democratic blip we witnessed was a result of three massive wars (WWI, WWII, Cold War) which forced cooperation from the oligarchs due to the threat of existential annihilation. The world is quite peaceful now, and with technology and globalization the average citizen has a severely reduced utility to the oligarchy. Hence, capital buys policy, and votes are meaningless.
Capitalism dictates that one optimize one's own desires above all others ("Greed is good"). Economists are only now noticing the bitter aftertaste from the fruits of their labor.
EDIT: I post this a lot, but just in case you've missed it, most of my conclusions come from Thomas Piketty's new book, Capital in the 21st Century.
I'm not saying that's good or bad; I'm just saying it's like gravity.
a) has money, and
b) is willing to finance your research.
If research is done with tax money, it's understandable taxpayers will want a say in it, and their ever-changing whims will be reflected in what they choose to fund. Since this involves politicians, you can expect consequences in that direction (i.e. a political angle even when there needn't be one, involvement of K Street either for or against you, etc).
If research is done with other resources, again, it's a matter of finding someone who has money and is willing to let you use it. So networking, and getting to know generous wealthy people, or wealthy people with a motive to give for a certain kind of research, is a smart way for someone in your org to spend time.
This doesn't necessarily sound so bad; it sounds like it's simply the way the world works.
Even Columbus - who financed his exploration with European monarch's money - had to justify it as financially worthwhile for them to do so.
It's worth noting in this context that the current system of government-funded science, which seems normal, in fact was invented more or less single-handedly by Vannevar Bush shortly after World War II. [1] The scenario that worries you was the norm for approximately the previous history of humanity. (This isn't to say governments never funded science, just that they didn't dominate it as the US Government does today.)
Will these patrons support academic freedom? An organization that challenges the social order? What if your research upsets someone; is your career/organization at risk? Will their ideas and whims serve the nation and world?
Every one of these questions applies with equal or greater force to government-funded science. Anyone worried that a private patron of science might, e.g., put his career at risk, should be a thousand times more afraid of the Feds.
The previous history of humanity isn't a standard that I think we should aspire to. It means no democracy, short lives, widespread brutality, open discrimination against most people, and not much investment in or success in the sciences.
> Anyone worried that a private patron of science might, e.g., put his career at risk, should be a thousand times more afraid of the Feds.
That's a strong claim. I don't agree subjectively; is there anything that backs it up? My impression from talking to people who apply for federal research grants is that it's tedious, time-consuming, but apolitical and based on merit.
It looks like you may be conflating several separate issues here. My point is that science seemed to work fine in, say, the period 1550–1950 without the NSF, NIH, etc., and it's not necessarily a disaster if we return to that model. We don't, at the same time, have to shorten lives, increase brutality, etc. (Democracy is a mixed bag at best, though; for example, in 1783 France was a troubled but basically functional absolute monarchy, and by 1793 it was a universal suffrage democracy that guillotined tens of thousands in the streets of Paris and bound books in leather made from human skin. [1])
[grant writing is] tedious, time-consuming, but apolitical and based on merit.
Getting federal research grants is apolitical only if your subject is apolitical, and the list of apolitical scientific subjects gets shorter every year. There are whole fields of inquiry—exploring heritable cognitive differences (if any) as a function of ancestry, for example—that are essentially verboten, while others (e.g., stem-cell research and climate science) are impossible to separate from politics. Moreover, even apolitical fields are notoriously subject to the whims of (democratically elected) Congress.
I've heard that there's PhD bigotry there, too, and that's it's nearly impossible to get in if you don't have a PhD; but I don't know enough to confirm or deny that. It could be completely untrue, or it could just be that most people who make the cut and know about RenTech happen to have PhDs.
He sounds like a stand-up guy, though, and compared to the ethical dirt on an average Silicon Valley CEO, this stuff (which isn't even ethical dirt so much as practical disagreement) is negligible.
What are the benefits of working at RenTech? They seem to be asking candidates to take a huge risk to their careers, due to the legally-mandated secrecy. That suggests there's a proportionally huge payoff in working there. What is it?
Of course, there's also the reward of building, creating, and contributing to something that extends beyond yourself. It's hard to believe that a career at a secretive hedge fund that invests its own funds would provide much along that axis of career satisfaction.
Some individuals are motivated by their interaction with smart colleagues, but others by the process of the work itself, others by financial incentive, others by prestige, others by societal impact, etc. There is no one-size-fits-all metric that guarantees satisfaction.
I suspect they use the ability to continue to invest in Medallion as an incentive to prevent people from going to work elsewhere.
Is there a data dump somewhere of Medallion's trades over time? Since the stock market is public, that means we could treat their investment engine as a black box, and try to reverse engineer their engine by looking at the decisions it makes over time. We should pay careful attention to how it performed leading up to the 2008 crash, since that reveals how their engine performs in adverse conditions, which might indicate what underlying metrics their engine is using.
I wonder what the daily trade volume of the NYSE is? It seems like if someone is moving around a billion dollars via thousands of trades, it should be possible to detect and categorize those seemingly-disparate trades as "these trades originated from the same owner".
If it's possible to trace the flow of money in that way, then it may be possible to generate a list of probable Medallion trades: search for a cohort that achieved >40% return on billions in volume.
Another way of figuring out Medallion's methods is to examine its interaction with academia. Presumably they search for candidates from fields related to their trade engine. If we can generate a list of research papers which resulted in its authors being hired by Medallion, then those research papers may reveal some of the techniques used by their trade engine.
Basically, people have thought of these strategies before. And they've thought of countermeasures to those strategies. And they probably have countermeasures to the countermeasures - for all I know, maybe RennTech's secret is that they've figured out how to statistically identify everyone in the market and trade ahead of them.
The financial industry is a massive arms race which draws some of the smartest people in the world. It's very unlikely that you (or any individual investor) can compete unless you've worked at one of the big hedge funds.
The volume traded on any exchange is absolutely massive, especially on the products where funds might be putting in millions of dollars. There's also an enormous number of prop firms, banks, institutions, hedge funds, mutual funds, and whoever else constantly buying an selling. It would be near impossible to be able to say "Firm X traded at these specific times."
Furthermore, any worthwhile firm moving that much money knows to break up its trades. If they immediately dump $10 million into the market, its going to cause a large market impact, and they're going to leak information they probably don't want to give away (since that's their edge). (See the whole Flash Boys nonsense.)
Lastly, if you could identify a set of trades that were owned by a single firm, it would be a massive benefit to anybody opposing them (ie: everybody else).
Hence they'd be just about as non-stationary as the market itself. If you were dead set on doing an almost impossible finance project, then instead of reverse engineering you'd probably be better served by figuring out how to do life cycle management of signals yourself.
Everyone makes it seem like Rentech is head and shoulders above everyone else and being able to invest in Medallion with a %50/yr return is probably one of the best bonuses anywhere. Bad work conditions?
Plus they way you describe, any body who can get in there- Putnam winners, top Math PhD's probably already have better offers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_technologies#Renais...
Well, for cleared positions there's a pretty standard lingo that allows people to say without saying by referring to a particular address or bit of geography. The restrictions seem mostly about preventing people from making their history trivially searchable by the uninitiated.
I would expect there to be something similar for these people? Just say "I was in Suffolk County" or whatever.
Are you sure about this? There are plenty of people on LinkedIn who identify themselves as working at/having workd at RenTech. Furthermore, you can also find on LinkedIn people who identify themselves as having been employed by the various non-profits which carry out govt crypto research.
i'm pretty sure at least one or two billionaires read HN, so, keeping in mind the audience, you're probably wrong.
So probabilistically he's right.
OTOH, if more modest acheivements would justify the investment of time and money and winning the Tour de France would be a crowning, but not necessary to justify the effort, acheivement, sure, start cycling...
A sarcastic but true anecdote.
Apparently some folks are motivated to strive towards those statuses. Not quite my cup of tea, but I wouldn't discourage them or say those goals are flatly impossible.
Or do you mean just maybe understand the general essence of the paper's title, and understand major contributions after spending some time reading the paper?
If the former, well... yes. That's probably true for almost all significant research, especially in mathematics.
If the latter, I think you're probably wrong. And that's not to trivialize the work presented in the paper; if anything, the contrary -- the paper's actually quite well-written.
Probably, and this is just a guess, neither Simons or Sullivan claim they could've written the paper alone. And it's certainly impossible to write essentially the same paper without plagiarizing. So probably there are either zero or two people who meet the "could've written this paper" criteria.
So, why didn't you just say "there are more than zero/two billionaires who read HN"? Seems less round-about.
I think Dr. Simon's point is not "if I can do it, so can you", but instead that the things we normally value, quickness in thought (see: whiteboard coding) really aren't the best or only measures of a person. The ability to organize talent in others, for example, or the willingness and curiosity to endless ponder on a question for a very long time, have payoffs. For example, Oppenheimer produced almost no new science after his early career, but his absolute brilliance at running research had an enormous impact on science, probably greater than his research.
For some reason we don't seek out that kind of brain. I don't know why. Is it because they are rare? I don't think they are. I see 'clever' people, and then smart people. The clever people dominate the meetings, make decisions, but often times it is the person brooding over a problem that sees how to better advance efforts. Can't implement a smart pointer off the top of your head, under pressure, in a interview? No hire. (this is something the friggin' C++ committee got wrong, for years, with auto_ptr). I see Ph.Ds chasing stupid ideas that will never be practical. Smart is good, but so is pragmatic, and seeing the 'right' thing to do, and doing that. They are different kinds of intelligence; we need both, but often only shop for the former.
The stupid interview questions about pointers involve just one variable, whereas a multi-variable (and higher order) analysis would consider what your company's business needs are and how software can help achieve them. The truth is, higher-order multi-variable thinking (also known as strategy) is far more critical to success than low level single variable thinking. However, due to the financial structuring of companies, there are very few positions for strategic thinkers.
What it boils down to, is how many times you ask "Why". If you stop at one iteration, you won't get a very optimized solution. But if you keep going until you're questioning the definition of reality, you're at about the right place.
"Dr. Simons received his doctorate at 23; advanced code breaking for the National Security Agency at 26; led a university math department at 30; won geometry’s top prize at 37; founded Renaissance Technologies, one of the world’s most successful hedge funds, at 44; and began setting up charitable foundations at 56."
But at the same time, I'm always surprised when people claim these sorts of comments are self-defeatist.
Unrealistic expectations can be just as psychologically and socially damaging as viewing the world through a billionaire-or-powerless-prole lens. Witness the periodic comments from founders whose failed start-ups ruin their marriages as well; if anything, unrealistic expectations for one's self can be even more damaging than self-re-enforced feelings of powerlessness.
So it's not that this comment is healthy. It's just that many responses here are almost hilariously as unhealthy. It's like an alcoholic criticizing a chain smoker.
(Okay, so now I'm the most unhealthy, most negative person in the thread :-( )