Comment by Utkarsh_Mood
3 years ago
Honestly I expected it to go over far more advanced topics than these, most of these are covered in the last year of high school over here.
3 years ago
Honestly I expected it to go over far more advanced topics than these, most of these are covered in the last year of high school over here.
> Honestly I expected it to go over far more advanced topics than these, most of these are covered in the last year of high school over here.
Opening sentence: The goal of this document is to present an introduction to probability and markets in what we hope is a fairly intuitive and accessible way.
Basic reading and comprehension is not covered in his last year of high school it seems.
right no I guess thats not what I meant to say, rather that I expected any learning material from Jane Street(which has some really rigorous interviews) to give a better heads-up to the type of thinking thats required to do well in those interviews.
> type of thinking thats required to do well in those interviews
They have a whole page dedicated to that: https://www.janestreet.com/join-jane-street/interviewing/
Attention to detail and clear communication, including good grammar and spelling, are probably important.
I teach post-grad stats classes in the US, with no real prerequisites besides a Bachelor's degree. Most but not all of my students have passed a college level stats class that covered these concepts, and maybe half of those did not retain a true understanding of these concepts by the time they got to my classroom. In my experience, math is the least like/most hated of the core subjects, and stats is one of the least liked/most feared math subjects.
What makes statistics seems so daunting to the average student over, say, discrete mathematics? I feel like statistics has so many immediately obvious real world use cases and useful analogies to help frame it (die rolls, etc).
As a person with a bachelor's in math who dislikes statistics, it's the one field I know where "gotcha" problems are more common in reality than in class. And they are nasty problems. It takes a lot of education until you can confidently say what simplifications are justified for your situation. And a lot of professional statisticians like to flex on newcomers for simple mistakes.
You're right that some education would help people with everyday situations. It'd be nice if schools had intro to probability and statistics as the only required math course for all students. Even just covering fractions for probabilities, mean/median/mode, and then memorizing basic tricks or terms to look up on Wikipedia/Wolfram throughout life.
The very idea underlying statistics (that we can learn something useful from a class of events by ignoring specifically that which makes them different from each other) is a very recent invention -- only a few hundred years old -- and it's still counter-intuitive to a lot of people.
Ask people to predict whether the Jones' have a dog and they'll start asking questions about the specifics of the Jones', like do they have children, do they live in the suburbs, have they always wanted a dog, etc. Then they try to construct a narrative based on "logical" conclusions.
When the right approach might be to ask "what's the background rate of dog ownership in the Jones' country of residence?" But that takes ignoring the specifics, and that doesn't come easily to people. It took several millennia for anyone to realise it could be useful.
4 replies →
Easy to get things wrong from the wrong intuition or understanding of the problem. Cross mathematic discipline etc. But I feel that most applications just need high school math.
Turns out trading doesn't require that much advanced math
Despite it being "covered" in many places, few otherwise intelligent people actually grok this stuff or have any real intuition for it.
simple things will go very far