Re:Quant != Finance Phd (Score 2, Insightful)

Though arguably this is precisely the root of the problem. As the post above you mentions, many quants build their software around nonparametric statistics or statistical (machine) learning, without deeply understanding the domain. This can lead to an over-reliance on historical data, which in turn leads to a failure to predict rare but significant events, like, say, the current crisis. Now, I'm totally unqualified to pronounce that if only we'd had more quants who richly understood finance and economics we could have avoided the worst of current events. But I'm aware that there are those who make that claim...