When we ask kids what they want to do when they grow up, no prizes to guess the top 2 professions. Wink.
Its no surprise at our local Universities, the Medical and Law faculties are the hardest to get into...
If you don't have straight As...
Wait! How do you reconcile this with the recent deemphasizing of grades by big daddy? Eh...
And if you look at parliament, how many of them are lawyers and doctors?
Power or what?
You know what's interesting?
If we say doctors represent the left-brained and Science stream, then lawyers would be the flagbearers for the right-brained and the Arts stream.
Those weak in math would not get into the Science stream. And without Science, you can't enter the Medical faculty.
Students more comfortable with words (euphemism for bad at math) will choose the Humanities or Arts stream. Try telling your parents you want to do Literature or History... But once you mention Law... All of sudden everyone fully supports your "wise" decision to choose the Arts stream! LOL!
You know the irony?
Doctors (metaphor) who are good in math don't take the time to verify the numbers. If they had, they would have spotted the numbers don't add up!?
Instead, they pay more attention to the shilling and spin of snake oils. These snake oils are skilled in using words to obfuscate and bewilder their flock...
Of course these marketing and PR propaganda do not work on lawyers (metaphor) who can read between the lines and tell the nuances between similar words. For eg, snake oils don't say high risk; they say high volatility. You don't say junk bonds; you say high yield bonds!
Guess what?
Lawyers instead prefer to be swayed and bamboozled by numbers and statistics plucked out of thin air by snake oils!
Some of you can spot the humour of this post.
And if you can laugh at yourself, you'll probably survive the next few bull/bear cycles.
In gambling speak, if you can't spot the patsy at the poker table, you're it!
Or if you're a yield hog and you can't figure out how the asset you're riding is able to sustain the yield???
You're the YIELD!!!
Smol,
ReplyDeleteCouple of my relatives are senior counsels ... hate to burst your thesis, but based on my observations & their feedback of the legal industry ... in Singapore, the best lawyers have very strong maths & science backgrounds.
One major reason is perhaps the most lucrative legal area -- corporate law -- requires a good head & love of business accounting & numbers.
But more fundamentally, law is pretty much based on logic (the cynical would say logic of the rulers or logic of the day), which is a major branch of algebra -- the math without numbers.
I once sat for a algebra final paper in Uni ... the only numbers in the paper were the question numbers ... all the problems were described in hieroglyphic symbols, greek letters & english words. You definitely don't need a calculator to do algebra!
(Most of us, when we think of maths, we are actually thinking about arithmetic, calculus, mechanics, statistics ... all those Newtonian, Einstein, quantum, Bayesian stuff with plenty of numbers ;))
I daresay (based on small sample of observations) that those lawyers without strong science or maths background tend to be those who can't qualify for local Unis, and did their law degree overseas. And they tend to be in the smaller law firms. Ok, elitist but just calling it as I see it. Hoho!
Spur,
DeleteWhat makes the Tao symbol unique is the 2 little dots in the Ying and Yang symbol ;)
I can also argue the "best" doctors in Singapore are closet poets and literary giants!
Bernie Markopolos, the whistleblower on Bernie Madoff, spent 9 fruitless years trying to convince the New York SEC that mathematically speaking, its IMPOSSIBLE for Bernie to get those returns...
His complaint is that the New York SEC then were staffed with too many lawyers who can't read the numbers.
Luckily, the Boston SEC had finance people who understood his presentations. They were sympathetic, but New York not under their jurisdiction... Rivalry between the SEC offices didn't help either!
It took the 2008 financial crisis to flush out Bernie Madoff. By then, the SEC can only close the barn door after the horse has bolted!?
Words are interesting aren't they?
If I just say Doctors and Lawyers - they cover the whole spectrum. Grey as mud.
But if we add "best"; "top"; "elite" to Doctors and Lawyers - the meaning changes instantly!
Its the same for local grad; the academic respect is different if you graduated from that 2 versus "others"...
Likewise, if you say you overseas grad, but didn't add its an Ivy league university, the assumption would be you can't get into our local U is it?
We all envy that classmate who not only can study, but also excels in sports, plays awesome guitar, and the killer... Is bloody tall and handsome too!!!
Plus he comes from a well to do family to boot!
We can only hope he not interested in the same chio bu we eyeing!
LOL!
The two mathematics modules I took as part of my masters degree course at a US Uni was more about equations than numbers. It was about triple integration, partial differentiation and complex matrices.
DeleteEven my masters from NUS didnt quite prepare for it. I was shell shocked when every "Maths" problem posed to us in the US masters course required us writing a computer code to solve them. And maths was not even what I was majoring in. It was but a tool we needed to define and solve other complex engineering problems.
mysecretinvestment,
DeleteOK, that flew over my head... What triple integration, partial differentiation??? LOL!
Double masters? Until a Phd comes to this watering hole, you're the current King in the room when its comes to academic prowess!
That's the beauty of an overseas education, no?
Every culture of excellence have their own pillars of strength and focus.
Hence big daddy doing its best to encourage its scholars to go Germany, China, Japan; etc.
And not always going to the usual Anglo-Saxon countries;)
Imagine if your US course was same same as the NUS one. What's the point then?
Now you have an edge over your NUS peers/classmates who have no clue you can solve math problems by writing computer codes!?
Wink.
Wait.
Can you write your own trading/investing program? Are you a Quant?
No, no, definitely not a "King" by any measure.
ReplyDeleteThat was in 1994, a good 28 years ago. And the two Maths modules were core requirement to my Aeronautics degree. We are not Maths purist.
And no, I did not write any codes for trading. But, but I wrote two programs to simulate & determine retirement funding adequacy in the local (S'pore) context, ie with consideration for SRS, CPF Life etc.
Have been having fun using them to run various scenarios from sunshine to nightmare scenarios for my own retirement. My retirement numbers arr ok except for very bad nightmare scenarios. Then its about probability of that happening.
Ah! You rode the aeronautics wave career wise!
DeleteRespect. When we say stress test, we merely say say only.
You? You really can and know how to do it!
For me, my stress test is if my trading account blows up, can I get a job flipping burgers?
If yes, no worries!
Won't go hungry in Singapore 🤗