Are you the "ordinary people" he was referring to in a recent tweet @ Musk?

> give us some truly excellent code that we really don’t deserve

Why such self flagellation?

This is misinformation. There is no evidence that he gave $100 million.

Indeed. I always recommend Time Series Analysis by Hamilton for this reason. KF comes up as a natural way to solve linear models.

Not one paper cited. Just random recitation of climate change hysteria tropes.

Life on earth had dealt with 120 meters of sea level rise. So please.

One million will not cut it. Greenland has free healthcare, free education, and a whole host of other social benefits that, over a lifetime, give a lot more value than a million in hand, and the US social system does. In addition their current (danish) passport ranks higher (4) than the US passport (9) in the The Henley Passport Index [1].

[1] https://www.henleyglobal.com/passport-index/ranking

Or we could just leave them be.

I hope you have decent source of secondary income or your family is reasonably well off.

A math PhD might take 6-7 years to complete and I hope that, at the end of it all, you won’t have to come to London to look for C++ or Ocaml jobs at hedge funds or banks.

I'm in the UK. It takes nominally three years here; usually three and a half. I also have full funding.

...this is the discouraging negativity I'm talking about. I do, respectfully, wonder what your agenda is.

Because i have worked with many math phds who lost their youth to something that they could not make a living on (research positions at universities are few and the competition is intense) and were writing C++ implementations of derivatives pricing models for a (comfortable) living.

I am not trying to discourage you, just a different perspective.

Well, luckily I'm not doing this in the hope of increasing my earning potential. It's an entirely separate pursuit. I have no doubt that what you're saying is true, but I don't think I'm bothered by it since it's not my goal.

That is the way. Not long ago, most of Science was done by rich people as a hobby. We need to get back to that system.

Can't wait to read Elon Musk's Ph.D. on pointy rockets!

Mendel did not have a PhD.

PhD now is an expensive way to signal that you can persevere longer than the average human.

Unfortunately, that is not always a positive as many real life situations require you to make decisions under extreme paucity of information and reverse or change course at short notice. For such professions and roles it is a liability.

I can see why you might think that; in some cases I'd agree. But there are parts of science — indeed of human knowledge in general — that are very difficult to break into if you don't have the opportunity a PhD affords. These disciplines also require perseverance longer than the average human. Without this system, we're not going to make fundamental progress.

I'm pretty sure that without the research done by people with PhDs and people who don't give up at the first hurdle, we wouldn't be able to be sitting at our keyboards now having this conversation. Of course, it's not for everyone. Maybe it's not for most. But I don't think you should write all of it off as 'signalling'. Some research simply cannot be done without several years of focus, outside of industry or 'the real world'.

This is a big deal.