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Garry Perkins's avatar

Operations Research is still a thing, but financial engineering pays better. I think an engineering school concentration in operations research is a wonderful thing. I would take an undergrad engineer in OR over any "data scientist" any day of the week. I will not need to explain what linear algebra is to an OR engineer. I will not need to explain to him/her that there are multiple probability distributions and one cannot simply assume that it is normal because you have a lot of data, and especially not if your variable is discrete (not making this up).

I am not aware of your deliciously-named subject, but he sounds cool enough. I will say that if language limits you, study up on philosophic logic. It is like computer programming, but useless. Ultimately, it is difficult to explain difficult ideas. Unfortunately, clear writing is not all that valued these days. If you work hard, you will get better at it, but the morons will still assume you are using chatGPT because they are incapable of writing and thinking quickly. I am convinced that most of us were surprised by chatGPT's widespread use because we have no need for it, while those struggle with reading and writing are not exactly advertising their crutch.

Similarly, you will hear that financial engineering is "all they do" at Princeton, but if you go to the other 99.99% of universities where Investment Banks and hedge funds will NEVER recruit, and it is all about OR. Ever warehouse, factory and call center uses the principals of operations research. Outside of the wealthy caverns in Manhattan and Chicago, no one else in the US uses financial engineering. I am the odd case in that I graduated from Cornell and worked in finance, but drugs and a prison term after a fight left me in a new place, where I found myself working in a mattress factory. Oddly, I enjoyed it and found myself running the place a few months later (the plant, not the firm). I regret leaving. I work in a government gig that I love now. but I miss modeling games. It is cool to get paid to model out shipping and receiving, then production, then financial stuff. It is a like a game one is getting paid to play. If I had any sense I never would have left my first job out of college, but not all of us are as sophisticated as Stafford Beer. Thanks for the story. I enjoyed it.

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Gordon Weakliem's avatar

You might look at https://web.archive.org/web/20080314192927/http://www.vanillabeer.org/staffordbeer.htm

vanillabeer.org seems to be the site for his daughter, who's documented on Wikipedia as an artist. The original link no longer exists.

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