I don't work in finance because I'm currently in university, but I may work in finance after I graduate. I might get a CFA charter and work at a hedge fund. One draw of working in finance is the earning potential.
For me, the appeal of a lot of money seems to be three things: I want enough money so that (1) I never have to worry about my own personal financials, (2) I can do a lot of optimal philanthropy, and (3) can fund my intellectual goals, like writing and publishing a book.
Those are the top three that come to mind. Given all we know about introspection, it's very unlikely those three are the whole story. But I think it's at least somewhat accurate.
Also, as thomblake points out, I can certainly find uses from arbitrarily large amounts of wealth. I suppose there's a theoretical limit at which the marginal utility of an extra dollar is less than the marginal utility of the time I give up to earn it. But I certainly haven't reach it yet. If your friends have, I want to know where they work so I can apply.
I suppose there's a theoretical limit at which the marginal utility of an extra dollar is less than the marginal utility of the time I give up to earn it. But I certainly haven't reach it yet. If your friends have, I want to know where they work so I can apply.
This depends on one's utility function... and all the cognitive mistakes they make evaluating it.
For someone who feels their free time is very important (even if they later waste it procrastinating online) and who has covered their basic expenses and can't imagine an attractive enough use of a mar...
The other day, someone did something I didn't expect. It was something many people have done before; something that I thought of as very normal, but that I in no way understood and had not predicted.
As I said, this had happened many time before, so I wrote it off as "me not understanding people" or "people are weird" for a second, like I usually do, before realizing that "bad at" really means "lacking basic knowledge", which I had never realized before.
And then I thought "I should ask someone who is different from me why people do that, and eventually someone will have an answer."
But many people will have many more questions like this. So, what have you observed people doing time and time again, but never understood? Or something that you only understood after a long time or asking someone about it?
And can Less Wrong tell us, not necessarily why (I for one can make up evolutionary psychology fairy tales all day if I want) but what conscious thought process occurs behind these events?