So I've recently been digging into quantitative finance and learning as much as I can about the field. After doing this for a little bit and really getting a good sense for the landscape, I had a pretty startling realization...

Quants, as a collective group, are the most intelligent group of people on the planet.

I'm talking about real quants, like RenTech and Jane Street, not the wanna be hedge funds and finance bros who think running a linear regression on price is hardcore quant shit. Even within finance the real quants are set apart from their peers in investment banking, hedge funds etc.

This is pretty alarming, that as a species we have allocated our brightest minds to the pursuit of capital allocation and asset prices. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those leftist cucks who thinks Finance people are "stealing money", or they "don't deserve it". Rather my concern is the huge opportunity cost from all of our smartest people working on finance, instead of the broader STEM landscape. Pretty much any of the top quants could go into any STEM field and produce top tier research.

To put my concerns concretely into a question...

Do you think the value added from Quantitative finance outweighs the value humanity would have collectively gained from having Quants work on science and technology instead?