purity-2

A four-panel comic depicting a job interview. A man in a suit interviews a woman with reddish hair. He asks why she wants to go into quantitative finance, and she enthusiastically answers, "The purity!" She explains that some people go into math with practical utility, others into math with no applications at all, but she wants a field with "anti-utility" — creating trading algorithms that make money purely on speed, providing no improvement in resource allocation but still extracting wealth. The interviewer suggests, "Have you considered going into weapons development?" She objects, "But those weapons could be used for good!" — the joke being that she finds weapons too potentially useful, while quant finance is appealingly useless. In the votey aftercomic, an off-panel voice declares "You're hired!" as a large smiling face appears in the corner of an empty panel.