Jane Street
Article
Jane Street is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between July 21, 2023 and April 07, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “He is an engineer, worked as a quantitative trader and researcher at Jane Street”; “I’m not talking about Google or Jane Street”; “Some say Jane Street is named after her”. It most often appears alongside China, OpenAI, Sam Altman.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 5
- Issue count: 5
- First seen: July 21, 2023
- Last seen: April 07, 2025
Appears In
- Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading
- Highlights From The Comments On “The Origin Of Woke”
- Lives Of The Rationalist Saints
- Introducing AI 2027
- Open Thread 376
Related Pages
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- OpenAI (2 shared issues)
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- Sam Altman (2 shared issues)
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- 2008 Financial Crisis (1 shared issues)
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- 2023 book review contest (1 shared issues)
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- 30-Year Mortgage (1 shared issues)
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- A.L. Barker (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Book Review Contest (1 shared issues)
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- affirmative action (1 shared issues)
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- Africa (1 shared issues)
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- African National Congress (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Tales of Icarus flying too close to the sun, where readers revel in schadenfreude, e.g., When Genius Failed. With The Laws of Trading, Agustin Lebron has written something different: part love letter to trading, part philosophical treatise on epistemology and modeling the world around us, and part guide to applied decision-making. Lebron’s Laws are Laws of the Jungle, not Laws of Nature. He views financial markets as the most competitive Darwinian environment on Earth, where participants must adapt or die. According to Lebron, the book is for people working in finance and trading, as well as anyone in the business of making rational decisions. This explicitly rationalist bent is similar to Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset or Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets. Where The Laws of Trading sets itself apart is with the best description of financial market dynamics that I’ve ever seen while diving deep into philosophical concepts. Why trust Lebron? He is an engineer, worked as a quantitative trader and researcher at Jane Street, and has a deep understanding of trading. He has what Taleb would describe as skin in the game. You and I may read Astral Codex Ten in our spare time, post on LessWrong, and navel gaze about our epistemic certainty, but at the end of the day most of us are pursuing rationality for fun, as a hobby. Traders like Lebron pursue rationality as a profession: Their livelihood depends on having a better model of the world than their competition. There are lessons to learn from them that apply to our daily lives. 1: Motivation Know why you are doing a trade before you trade. “What is trading about? Fundamentally, it’s about the relationship between you and the rest of the world.” Right now, you’re making a trade. You’re trading your time to read this book review. You have a cost: you could be spending time with your loved ones, exercising, working, sleeping. You might be hoping to learn something, to take away lessons that you can apply to your life, or simply to entertain yourself. Here, off the bat, are two key insights: We are all making trades, all of the time.
Inline links: The Laws of Trading
My admittedly anedotical 0.05$ as a generic office drone. *Every* white collar job I've heard of uses patently IQ test-like screening. I'm not talking about Google or Jane Street, I'm talking about big4 consultancies, mid-sized accounting firms etc. Places where productivity is not nearly high enough to justify resisting the acrimonious persecution Hanania posits, and that yet are happy to ask their applicants to submit Raven matrices or quirky plane geometry problems (the joke is even that the only thing those working there got out of grad school/MBA was prepping for the GMAT/GRE, since once hired they'll end up filling excels anyway).
St. Joanne of ARC had a resume so beautiful that Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk all sought her hand as employee. They became increasingly insistent that she choose one of them, and refused to take ‘no’ as an answer. She asked Paul Christiano what to do, and on his advice she called the three men together and said “I will make my decision once my simple twenty-line program finishes running”. After they agreed, she revealed that her program was calculating BusyBeaver(100), and they all admitted they were unworthy of her. She cut her hair, gave her jewelry to the poor, and joined the Alignment Research Center, where she discovered many important theorems. Some say Jane Street is named after her, although others attribute it to a St. Jane of Manhattan who is otherwise unrecorded.
Dwarkesh Patel kindly invited me and Daniel on his podcast (sponsored by Jane Street, who also sponsored SSC many years ago!) to promote and explain the scenario. I don’t usually do podcasts, and I worry I was a bit of a third wheel in this one, but I’m hoping that my celebrity will get people to pay attention to what Daniel‘s saying. Think of it as “International aid expert discusses the Ethiopian famine with concerned Hollywood actor,” with me in the role of the actor, and you won’t be disappointed.
Inline links: Jane Street
1: Thanks to everyone who commented on AI 2027 and the podcast (and special thanks to podcast sponsor Jane Street). I hope to host an AMA with the team here sometime this week or next.
Inline links: Jane Street