Great essay Amit. My Stanford Financial Engineering students could stochastic program their asses off for the VCs on Sand Hill Rd. But I do not think fake mastery over randomness is necessarily the answer, when WS quants merely use it to create the illusions of risk elimination. Recall how CAPM used Ito Calculus (real rocket science) to price the the impossible and create the downfall of LTCM, and then 2008 Crisis (which remains unresolved) Quants gotta quant, but until we stop them from creating a quadrillion in derivatives, we are all fucked in the end.