> Most social media characterize finance as some ethical vice or organized political power structure - and those people simply don't understand finance.
Just because quantitative analysis has solid grounding doesn't mean that its use is unrelated to ethics. The finance establishment is an organized power structure whose decisions are political.
If you want an analogy, I'm pretty sure that you'll find plenty of people who used ballistics to achieve goals that you would find pretty unethical.
That can also be said for nearly all specializations/ventures of us humans, right? Physics (nukes), chemistry (explosives and refined sugars), electronics engineering ("engagement optimization"), biology (human experiments maybe), philosophy (started many wars), etc. There doesn't seem to be many things where we haven't corrupted in some way. Everything is about ethics and politics(?)
Just because quantitative analysis has solid grounding doesn't mean that its use is unrelated to ethics. The finance establishment is an organized power structure whose decisions are political.
If you want an analogy, I'm pretty sure that you'll find plenty of people who used ballistics to achieve goals that you would find pretty unethical.