Consider the following

Those are weak examples. The counterpart to Brin is Zuckerberg who's a programmer but haven't shown any flashes of brilliance in math or CS; the counterpart to Gates is Ellison (of Oracle) who certainly understands databases but again, not a genius in math or CS; the counterparts to Simons are a large number of hedge fund founders (e.g. Ray Dalio); and the obvious counterpart to Munger is Warren Buffett himself.

What "major disadvantages" do you have in mind? Brilliant mathematicians are rarely wealthy or enjoy high social status.

Is there any particular reason to focus on anecdotes and not focus on the percentage of millionaires who have specific degrees?

http://time100.time.com/2013/11/11/these-are-the-most-popular-college-degrees-earned-by-millionaires/ gives for example a list.

First, I'd predict that much of the observed correlation between technical proficiency and wealth is just because both of them require some innate smarts. In general, I'm suspicious of claims that some field develops "transferable reasoning abilities", partly because people keep using that to rationalize their fiction-reading or game-playing or useless college degrees. I'm worried that math and physics and theoretical CS are just nerd-snipery / intellectual porn, and we're trying to justify spending time on them by pretending they're in line with our "higher" values (like improving the world), not only with our "lower" values (like intellectual enjoyment).

Second, if technical proficiency does build transferable reasoning ability, I'd expect the overall benefit to be small, much smaller than from, say, spending that time working on whatever contributes most to your goals (which will usually not be building technical proficiency, because the space of all actions is big). You should always be trying to take the optimal action, not a random "beneficial" action, or else you'll spend your time mowing lawns for $10/hour.

Edit: I think this comment is too hostile. Sorry. I do agree that learning technical skills is often worthwhile.

I can't give a brief justification for this, but I have good reason to believe that the ~10000x+ differential in net worth comes in large part from the people having had unusually good opportunities to conducive to becoming very technically proficient, that resulted in them developing transferable reasoning abilities and having had an intellectually elite peer group to learn from.

Either it's a hunch, or you should try to provide the justification.

My counterargument to this claim is summed up by the Dilbert cartoon. For every Gates/Simon/Brin, there are hundreds of technically adept but socially naive Dilberts who are working for dumb pointy-haired bosses.

I wonder if there's useful research on this.

Graduates of elite law schools are mostly "intellectually gifted people who haven't developed very strong technical ability." How do you think most of them would achieve better life outcomes by developing such an ability? Keep in mind that most of them are relatively much better at verbal and social stuff than math.

Bill Gates took Math 55 as a freshman at Harvard, which is the class designed for the most mathematically talented students at Harvard. During his sophomore year he did research which he later published a paper on with well known theoretical computer science professor Christos Papadimitriou.

Bill Gates's father was an antitrust lawyer (focusing on the corporate, rather than government, side), and Gates is proficient at poker--the calculational, strategic, and human elements. Those seem stronger influences on his being able to create a monopolistic software juggernaut and get the better of his counterparties in several critical deals.

As Leo Atreides puts it, "A Mentat Duke would be formidable indeed." But merely being a mentat is not enough! One must also train to be a duke, which is likely the harder part to convince this crowd of.

I think you mean income, not social class. An academic mathematician might have higher social status but lower income than they would as a startup founder, for example.

I can't give a brief justification for this, but I have good reason to believe that the ~10000x+ differential in net worth comes in large part from the people having had unusually good opportunities to conducive to becoming very technically proficient

I would think this would be obvious. Social class and life situations are a big freaking deal.

Do you mean high IQ with "intellectually gifted" or something else?

Certainly this is true for some "theoretically gifted" people. But others do indeed have little to no "technical ability". The "Grothendieck prime" is an extreme example of it, but there are many accounts of the genius theorists told to stay out of the labs, or else.

It is worthwhile for any "intellectually gifted people who haven't developed very strong technical ability in a quantitative subject" to give it an honest try, but not to be too surprised if they find themselves lacking.

I just wanted to mention that your last few posts have been very nice. You have clearly worked on exposition, and it has paid off.

I became interested in this sequence after your first post on mathematical ability, and I'm glad to see you factoring your ideas into digestible pieces and writing them up.

My impression significantly differs, though I'm far from confident. I'd be interested in seeing an expanded version of this point because it seems potentially very valuable to me.

If your claim about the difference between having training in a mathematical field and not having it or are you talking about the difference between people with strong achievements in those domains vs. those that don't have them?

Sorry, this was an useless post so now it's gone