Financial Network Topology | Hacker News Reader

Financial Network Topology

streetwiseprofessor.com

39 pointsrargulati7 comments

This applies to financial network topographic analysis that old reformer adage... "If one comes upon a gate and wishes to clear it away, I first ask them what purpose the gate may serve? If they can not answer that, then they are not ready to remove the gate." There seems to be a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt around making sweeping changes to the financial system based on this recent, and perhaps not fully tested, theory.

I'm not a fan of that quote. It's actually quite common for the gate's purpose to have been forgotten or for the gate to be some pathological emergent side effect of something else. Not everything is necessary or rational. In old systems there is often a huge amount of "cruft" that simply does not need to be there.

Edit: I do believe trying to explain the reason for a thing is a worthwhile exercise, but failure to do so does not prove a thing's value.

My way of expressing the same thing would be something like this (I'm not sure if it is an improvement, though):

Old methods are not automatically bad because you don't understand them or why they are used. New methods are not automatically good.

If you want to change something, try to prove both that your change isn't worse in any important way and that is notably better in some meaningful way. Understanding where the original method came from helps you prove the right things.

And that is the root of the article's thesis: the current regulator has basically said that if we had technology X back in 2007, none of this would have happened; this idea is a dangerous presumption against the adaptability of the system based in partial models.

That title only makes sense in English if you manage to read to the bottom 2 paragraphs of the linked article.

Word salad...

We updated the submission title to be less link-baity, but we're open to suggestions for a better one.

Financial Network Topology and "Women of System": A Dangerous Combination.

The longer article, I finally figured out that "women of system" was a phrase quote. It's just not clear without quotes what those linguistic pieces were all doing in conjunction with the other words.

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