I love the discussion on this topic. Classic HN. A bunch of pretty smart people throwing out claims and arguing assertions with no evidence or even an inkling of how they could justify their claims.

Perhaps this topic is especially suited to these types of arguments as economics and financial instruments _seem_ to follow some sort of intuition. The problem is that you can have lots of ideas about what causes something but unless you can build a model that seems to reflect the world properly and then introduce your change and see if it results in the outcome you expected, you have no idea if it is even close to possibly true.

Arguing off intuition is fun and could even give you some ideas but it is ultimately pointless if you don’t test your intuition and correct it if you are off.