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Comment by crimsonalucard | Hacker News Reader

None taken. The person I am trying to refute also didn't offer anything substantial either. I'm not a finance guy because it's complex so I can't point to specific examples of things that are unnecessary.

What I can point to is that when humans create systems that abstract we tend to make things unnecessarily complex. Our software is a perfect example. Statistically if most of the software we create suffers from this phenomenon how likely is it that our finance (which is also a very abstract system) suffers from it as well? Answer: Very likely.

If you want specific examples. The sub prime mortgage crisis was caused by a finance concept called a CDO that was so complex people could hide garbage assets away from view. Tax law (which is also a part of finance) is so complex corporations can find unintended loopholes that benefit them and harm the economy.

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Well to be fair, the person who responded to you gave just as much substance as you did in your initial post.

It just sounds like you are stretching a bit - you've admitted that you're not a finance guy so it seems likely that you don't fully understand the reasons for why financial systems might be as complex as they are.

Sure, there probably are some areas that could be structured more efficiently (guessing here) but it also seems just as likely that there are many areas that are complex but for good reason.

If you studied the history of finance. Financial instruments are invented adhoc. They are not made or created as part of a grand design.

For example the theory on how banking came about or how we use paper cash to represent wealth was literally an organic concept that slowly came to be over time. People needed to store grain, so someone formed a grain storage business that gave out paper certificates as proof of storage... people started trading those certificates as if it was cash... the storage business owner realized he could just print out those certificates and loan it out... hence the creation of banking and loaning...

That's the basic idea behind how banking formed organically. It is complex not by design but by evolution.

If you studied machine learning and genetic algorithms you'll know that natural selection and random walk does not always lead to the most optimal minimum and your walk will spend a lot of time wandering the entire space of possibilities before converging on a possible sub optimal solution. Finance is such a walk. Random designs eliminated by natural selection. We are more than likely in the middle of this random walk heading towards a solution that like all of our software is more than likely a sub optimal minimum.

Nobody needs to understand finance completely to know this. They just need an understanding of the properties of the real world in general. Finance IS overly complex you and I don't need to be experts in finance to know this.

Why are you spending so much time arguing this point to anonymous persons online?

My goal in life is to prove the internet wrong.

Seriously, I don’t know why. Because I’m human? And humans do illogical things?

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