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Comment by boothead | Hacker News Reader

May I ask where your confidence in this prediction comes from?

You comment about needing the brain the size of a planet is what leads off my doubts. Its like people who say that credit swaps are too complex to understand so don't even pay attention to them. Your basically admitting you have no idea whats going on and trying to cover it up by saying its just way to complex to understand

That was a somewhat flippant comment... The guys who build the models have phds in physics plus advanced degrees in statistics and stochastic calculus etc. I understand the basics of how the system works, but due to my lack of that advanced maths education and a certain amount of secrecy I don't have every detail.

So in summary: it is too complex to understand, unless you have a very advanced education in the statistical techniques they use to build the models.

Agree, that always bothers me, hand waving under the guise that it's too complicated to be understood. It may take some time but it can always at minimum be on a high level understood. If it can't then someone is lying or hiding something.

(For example I don't have a PHD in physics but a few years of reading and following up on linear algebra, and I can hold my own in a conversation on sting theory with with a PHD Physicist).

One example, there are many:

These guys certainly knew their stuff, and they also had a system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management

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