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> jury doesn't understand it? Everytime I hear a finance person use the excuse of 'you wouldn't understand' to a complex, I can't help but correlate it to a de

> jury doesn't understand it? Everytime I hear a finance person use the excuse of 'you wouldn't understand' to a complex, I can't help but correlate it to a developer who's obfuscated code tell another developer they wouldn't understand, without acknowledging that they obfuscated the code. I'm sure I understand, you just don't want me to because then it would be obvious you are just ripping people off to make more money for yourself / company. Kind of like how the government has used 'enhanced interrogation' rather than the common definition of torture to get around breaking the law.

unimpressive 11y ago
This sort of plausible deniability depends on there being financial instruments which are genuinely difficult to understand. I'm sure you would agree that there are in fact mechanisms and systems in computer programming which would be fairly difficult to explain quickly. Especially in terms which are anything approaching accuracy.
- collyw 11y ago
  As software professionals we (some of us take) pride in trying to build stable systems that are decoupled and not overly complex. Financial systems seem to be build the opposite way.
  - lmm 11y ago
    A finance person would probably say the exact opposite - most deals are just stacking two or three obvious, properly factored/decoupled abstractions together, whereas software people seem (to a finance person) to deliberately complicate things.
  - pjmorris 11y ago
    Richard Bookstaber makes very similar points about the financial system in 'A Demon of Our Own Design', highly recommended. When the investment banks were partnerships, the partners had plenty of 'skin in the game', and favored stable systems. Going public took the pressure off of the leadership's individual fortunes... and stability seems to have suffered.
  - VLM 11y ago
    Yet think of surviorship bias, isn't the code most likely to end up in front of a jury the hackiest, most complicated, least understandable, least documented stuff out there? Think of the VW "scandal" at what point does a piece of code go from being a really effective emissions blocker to being an illegal emissions blocker? If they implemented and trained up a neural net then what piece of code is the violator, the guy who wrote the unit tests the neural net trained on, or the evolved coefficients in the network that humans never wrote, or the manager who told them to write an emissions routine using a NN or the regulators who entrapped them by knowingly writing bad regs with the intention of the .gov selecting winners and losers by selective prosecution?
  - harryh 11y ago
    They only seem that way to you because you do not deal in finance. A system can only be as simple as the business needs it's supporting whether than be a piece of code or a financial product. Some pieces of code are VERY complex because the business demands it. Same goes for financial instruments.
    - collyw 11y ago
      Is there a real reason for them to be so complex though? "Buisness demands it" isn't really a reason for me. It clearly affects the stability of the system, so shouldn't we look at ways of improving it overall?
      - harryh 11y ago
        Well you can't just say "them." That would be like saying "is there a reason that all that software is so complicated?" There are lots and lots and lots of different reasons for all the different pieces of code in the world. Same thing for financial products.
SilasX 11y ago
It's been my experience that this is very generally true, and you don't need the "finance" qualifier: people hate having their roles demystified to the point that they often don't even try to improve their own understanding of it. Even if the person isn't greedy, they'll resent the loss of status that comes with, "wait, all you do is add entries on the CMS interface?" or "all you do is make the risks less obvious to auditors?" As Mal says, "50% of the human race is middlemen, and they don't take kindly to being eliminated."
- meatysnapper 11y ago
  We should make a up a spurious tale about an enormous stargoat eating the sun and send them on ark to colonize another planet.
  - monocasa 11y ago
    Watch out, you don't want to die of a public telephone transmitted virus.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
I wonder if a form of activism here might be to seek out Jury duty as a way to make sure the Jury does understand. To be honest I have never even thought about walking down to the Superior Court building and saying "Hi, I'm here to volunteer to be on a jury, what do you have today?"
- nicholasjarnold 11y ago
  This raises an interesting point, but neglects the fact that it's not possible (for good reason if you think about it) to simply volunteer for jury duty. In order to be eligible in most (all?) jurisdictions one must simply register to vote. Neglecting the fallacy of the presumption that one can just volunteer, it is interesting to think about the way the world might be shaped should "more educated" individuals be the ones who solely shape public policy and case law. It's not very democratic in the pure sense of the meaning, but certainly interesting as a thought experiment.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    >In order to be eligible in most (all?) jurisdictions one must simply register to vote. I've seen states at least claim that being registered to vote is not necessary to be called for jury duty. It gets a bit hand-wavy after that but supposedly they also draw from, at least, driver licenses as well.
    - 6502nerdface 11y ago
      Simply filing state income taxes as a resident is enough to get you in the (potential) jury pool for your locality, at least in NY.
- c22 11y ago
  In my experience appearing too excited about performing jury duty is a sure way to not be selected.
scott_s 11y ago
Keep in mind that in this circumstance, it's not the finance people who are claiming complexity. It appears to be the reaction from the jurors based on the case made by the prosecutors.
rayiner 11y ago
Even good, clear, code is inscrutable complexity to a lay-person. Finance is no different. To me, it's more than a little ironic how often software professionals look at what finance professionals do and ask the equivalent of "why the hell does Twitter need all this code? It's just 140 character messages!"
- ccvannorman 11y ago
  a fifteen minute conversation with a layperson about a particular code base will do just fine. "You know how a car is simple to operate, right? But you understand it has an engine and many moving parts? Well.. Twitter is just like that, and there are actually lots of small engines making sure the characters get from your keyboard to other people's eyes." > ... you just don't want me to because then it would be obvious you are just ripping people off to make more money for yourself / company. Agree. If your car pollutes more than other cars and runs on the blood of innocent consumers, hiding that in the explanation of how a regular car works is not an excuse. Anyone who says "You wouldn't understand" is hiding something. If you can't explain it to me, do you even know what the fuck you're talking about?
  - morgante 11y ago
    > Twitter is just like that, and there are actually lots of small engines making sure the characters get from your keyboard to other people's eyes." That's an abstract explanation of what Twitter's code is, it doesn't get you anywhere closer to being able to actually understand the code. Just like I wouldn't expect a layperson person to be able to find and fix a bug in a codebase, I don't think they can reliably evaluate the nuances of the financial system.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    So a guy is charged with tax accounting fraud for basically not putting some number into some entry in a spreadsheet when some external event happened, and instead putting that number into a different entry in the spreadsheet. You can't just say "you know how cars are complicated? Well so are spreadsheets. That's why this guy is guilty." Your analogy has to capture some legally-relevant dynamic of the system you are trying to explain. Imagine your case depends on proving that only a guilty person would have failed to shard a particular database. It's not enough to just explain at the highest possible level the concept of splitting up a database. You gotta get the jury to understand it enough to know why you do it, and why it would be so out of the norm to not do it in a particular situation that the person must have had a nefarious motive.
morgante 11y ago
First off, this is coming from the prosecutorial side, who has every incentive to make the case as understandable as possible. Frankly, it's not surprising that the average person can't understand complex finance and thus complex financial litigation. > Everytime I hear a finance person use the excuse of 'you wouldn't understand' to a complex, I can't help but correlate it to a developer who's obfuscated code tell another developer they wouldn't understand, without acknowledging that they obfuscated the code. The difference is that a jury is not other finance people. I don't expect jurors to understand financial crimes any more than I expect a random member of the public to understand a complex computer bug.
harryh 11y ago
I don't know about you particularly but I'm certain that there are a great many people who think that the financial system is ripping them off somehow when they really don't understand what's going on. Just look at High Frequency Trading & the Michael Lewis book. It comes up on HN every month or three and there are always people convinced that somehow these traders are "jumping in front of" other people's orders to steal their money when this is definitely not the case.
ellio 11y ago
Check out the book "The Bankers' New Clothes," which addresses the intentionally obscure language of finance

unimpressive 11y ago

This sort of plausible deniability depends on there being financial instruments which are genuinely difficult to understand. I'm sure you would agree that there are in fact mechanisms and systems in computer programming which would be fairly difficult to explain quickly. Especially in terms which are anything approaching accuracy.

collyw 11y ago
As software professionals we (some of us take) pride in trying to build stable systems that are decoupled and not overly complex. Financial systems seem to be build the opposite way.
- lmm 11y ago
  A finance person would probably say the exact opposite - most deals are just stacking two or three obvious, properly factored/decoupled abstractions together, whereas software people seem (to a finance person) to deliberately complicate things.
- pjmorris 11y ago
  Richard Bookstaber makes very similar points about the financial system in 'A Demon of Our Own Design', highly recommended. When the investment banks were partnerships, the partners had plenty of 'skin in the game', and favored stable systems. Going public took the pressure off of the leadership's individual fortunes... and stability seems to have suffered.
- VLM 11y ago
  Yet think of surviorship bias, isn't the code most likely to end up in front of a jury the hackiest, most complicated, least understandable, least documented stuff out there? Think of the VW "scandal" at what point does a piece of code go from being a really effective emissions blocker to being an illegal emissions blocker? If they implemented and trained up a neural net then what piece of code is the violator, the guy who wrote the unit tests the neural net trained on, or the evolved coefficients in the network that humans never wrote, or the manager who told them to write an emissions routine using a NN or the regulators who entrapped them by knowingly writing bad regs with the intention of the .gov selecting winners and losers by selective prosecution?
- harryh 11y ago
  They only seem that way to you because you do not deal in finance. A system can only be as simple as the business needs it's supporting whether than be a piece of code or a financial product. Some pieces of code are VERY complex because the business demands it. Same goes for financial instruments.
  - collyw 11y ago
    Is there a real reason for them to be so complex though? "Buisness demands it" isn't really a reason for me. It clearly affects the stability of the system, so shouldn't we look at ways of improving it overall?
    - harryh 11y ago
      Well you can't just say "them." That would be like saying "is there a reason that all that software is so complicated?" There are lots and lots and lots of different reasons for all the different pieces of code in the world. Same thing for financial products.

SilasX 11y ago

It's been my experience that this is very generally true, and you don't need the "finance" qualifier: people hate having their roles demystified to the point that they often don't even try to improve their own understanding of it. Even if the person isn't greedy, they'll resent the loss of status that comes with, "wait, all you do is add entries on the CMS interface?" or "all you do is make the risks less obvious to auditors?" As Mal says, "50% of the human race is middlemen, and they don't take kindly to being eliminated."

meatysnapper 11y ago
We should make a up a spurious tale about an enormous stargoat eating the sun and send them on ark to colonize another planet.
- monocasa 11y ago
  Watch out, you don't want to die of a public telephone transmitted virus.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

I wonder if a form of activism here might be to seek out Jury duty as a way to make sure the Jury does understand. To be honest I have never even thought about walking down to the Superior Court building and saying "Hi, I'm here to volunteer to be on a jury, what do you have today?"

nicholasjarnold 11y ago
This raises an interesting point, but neglects the fact that it's not possible (for good reason if you think about it) to simply volunteer for jury duty. In order to be eligible in most (all?) jurisdictions one must simply register to vote. Neglecting the fallacy of the presumption that one can just volunteer, it is interesting to think about the way the world might be shaped should "more educated" individuals be the ones who solely shape public policy and case law. It's not very democratic in the pure sense of the meaning, but certainly interesting as a thought experiment.
- ghaff 11y ago
  >In order to be eligible in most (all?) jurisdictions one must simply register to vote. I've seen states at least claim that being registered to vote is not necessary to be called for jury duty. It gets a bit hand-wavy after that but supposedly they also draw from, at least, driver licenses as well.
  - 6502nerdface 11y ago
    Simply filing state income taxes as a resident is enough to get you in the (potential) jury pool for your locality, at least in NY.
c22 11y ago
In my experience appearing too excited about performing jury duty is a sure way to not be selected.

scott_s 11y ago

Keep in mind that in this circumstance, it's not the finance people who are claiming complexity. It appears to be the reaction from the jurors based on the case made by the prosecutors.

rayiner 11y ago

Even good, clear, code is inscrutable complexity to a lay-person. Finance is no different. To me, it's more than a little ironic how often software professionals look at what finance professionals do and ask the equivalent of "why the hell does Twitter need all this code? It's just 140 character messages!"

ccvannorman 11y ago
a fifteen minute conversation with a layperson about a particular code base will do just fine. "You know how a car is simple to operate, right? But you understand it has an engine and many moving parts? Well.. Twitter is just like that, and there are actually lots of small engines making sure the characters get from your keyboard to other people's eyes." > ... you just don't want me to because then it would be obvious you are just ripping people off to make more money for yourself / company. Agree. If your car pollutes more than other cars and runs on the blood of innocent consumers, hiding that in the explanation of how a regular car works is not an excuse. Anyone who says "You wouldn't understand" is hiding something. If you can't explain it to me, do you even know what the fuck you're talking about?
- morgante 11y ago
  > Twitter is just like that, and there are actually lots of small engines making sure the characters get from your keyboard to other people's eyes." That's an abstract explanation of what Twitter's code is, it doesn't get you anywhere closer to being able to actually understand the code. Just like I wouldn't expect a layperson person to be able to find and fix a bug in a codebase, I don't think they can reliably evaluate the nuances of the financial system.
- rayiner 11y ago
  So a guy is charged with tax accounting fraud for basically not putting some number into some entry in a spreadsheet when some external event happened, and instead putting that number into a different entry in the spreadsheet. You can't just say "you know how cars are complicated? Well so are spreadsheets. That's why this guy is guilty." Your analogy has to capture some legally-relevant dynamic of the system you are trying to explain. Imagine your case depends on proving that only a guilty person would have failed to shard a particular database. It's not enough to just explain at the highest possible level the concept of splitting up a database. You gotta get the jury to understand it enough to know why you do it, and why it would be so out of the norm to not do it in a particular situation that the person must have had a nefarious motive.

morgante 11y ago

First off, this is coming from the prosecutorial side, who has every incentive to make the case as understandable as possible. Frankly, it's not surprising that the average person can't understand complex finance and thus complex financial litigation. > Everytime I hear a finance person use the excuse of 'you wouldn't understand' to a complex, I can't help but correlate it to a developer who's obfuscated code tell another developer they wouldn't understand, without acknowledging that they obfuscated the code. The difference is that a jury is not other finance people. I don't expect jurors to understand financial crimes any more than I expect a random member of the public to understand a complex computer bug.

harryh 11y ago

I don't know about you particularly but I'm certain that there are a great many people who think that the financial system is ripping them off somehow when they really don't understand what's going on. Just look at High Frequency Trading & the Michael Lewis book. It comes up on HN every month or three and there are always people convinced that somehow these traders are "jumping in front of" other people's orders to steal their money when this is definitely not the case.

ellio 11y ago

Check out the book "The Bankers' New Clothes," which addresses the intentionally obscure language of finance