Key graf: The recent "flash crash" might have a simple, understandable explanation, or it might not, but it, and every other large-scale financial phenomenon,

Key graf: The recent "flash crash" might have a simple, understandable explanation, or it might not, but it, and every other large-scale financial phenomenon, has to be studied with the same analytical care and lack of anthropomorphizing expectations with which you would study any other large and complex non-human phenomenon. We only understand the broadest strokes of the global climate system, are just beginning to map the precise way in which everything fits together in cells, and although we know almost every atom of every chip, developing, debugging and deploying software is equal parts science, black art, and disaster management. The global financial markets are probably not much less complex than any of those, and certainly not more human. With just a few years of experience with them, one of the few things we can say with certainty is this: we don’t understand them, and when we do, the explanation probably won’t make sense to most of us, and it won’t fit neatly in a newspaper column.