Hacker News Reader

Accidentally bad math or intentionally bad math? I recall the great article posted here, written by the self identified godfather of the software to slice and repackage risk. And I always wondered, did he understand the difference between correlated and uncorrelated probabilities?

View on HN

Good call. There is plenty of blame to go around. The models the quants used served their purpose of recording "profits" "right now". I think being short sighted was intentional or at least "unconsciously intentional".

Yes, "They either didn't understand that, or intentionally ignored the possibility that, the random variables they were working with would eventually be correlated" is great summary of math BS for laymen.

However, I think that the "art" of the whole affair was looking at a domain just complex enough that even they themselves couldn't sure whether they were lying or just "being clever".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com