Following The Flow

There's always a good argument to be made for and against the technical jargon that exists in almost every domain with sufficient complexity and specialisation.

Origins of such go back arguably to historic times where initiates were given secret knowledge as a way to "separate" non-initiates from those deemed worthy of the inner circle.

This pattern repeats across guilds, priesthoods, and professional classes throughout history. I think there's a dual purpose to such barrier to entry, which are preserving genuinely complex knowledge and maintaining social gatekeeping. For the most part, it can be a tough task on how often we can't tell where one purpose ends and the other begins.

I may have mentioned it before that of all the domains I've peeked at so far, financial jargon is what twists my mind the most, specifically this aspect of building a complicated system out of a simple exchange mechanism with seemingly many layers that no single person can understand the totality of the system inside out.

I think it's an interesting observation to ponder on how the extent of which humans are geniuses is in equal proportion to whatever not being a genius is.

I see it as two sides of the same coin, so in practice it doesn't really take much to flip the coin from one side to another, that's why I keep the hope alive that despite how all of the craziness that we are immersed in, it will only take a few directed moves to shift everything back to sanity.

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Right under my nose

But I digress. Back to financial jargon. In practice, it does seem to me that the understanding of finance on a basic level is relegated to an afterthought. The forethought in this case is what the practical manifestation of finance is, i.e money. How to make it and then from there spend/save/invest it.

I'm not sure if this is wholly intentional or just a byproduct of the financial jargon that exists to both obscure and protect the uninitiated from making costly mistakes in systems they don't understand. Who knows, it could be an element of both, with the latter acting as the symptom and the former a cost for maintaining the complexity that serves those already fluent in the language.

But I do like and found it useful the analogy of money as basically energy, and I'll add that it flows within a defined structure, since there exists a system of channels, reservoirs, and gates that direct its movement.

Now, energy seeks equilibrium. It flows from high concentration to low, finds the path of least resistance, transforms but never disappears.

Money behaves similarly within its economic structures, and an obvious question for me that I keep going back to look into is who designs those structures, controls the gates, and benefits from the particular flow patterns that emerge?

Spiderweb

Sometimes, there are different parties involved who can work together when incentives are aligned without getting into direct conflict, which adds another layer of complexity.

The more elaborate an architecture is, the more points of failure exist, and also more dependent the whole system becomes on specialized knowledge to maintain it.

A rather unfortunate part is once enough complexity exists, simplification becomes almost impossible because too many interests depend on the current configuration.

Hopeful part however is underneath all that wrapping, the basics remain simple. I give you this, you give me that at the core. Two parties trading goods/services they value differently. Everything else built on top of this foundation is architecture.

So the goal if there's one is to go thoroughly through the complexity to find the simple mechanisms at work, which then gives the elaborate superstructure a less intimidating and more transparent terrain to operate on.


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