| I’m pretty sure we’re in agreement in the insurance policy part. If I buy a policy to cover my risk of death for the next X years, the insurance company uses the ensemble probability of the group to price that policy (and believes that the risk of me knowing more than them is covered by the fact they’ve factored that in, plus that they’ve insured multiple people in the group and the aggregate will be good even if 1 policy isn’t.) If I said to an insurance company — okay I want to buy a policy that only covers me for one day - they would not do it. Firstly of course the transaction costs would swamp the cost of the policy, but let’s ignore that by pretending they use some magical technological solution (digital contracts… hardy har har) The second reason they wouldn’t do it is because that’s not how their model works. It has to smooth over time. Over a year, over a lifetime - not over a day. The third reason they wouldn’t do it is because the information asymmetry now dominates. My knowledge of whether I’ll die tomorrow in particular is better than their model. I’m able to price the policy much more accurately than them. The fact I want the policy is a big red flag. (They do offer some very short term contracts such as holiday insurance — but those disclaim every imaginable pre-existing… which is out of scope for this discussion as it’s not something we can do with nuclear risk) I think we more or less agree on that stuff. Don’t we? What I’m saying about it is that just as we all know that insurance policies don’t make sense when you reduce it down to thinking about an individual person on an individual day — the nuclear war modelling doesn’t work when (the author of the article) reduces it down to saying it’s like suggesting that Putin flips a coin each morning. The most likely reason an author would pretend that the models claim such a plainly ridiculous thing is in order to ridicule the models, about a claim they did not make. In this way it is a straw man argument. They are recasting the original assertion into something that is easy to attack. It’s not a well intentioned thing to do. That’s what I’m saying about that. |