I’m too dumb to understand this post. It seems to start with some reasonable math (though the switch from per-season to per-voyage calculations makes it unnecessarily obtuse), but then introduces a bunch of names participants in a way that it’s hard to tell if they’re unreliable and incorrect or intended to be making valid points that the author assumes the reader doesn’t understand.
Is it sufficient to understand that insurance only applies to the transactional monetary level, and most of the post was about other levels and considerations? Or that the characters didn’t MAKE any clear arguments, just some noises about modeling that doesn’t obviously apply to the question at hand (how to share/smooth the risk of variable but overall-profitable actions)?
the idea is that if we understand insurance, it should be easy to tell if the characters’ arguments are sound-and-valid, or not.
Umm, the difficulty was even understanding what the arguments are. At first glance, they are mostly irrelevant to the proposal (of an insurance pool among voyage-financiers).
The characters don’t live in a world where sharing or smoothing risk is already seen as a consensus-valuable pursuit; thus, they will have to be convinced by other means.
I gave their world weirdly advanced [from our historical perspective] game theory to make it easier for them to talk about the question.
I’m too dumb to understand this post. It seems to start with some reasonable math (though the switch from per-season to per-voyage calculations makes it unnecessarily obtuse), but then introduces a bunch of names participants in a way that it’s hard to tell if they’re unreliable and incorrect or intended to be making valid points that the author assumes the reader doesn’t understand.
Not to be too cheeky, the idea is that if we understand insurance, it should be easy to tell if the characters’ arguments are sound-and-valid, or not.
The obtuse bit at the beginning was an accidental by-product of how I wrote it; I admittedly nerdsniped myself trying to find the right formula.
Is it sufficient to understand that insurance only applies to the transactional monetary level, and most of the post was about other levels and considerations? Or that the characters didn’t MAKE any clear arguments, just some noises about modeling that doesn’t obviously apply to the question at hand (how to share/smooth the risk of variable but overall-profitable actions)?
Umm, the difficulty was even understanding what the arguments are. At first glance, they are mostly irrelevant to the proposal (of an insurance pool among voyage-financiers).
The characters don’t live in a world where sharing or smoothing risk is already seen as a consensus-valuable pursuit; thus, they will have to be convinced by other means.
I gave their world weirdly advanced [from our historical perspective] game theory to make it easier for them to talk about the question.