I disagree. I find this dialogue extremely opaque and muddled, to the point where I can’t even tell if Hornbein understands the Beornwulf character’s fallacy or not, especially given that the Aelfred character makes so many tangential or unimportant counter-arguments beyond the core fallacy about expected value*, and I doubt many readers would be enlightened by it.
* by agreeing to put a floor on the invaders’ losses, you immediately increase the expected value of future invasions, because the option of reducing a loss can be as valuable as adding to a gain, and so agreeing to the compromise may well cause future invasions; therefore, it is ‘paying a danegeld’ - even if the current invasion is a ‘net loss’ when myopically analyzed as a single game rather than the iterated game that ‘paying the danegeld’ is definitionally
I disagree. I find this dialogue extremely opaque and muddled, to the point where I can’t even tell if Hornbein understands the Beornwulf character’s fallacy or not, especially given that the Aelfred character makes so many tangential or unimportant counter-arguments beyond the core fallacy about expected value*, and I doubt many readers would be enlightened by it.
* by agreeing to put a floor on the invaders’ losses, you immediately increase the expected value of future invasions, because the option of reducing a loss can be as valuable as adding to a gain, and so agreeing to the compromise may well cause future invasions; therefore, it is ‘paying a danegeld’ - even if the current invasion is a ‘net loss’ when myopically analyzed as a single game rather than the iterated game that ‘paying the danegeld’ is definitionally