Insurances are not hedges. Hedges are „investment position[s] intended to offset potential losses or gains that may be incurred by a companion investment“ (wikipedia) of which insurances can be a part of, while in an insurance „a party agrees to compensate another party in the event of a certain loss, damage, or injury“ (wikipedia).
Absolutely not the same thing. But even so there is still an interesting insight to be gained from common parlance:
Usually we talk of a bet in a situation where you take an event that is somewhat out of your control and irrelevant for your wellbeing and intentionally and actively make some kind of material outcome for yourself depend on it. In so far speculation at stock markets is „gambly“, you are right about that. And if you have measures in place that hedge the risks of those speculations you might be tempted to very loosely call those your insurance.
If you look however at how the term insurance is typically used you can see a difference there: you insure against risks that are non-avoidable risks of your daily life or business. You do not intentionally and actively enter the cancer-lottery. And you do not actively take measures to win your „health-insurance-bet“ because the outcome is still considered catastrophic, even in case of „winning“ it.
And the way people tend to see things more as insurance vs. bets follows exactly these lines: is it about mitigating a devastating natural risk that is hard or impossible to avoid 100% or is it about something where you actively and intentionally attach your wellbeing to a random event. (We could separate this out in two questions: do you involve yourself actively and intentionally; and: is the outcome that you bet on inherently against your intrinsic interests. But that is a detail that I don‘t think we need to go into)
I think this explains the common parlance quite well: health-insurance: the risk is unavoidable, you do not willfully enter some kind of cancer-lottery on whose outcome you bet. Also you have an intrinsic interest in not „winning“ said „cancer-lottery“. -> no doubt it is insurance.
Legal expenses insurance: risks depend largely on your behaviour but you usually still have an intrinsic interest not having to use it. -> some people might see this as more gambling- or “bet-“ adjacent.
Speculating on one stock and hedging that bet. -> Totally not an insurance. Also not something insurances do. An insurance might be part of your hedge (maybe insurance of freight against loss) but insurers typically do not insure bets. Which makes sense, since part of their business-model is that the customer has an intrinsic interest that the payout case does not occur.
This whole thread started because someone essentially said “gambling is bad” and someone else said “not all gambling is bad; how about X, Y, and Z?” My point here is that if you sit down and define what gambling is in a principled and consistent way, you probably have to conclude that some good things are actually gambling. And that’s cool, because we can also then discuss what kinds of things that “maybe look like gambling” are actually a net positive vs net negative based on their impact rather than some division of “gambling” vs “not gambling” that is fairly arbitrary and leads to bias in how we think of them. You can’t have that kind of conversation if the definition of gambling includes “and it’s bad” because it’s tautological.
In specific response to your reply, I understand what you’re going for but you’re stretching definitions to meet your goals. The Wikipedia page you cite states clearly that insurance is a common hedge. And in your definition of a bet you state that it is “irrelevant for your wellbeing” as if a boxer wagers on their own fight wouldn’t be betting or gambling.
Your discussion of insurance vs bets is reasonable and I get what you’re going for, but I think the distinction is not as clear as it might seem at first. “I don’t want this payout” feels like a meaningful distinction but that Wikipedia page rears its ugly head and points out Hawking’s what-if-black-holes-aren’t-real bet that he wanted to lose. I wanted the Seahawks to win today. If I had put $50 on the Buccaneers would that have been a bet? Insurance? A hedge?
Regardless, back to my point. Maybe there is some criteria that disambiguates all the “good
Things that look like gambling but aren’t” from the “bad things that are clearly gambling” but I haven’t seen it yet. I think it’s all some level of gambling. If I roll through life without health insurance, I’m betting I don’t need it. If I buy the insurance I’m betting that at some point I will, or at least that the odds are good enough that I will that I should hedge.
When I was a teenager I made a ttf-font from the handwriting of a girl I was in love with as a gift for her. Man I underestimated that task seriously. I used some tool that was included in the Corel Draw Suite, scanned a sheet of paper on which she had written me the alphabet (in upper and in lower case) and vectorized everything by hand. It was so. Much. Work. Since then a quarter of a century has passed and it is one of those stories which leaves me amazed at the amount of naive stubborn energy of youth. I mean it was just for a birthday but I spent so much time on it and most of that time I didn't really know what I was doing. But somehow I succeeded, probably just because I didn't know any better.
I don't know what she is doing now, since we lost contact many years ago. Basically after school when I moved away to study. So no happily ever after with her, but it was absolutely worth the effort. It would never have worked out, since we were way to different, which she knew, but I – as always – took longer to understand. However it was such an important thing for me, since it was the first time that I was really confident and brave enough to be really open about my feelings and my interest. Of course it took me some time and overcoming, but in the end I was able to openly communicate to her and also not trying to play cool or hide it from my friends. I think it really was the first conscious experience for me in regards to that: to really just do the jump, be open about my feelings, take my shot and in the process make myself vulnerable. As I said, she gave me a clear "no" and I think that was for the better – not only because we came from quite different worlds but also because I still had so much to learn. However she handled all this so perfect, gracefully and appreciative: actually for me the perfect experience to learn and grow from. We stayed friends, continued to do stuff together and it never was much of a topic after a while. I still remember how after I was a bit petulant in the first time after her rejecting me and refused her offering me some of her lunch. She told me in the most respectful way that just because she said no to one thing I didn't have to say no to everything else now. Which was exactly what I needed to hear. It showed me that I hadn't lost any of her respect and that relationships with people do not have to be all or nothing, can have so many facets which can (almost) all be valuable and should be appreciated – just as she still appreciated our relationship. Although there was no happily ever after, I still like to remember all that. Today I am having my happily ever after with a very wonderful someone else. But to become the person who is having this, the whole experience with that girl was so important. I was making myself very vulnerable for the first time and it was the best fail-scenario I could ever think of and it helped me become more brave and open about myself and my feelings.
Out of pure curiousity: do your really think that would make any significant difference for voter behavior? My understanding is that one of the biggest misunderstandings of the last decade+, was that center and leftist politicians assumed it would keep people from voting against their interests if you point out the lies of the relevant politicians and how their policies actually go against their voters interests. I mean that was the whole point of the fact-checking stuff gaining traction in mainstream-media during that time: just to be mostly abolished again because people are just not interested in truth and facts as much as we like to assume. Not not at all. But not as much as we tend to think.
Please don't get me wrong, I am not trying to be sarcastic here. I would love to see a perspective – just any perspective – of how to get out of the current political situation. Not just in the US but in many other countries the same playbook is followed by authoritarians with just as much success as in the US. So if you have material or some reasoning at hand why more information for the population would make a difference on the voting behaviour I would be super-interested. Thanks in advance!
I don't know if it will make any difference. But this sort of large scale data categorization is possible only with an LLM. Previously, you probably needed dozens of people working full time to do this. Now you just have a few GPUs do it.
I have a lot more ideas that are gated by low context size, inference speed, and price per token.
The bottomline is that we don't need AGI to change the world. Just more an cheaper compute.
I have been toying with idea to make candidate chooser on what members of parliament actually voted for. That data set is pretty limited and readily available. Just get the vote record and identify key bills. No LLM needed.
Because the users pay an unrealistically low price. You aim for money and right now you make money via the investors and not the users. Would 700M people use it if they had to pay a realistic price? I doubt it.
It's not so much that it is "boolean multiplication" (because how do you define that, also because digital representation of booleans implies that integer multiplication still applies) so much as AND follows similar Laws as multiplication, in particular AND is distributive across OR in a similar way multiplication is distributive over addition. [Example: a * (b + c) <=> a * b + a * c] Because it follows similar rules, it helps with some forms of intuition of patterns when writing them with the familiar operators.
It's somewhat common in set notations to use * and + for set union and set intersection for very similar reasons. Some programming languages even use that in their type language (a union of two types is A * B and an intersection is A + B).
Interestingly, this is why Category Theory in part exists to describe the similarities between operators in mathematics such as how * and ∧ contrast/are similar. Category Theory gets a bad rap for being the origin of monads and fun phrases like "monads are a monoid in the category of endofunctors", but it also answers a few fun questions like why are * and ∧ so similar? (They are similar functions that operate in different "categories".) Admittedly that's a very rough, lay gloss on it, but it's still an interesting perspective on what people talk about when they talk about Category Theory.
Do you really need to introduce category theory for that?
Seems like overkill, abstract algebra seems sufficient to categorize both boolean logic and integer operations as having the common structure of a ring.
Of course you don't "need" to introduce category theory for that, which is why I saved it for fun at the end. I just think it is neat. It's also one of those bridges to "category theory is simpler than it sounds", which is also why I disagree with it being "overkill" in general in part because that keeps category theory in the "too complex for real needs" box, which I think is the wrong box. Which, case in point:
> […] abstract algebra seems sufficient to categorize both boolean logic and integer operations as having the common structure of a ring.
I don't think Ring Theory is any easier than Category Theory to learn/teach, I rather think that Category Theory is a subset of some of best parts of abstract algebra, especially Group Theory, boiled down to the sufficient parts to describe (among other things) practical function composition tools for computing.
I would normally interpret "Boolean multiplication" as multiplication over GF(2), where + would be XOR. This notation is fairly common when discussing things like cryptography or CRCs.
Thx for your thorough explanation! I don’t know much about these things, just thought about similarities in the algebraic properties, especially with regards to the zero-element: 0*1=0.
This and 1000 times this. It is so absurd: of course it seems ad hoc plausible to treat roughly similar things as if they were the same. However: never do this in this forum, since this is a community is looking a lot into all kinds details, so you will get called out.
But somehow – SOMEHOW – the same people that ask for nuance in everything act as if it would be even remotely plausible that the two most polar opposites of political theory would be basically the same for all important intents and purposes if thought to an end.
It is simply mind-blowing. People looking at something, seeing it is complex, stopping their thinking and just somehow feeling their way to the most empty assessment ever: "probably the same consequencesif you think it to the end". Without even having begun to think their way through it!
But I get it: thinking is nice as long as it is a purely intellectual endeavor but not if any personal moral responsibility is concerned. You might be morally obligated to draw consequences in your behavior – Heaven Forbid!
The system is eroded by the people who were brought into the position of being capable to destroy the system: by the system!. In so far: "The purpose of a system is what it does" (Stafford Beer). This should motivate us to ask what properties of the system lead to this and how we might change it.
To me it seems to be a bit like what the Böckenförde-Diktum points to, which is: "The liberal secularized state lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself."
Basically the modern capitalist secularized society is so void of deep human values and only emphasizing legality and profitability that it brings out a certain kind of elite. An elite which is decoupled from all real human connection and value leading to a thinking like this: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/05/politics/elon-musk-rogan-...
Well and now we have to cope with this. But until we understand that these elites are no accident but logical results of the system we foster, nothing will really change. Or better: until we accept that the reductionist approach to human society and value that this system is based on is flawed and act accordingly everything we do is basically just flex-taping it and waiting for the next escalation.
So it was not uncovered by doge? and it is also not simply fraud? „Every year, agency reports posted online document billions in improper payments, which include fraud but also underpayments, duplicate payments, payments to ineligible recipients or for ineligible goods or services.“ (from the article you linked)
Absolutely not the same thing. But even so there is still an interesting insight to be gained from common parlance:
Usually we talk of a bet in a situation where you take an event that is somewhat out of your control and irrelevant for your wellbeing and intentionally and actively make some kind of material outcome for yourself depend on it. In so far speculation at stock markets is „gambly“, you are right about that. And if you have measures in place that hedge the risks of those speculations you might be tempted to very loosely call those your insurance.
If you look however at how the term insurance is typically used you can see a difference there: you insure against risks that are non-avoidable risks of your daily life or business. You do not intentionally and actively enter the cancer-lottery. And you do not actively take measures to win your „health-insurance-bet“ because the outcome is still considered catastrophic, even in case of „winning“ it.
And the way people tend to see things more as insurance vs. bets follows exactly these lines: is it about mitigating a devastating natural risk that is hard or impossible to avoid 100% or is it about something where you actively and intentionally attach your wellbeing to a random event. (We could separate this out in two questions: do you involve yourself actively and intentionally; and: is the outcome that you bet on inherently against your intrinsic interests. But that is a detail that I don‘t think we need to go into)
I think this explains the common parlance quite well: health-insurance: the risk is unavoidable, you do not willfully enter some kind of cancer-lottery on whose outcome you bet. Also you have an intrinsic interest in not „winning“ said „cancer-lottery“. -> no doubt it is insurance.
Legal expenses insurance: risks depend largely on your behaviour but you usually still have an intrinsic interest not having to use it. -> some people might see this as more gambling- or “bet-“ adjacent.
Speculating on one stock and hedging that bet. -> Totally not an insurance. Also not something insurances do. An insurance might be part of your hedge (maybe insurance of freight against loss) but insurers typically do not insure bets. Which makes sense, since part of their business-model is that the customer has an intrinsic interest that the payout case does not occur.