Weird how when I model risks in the world, I'm like zombies, asteroids, pandemics, climate apocalypse, grimdark only war... but when I model personal lifestyle risk, I'm like inflation, savings level/rate, NPV of future income, portfolio return rate... 🧐
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There is possibly an impedance mismatch in my thinking 🧐🧐
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How do you connect up the former kind of model to latter kind of model...? What is the inflation impact of zombies?
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Kidding aside, there's a real gap here. Typically, the reinsurance sector is the main bridge between dramatic, discontinuous scenario-shift risks and quantitative, continuous in-scenario risks. So for eg. now reinsurance are starting to ditch fossil fuels
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In-scenario risk mitigation is mainly about managing financial assets. Out-of-scenario risk mitigation is mainly material assets, relationship assets, and capability assets, in that order.
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If the world gets slightly bad, you need money. If it gets very bad, you need stuff more than money. If it gets really bad, you need relationships more than stuff. If it gets really, really bad, you need capabilities like zombie killing. If it gets worse than that you die.
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This is not a bad way to model risk regimes actually, based on the primary asset of value. Money regimes, stuff regimes, people regimes, skill regimes. You assign probabilities to scenarios in each, and allocate your risk management efforts across those 4 asset classes.
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For eg if you think there are no slightly bad futures, and it's all very bad or worse, you should ditch all financial assets and invest in material stuff, relationships, and skills. Basically retreat to a an off-grid commune.
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Realistically, looking at my revealed preferences, I seem to currently think 99% futures are slightly bad at worst, but I'm trying to shift my resources in ways that suggest 80% slightly bad, 15% very bad, 5% really bad, 0% really, really bad
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This is ignoring upside scenarios... risk management is about planning for the downsides. I'd say my upside:downside ratio has been roughly 50-50 in the last few years. Used to be more like 70-30 before Great Weirding. So somewhat more pessimistic.
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Note that this kinda thing is of course necessarily personal, since your age and ability to participate in upsides and avoid the downsides vary based on who you are. If you're an infirm 80y old with no family when war breaks out, you're kinda in deeper shit than young, fit guy
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If the world has been trashed to shit by multiple omni-crises but suddenly someone discovers fusion, hyperspace travel, and multiple Eden planets to migrate to... but you're on your deathbed, you can't participate in the big upside scenario
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Re: upside, in a way, almost by definition, an across-the-board upside scenario doesn't need modeling since it creates abundance and allows you to live more in the present without planning. Scenarios are a tool of scarcity anticipations.
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"He chose money over power...Money is the McMansion in Sarasota that starts falling apart after ten years. Power is the old stone building that stands for centuries. I cannot respect someone who doesn’t see the difference." -- Frank Underwood
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Money only easily gets converted to power in the times of great stability. twitter.com/vgr/status/150…
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Power embodiment scale:
Very stable world: Power = money
Slightly unstable world: Power = Mansion
Very unstable world: Power = Friends
Very, very unstable world: Power = knowing how to kill 3 people with a pencil like John Wick
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This thread inspired by a spreadsheet scenario model I've been building this morning to analyze some personal life financial strategery. Interestingly, the cost function I ended up with in the model was "number of unfunded years"
The best cost functions all have units of time
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Time is the best cost function for almost everything.
Money is the second-best cost function for almost everything.
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Just had a thought: money is the second-best reason to do anything. It felt familiar and searching… yeah I asserted a complementary idea 2 years ago. twitter.com/vgr/status/115…
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