Astral Codex Ten had me curled up on the floor in stitches ….
Man, it’s been a crazy few months. You hear I quit my job at Google and founded a fintech startup?”
“No! What do you do?”
“War insurance!”
“War insurance?”
“Yeah. We pay out if there’s a war.”
“Isn’t that massively correlated risk?”
“Yeah. The idea is, we sell war insurance to companies who do badly if there’s a war - tourist attractions and the like. Then we sell the same amount of peace insurance to military contractors. As long as we get the probabilities and costs right, we make the same profit either way.”
“Neat idea, how’s it going?”
“Great! Ayatollah Khameini just bought a ten billion dollar policy.”
“Of the war version or the peace version?”
“Can’t say, confidentiality agreement.”