Risk in finance and in board games

I find it endlessly fascinating how risk is treated differently in finance, and in board games.

In finance, investments with higher risk usually also have higher average payoffs.  This indicates that risk has negative value which offsets the higher payoffs.  This makes sense, because after all, we like our security.  If you want to mitigate your risk, you can buy insurance, but note that insurance has a negative average payoff; insurance companies still need to make money.

In board games, risk may have positive value.  For the record, I'm thinking of the game I play most often, Dominion, but it works for any board game that has a blend of chance and decision-making, and which has an ongoing score to keep track of who is winning.  That's because in a board game, you don't really care about your average score.  You care about your likelihood of winning.

In a game, if you take a big risk and lose big, then all that happens is you lose until the next game.  If you take a risk and win big, then you beat out your opponent and win the game.  Flipping a coin to determine whether you win or not doesn't seem like a good deal at first, because at most it gives you even chances.  But the key point is that if you are already behind in the game, then you had less than even chances to begin with.

If you're losing, risk has positive value because it evens out your chances.  If you're winning, risk has negative value also because it evens out your chances.

If you're already winning, you want to play conservatively, and you might even sacrifice some of your average score to play safer (just like in finance).  If you're already losing, you want to play riskily, and you might even sacrifice some of your average score to increase your risk.

There is a slight complication that many people often care about their average score rather than their win percentage.  Even if you lost the game, having a higher score indicates that it was a "close game".  And if you have a very low score, that might indicate that you played poorly, not that you took a big risk and happened to lose.  So even in a board game, what counts as "good play" can be subjective, as some people value high scores while other people value winning.

Tying back to finance, for some one-percenters, it's not the money that matters (since they already have enough to live well), but how much status and power they have relative to other elites.  So perhaps there is also a realm in finance where "winning" is what matters the most.

In which I am mean to trolls

Recently, I got one of my first trolls since the comments RSS feed went down.  It was rather amusing.

They were saying, asexuality is bullshit.  So I responded in a particularly mean way: I asked them to explain their opinions, and then justify them with reasoned arguments.  It's funny because your average troll doesn't know how to offer reasoned arguments for shit.  This particular troll didn't even seem to understand why it was necessary.

A little background.  Given that my blog is not that widely read, and does not have particularly active comment sections, I generally don't attract trolls.   The trolls that I do attract, are typically wayward googlers (as I tend to think of them) who found some old page in my archives on the second page of some search term I don't care about.  Usually they're just incensed by the topic and don't respond in any way to what I wrote.

Before, other people could theoretically see the trolls' comments via the "recent comments" on the sidebar or following the comments RSS feed.  There weren't many readers tracking comments in the first place, but now that these features are broken, the only person who can possibly see the trolls' comments is me, because I alone have access to the moderation queue.  If the trolls are trying to get attention, they are doing it in about the least effective way possible.

In short, the only trolls I get are the ones who are thoroughly incompetent.

There are basically four reasons why I might care about a person's opinion:

1. The person has power.
2. I care about the person.
3. The opinion is backed up by arguments.
4. The opinion is succinct, eloquent, novel, or otherwise intrinsically interesting.

In the case of incompetent rando trolls, they don't have power, I don't care about them, they are too incompetent to argue, and too tedious to be interesting.  I like to poke at them until they either make coherent arguments or realize they've been wasting their time all along.

Of course, I'm much nicer to commenters who don't appear to be trolling.  Even when commenters don't offer supporting arguments for points of disagreement, I at least tend to care about their opinions by #2.