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> Back in the 1500s shipping insurance was priced under the assumption that if you just learned enough about the voyage you could tell for certain whether it w

> Back in the 1500s shipping insurance was priced under the assumption that if you just learned enough about the voyage you could tell for certain whether it would be successful or not. Do you have a source on that? That sounds very unlikely to me. People just have to look at a single storm to see that it sometimes destroys some ships and does not destroy others. It is very clearly has a luck component. How could have anyone (at any time really) believe that "if you just learned enough about the voyage you could tell for certain whether it would be successful or not"?

kqr 2y ago
Okay, that was an oversimplification. I have long wanted to write more on this but it never comes out right. What they did was determine the outcome with certainty barring the will of God or similar weasels. I.e. they did thorough investigations and then determined whether the shipment ought to be successful or not, and then the rest laid in the hands of deities or nature, in ways they assumed were incalculable. This normative perspective of what the future ought to be like is typical of statistical illiteracy. I'll get back to you on sources after dinner!
- kqr 2y ago
  I think I got most of this from Willful Ignorance (Weisberg, 2014) but it was a while since I read it (and this was before I made more detailed notes) so I might be misremembering. There are what looks like fantastic books on the early days of probability and statistics aside from Weisberg (Ian Hacking is an author that comes to mind, and maybe Stephen Stigler?) but I have not yet taken the time to read them – I'll read more and write something up on this some day. But statistical understanding is such a recent phenomenon that we have been able to document its rise fairly well[1] which is fascinating in and of itself. [1]: And yet we don't know basic stuff like when the arithmetic mean became an acceptable way to aggregate data. Situations that obviously (to our eyes) call for an arithmetic mean in the 1630s were resolved some other way (often midrange, mode, or just a hand-picked observation that seemed somehow representative) and then suddenly in the 1680s we have this letter to a newspaper which uses the arithmetic mean as if it was the obvious thing to do and then its usage is relatively well documented after that. From what I understand we don't know what happened between 1630 and 1680 to cause this change in acceptance!
  - krisoft 2y ago
    Thank you for the reference!
  - isaacfrond 2y ago
    Could it be related to Huygens publication in 1657? (De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae)
marcus0x62 2y ago
Somewhat related, but very detailed, is the book Against the Gods[0] by Peter Bernstein that documents the historical development of understanding probability and risk. It also discusses what people believed before these concepts were understood. 0 - https://www.amazon.com/Against-Gods-Remarkable-Story-Risk/dp/0471295639/ https://www.amazon.com/Against-Gods-Remarkable-Story-Risk/dp...

kqr 2y ago

Okay, that was an oversimplification. I have long wanted to write more on this but it never comes out right. What they did was determine the outcome with certainty barring the will of God or similar weasels. I.e. they did thorough investigations and then determined whether the shipment ought to be successful or not, and then the rest laid in the hands of deities or nature, in ways they assumed were incalculable. This normative perspective of what the future ought to be like is typical of statistical illiteracy. I'll get back to you on sources after dinner!

kqr 2y ago
I think I got most of this from Willful Ignorance (Weisberg, 2014) but it was a while since I read it (and this was before I made more detailed notes) so I might be misremembering. There are what looks like fantastic books on the early days of probability and statistics aside from Weisberg (Ian Hacking is an author that comes to mind, and maybe Stephen Stigler?) but I have not yet taken the time to read them – I'll read more and write something up on this some day. But statistical understanding is such a recent phenomenon that we have been able to document its rise fairly well[1] which is fascinating in and of itself. [1]: And yet we don't know basic stuff like when the arithmetic mean became an acceptable way to aggregate data. Situations that obviously (to our eyes) call for an arithmetic mean in the 1630s were resolved some other way (often midrange, mode, or just a hand-picked observation that seemed somehow representative) and then suddenly in the 1680s we have this letter to a newspaper which uses the arithmetic mean as if it was the obvious thing to do and then its usage is relatively well documented after that. From what I understand we don't know what happened between 1630 and 1680 to cause this change in acceptance!
- krisoft 2y ago
  Thank you for the reference!
- isaacfrond 2y ago
  Could it be related to Huygens publication in 1657? (De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae)

marcus0x62 2y ago

Somewhat related, but very detailed, is the book Against the Gods[0] by Peter Bernstein that documents the historical development of understanding probability and risk. It also discusses what people believed before these concepts were understood. 0 - https://www.amazon.com/Against-Gods-Remarkable-Story-Risk/dp/0471295639/ https://www.amazon.com/Against-Gods-Remarkable-Story-Risk/dp...