Betting in Cape Town
If you cast a standard die, it has a one in six chance of landing on any particular face. Alternatively stated, if you made a random guess on what number the die would land on, you'd be right about one sixth of the time. Bet some money on those guesses, and we would call that gambling.
In a casino, they'd never pay more than six times the bet for a correct guess, and you could reasonably call it a bad bet because if you made that bet repeatedly, you would lose money even if you occasionally guess correctly. That's true of any bet you make in a casino.
The casino itself isn't really gambling though. Because of the way randomness works, the casino is guaranteed to make money in the long run so long as people keep wagering.
Here's a question that's been bothering me lately: What would you call it if the die was completely obscured from both you and the casino, such that absolutely nothing about the odds of a given outcome was certain for either party? Neither you nor the casino know that the die has six sides, that those sides are labeled one to six, or that the outcomes are evenly distributed across all possible numbers.
Over time, an observant party could observe the numbers this mystery die lands on and develop better informed guesses on its properties, but they can never confirm them definitively. If the counterparty doesn't have access to the same information, or doesn't pay attention to it, the observant party might gain a perceived advantage. They'd only really know by playing the game for eternity, which we don't have time to wait for.
In that scenario, is anyone still gambling? Is everyone?
Regretably, not my apartment
The balcony of my apartment looks out on the eastern side of Table Mountain. On summer mornings, the sun comes up behind the mountain, casting a long shadow on the city below it. Trees don't grow too far up the craigy, granite slope, so you can see hikers and climbers as little dots in the distance.
In the rainy winter months, though, Table Mountain is often shrouded in clouds. Cold, dense, humid air from the ocean falls over the ridge into the city bowl. Moisture in the air condenses into a thick, monochrome backdrop,, which has a funny way of eliminating any sense of distance. The clouds might be miles away or they might be only just out of reach. It’s disorienting.
One morning on a recent trip the clouds were out in full force. I turned and looked up at where the mountain should be. "That's crazy," I thought, "There's a whole mountain up there and I can't even see it."
It occurred to me that maybe that's not quite right. There's probably still a mountain there, and I would bet everything I own on it, but there might not be and I can't really know until the clouds clear.
I rented a car to be a little more mobile in the city. I didn’t get extra insurance.
The city bowl of Cape Town is not an especially big area. It is boxed in by the mountain and the ocean. It's hilly though, which makes walking everywhere difficult, and the buses are not particularly frequent, so it’s nice to have a car.
The company I rented from includes basic insurance in all of their rental contracts and offers a lower deductible for an increased daily fee. Standing at the rental counter, I did some calculations in my head about how much the additional coverage and a theoretically totaled car would cost me, and estimated how likely I thought a car crash was. I've never hit another vehicle, and only crashed my motorcycle at slow speeds on dirt roads when I was intentionally pushing my limits, which makes me think I'm a safer than average driver. I decided that the risk profile implied by the additional fee was probably greater than my actual risk of an accident.
It was raining that day. Not especially hard, but apparently hard enough to strain Cape Town's road drainage. On the drive home, I passed by a highway on-ramp that was flooded. A car was merging on pace to enter the road right in front of me, but moving slowly because of the water. I slowed down a little bit too, but didn't have room to change lanes or otherwise get further away. Suddenly, and for reasons I'm still not entirely sure, they entered my lane and stopped suddenly. I hit my brakes and managed to stop short of hitting him. Looking in the rear view mirror, I saw an SUV coming up behind me. A second later my car lurched forward as the SUV collided. "Goddammit," I thought, "Not even a few hours."
In the end, that accident cost me about $400. It was more than the cost of insurance.
At breakfast on a Wednesday morning, my uncle asked me if I had any plans for the weekend. "I'm gonna hike up Table Mountain if the weather's nice." I replied. It turned out that the weather wasn't nice and I didn't go hiking that weekend.
A week later, there was a stretch of four days with no forecast of rain at all. I texted a few cousins and set a plan to meet at 9am and go up a route called India Fenster. It’s a difficult trail, with huge steps, and sections of scrambling up nearly vertical rock faces. There are a handful of places with steel handles installed in the rock because there would be nowhere else to grab. In my head, success was conditioned only on the weather though.
The first section is a steep staircase ascending quickly up the mountain. The steps are tall, but being so close to the beginning, it's easy to move quickly. The peak doesn't look so far away. It was easy to walk up that first section a little bit faster than I probably should have. So fast that before long I found myself out of breath. I remember stopping at one point and my cousin noting that we had only hiked about a kilometer. A steep kilometer, but just one and we weren't even half way.
I contemplated turning around. I played out the conversation in my head "Sorry, y'all. I thought I was fit enough to do this, but I just don't think I'm gonna make it."
I would keep the more aggressive thoughts to myself. "I shouldn't have said that I was going to climb this mountain. I'm not going to do it. I was only trying."
In the end I didn't turn around and I made it all the way to the top.
It’s seeming more and more reasonable to me to approach all of my life like it’s a bet. I'm 99% confident that the mountain is still there. That extra $300 worth of insurance probably won't make my life better. If I attempted to hike up Table Mountain 10 times, I'd make it to the top for 7 of them.
It's simple and quick to ignore the chances of negligible outcomes, and even convenient to assume that unlikely events just won't occur. It's wrong though. Even beyond the conceivable obstacles and outcomes, there will always be some set of possibilities I don’t even know to consider.
It’s all a roll of the dice.
