So what are the true odds of our having to make a payout during the policy’s term? We don’t know—nor do we think computer models will help us, since we believe the precision they project is a chimera. In fact, such models can lull decision-makers into a false sense of security and thereby increase their chances of making a really huge mistake. We’ve already seen such debacles in both insurance and investments. Witness “portfolio insurance,” whose destructive effects in the 1987 market crash led one wag to observe that it was the computers that should have been jumping out of windows.
