The primaries I was on were perfectly driveable without any issues. The issue was that the primaries were backed up because hills on the side roads iced to the point where cars were sliding back down them if they didn't have steady momentum all the way up them. People did figure this out, but it took volunteers coordinating people to keep traffic moving at a slow but steady pace over these trouble spots.
Under saturation conditions (i.e.nearly every possible square foot of road occupied by a car), the flow of traffic is reduced to the rate of flow at the outer bottleneck points, which was less than 3 miles per hour. The issue was the capillaries not the arteries.
Target has a system where you can return anything without a receipt if you can show the credit card the item was purchased with. Plus Target makes heavy use of data to track customers. Not that that's a good thing.
I would have to guess that Target views these things as strategic advantages over their competitors and they may have a culture which views IT infrastructure only as a means to further develop these advantages. In that kind of environment, "what we can do if we hold onto this data" is going to trump security concerns.
It's kind of interesting that a concept of user data being innately dangerous to hold onto hasn't taken hold in the same way that the concept of raw chicken being innately dangerous to hold onto. Most industries where users can get hurt have some sort of "hygiene" practices that ensure segregation of dangerous materials if followed rigorously. Continuing on the raw chicken metaphor, the current state of things seems to be as if the health inspector had to analyze the design of every machine and process in the meat packing plant to determine whether it's safe.
PCI seems to be intended to tackle this, but it doesn't seem to be stringent enough to do the job.
I'd have been extremely surprised if solving for the shortest regex golf pattern for a pair of lists weren't NP hard. And greedy approaches are fairly obvious.
The point is, that's what makes it analogous to golf. The optimal solution is your hole in one. Some greedy algorithm solution is your par. Those aren't the interesting areas, they're just the end points.
For those who couldn't work it out for the,selves, here are the rules of regex golf:
How many characters you use in your regex is your score Lower is better There's a par calculated for each hole, and totaled for the course, which serves as a frame of reference for performance
1. There is a gene associated with a brain pathway responding to the smell. 2. The more this gene is expressed, the more the stronger the pathway. 3. Brain functions that depend on this pathway have a feedback mechanism that result in hypomethylation of the gene in at least sperm cells (egg cells weren't mentioned). This increases expression in the descendants. From what I understand, hypo methylation does not entail any alteration of base pair sequences. 4. As the parent post mentioned, this doesn't mean passing on aversion/affinity, but potentially increased sensitivity which may aid in speed of learning these traits.
That's based on my reading of the abstract. The abstract didn't mention any kind of known or discovered chemical signal for the brain activity to result in the hypomethylation in the sperm. My question would be if anything else in the experimental protocol could have triggered this in a manner not directly caused by the brain activity. My next question would be if this work can be reproduced with a different chemical pathway.
The very short version of that theory is that in a perfect market all investors have the same information and thus the only difference in their investment decisions comes from their risk preferences and over time several high risk investments inevitably give exactly the same total return as lower risk investment since whilst the successful high risk ones give higher returns, more of them fail whilst the latter give lower returns but with greater certainty.
The theory doesn't really work that way. The theory says that under arbitrage free conditions there exists a probability measure that results in the expected return between the risky investment and the low risk investment being identical relative to that probability measure. This does not constitute an assertion that this probability measure is predictive, merely that it exists. The probability measure is essentially a rationalization applied to market prices. The spread between high quality corporate bonds and government bonds is much larger than the difference in default rates between the two.
Basically the theory doesn't say that risky investments even out with safe investments over time, it says that there is a premium you pay for safety. That premium can be neutralized by creating a fun house mirror probability measure that overstates the risk of the investment failing. The fun house probability measure isn't real, it's just something used to analyze prices.
It does work for group insurance which is what 90% of people who have private insurance have. Most people who have group insurance don't want to buy individual insurance.
Whoops, I forgot to mention that since the survey was from 2009, those numbers have grown with 4 years of medical cost trend (plus one more to grow on to project to 2014). Fortunately that's been lower the past few years compared to the average for the last 20 years. I think it was only a bit over 6% last year, compared to a more typical trend of around 10%.
In 2008, 12.7% of all individual insurance applications were denied. For ages 50-64, the denial rate was 20-30%.
Did you say you are paying $75 per month for your current plan? For 2009, the national average premium for individual insurance with single coverage and a $500 deductible was $259 per month.
You haven't been the one who's been seeing the worst of the current system and I'm not convinced that you are going to be the one who's seeing the worst of it next year.
That bronze level plan costs more than twice what I am currently paying.
How old are you? If you're young that may explain what you're seeing.
Here's the deal. The individual insurance market has premiums that are heavily biased towards expected claims for sicker people, but if you look at how premiums vary by age and other underwriting characteristics, it's more proportional to how the average claims change with those characteristics.
For group insurance, there isn't as much bias towards the cost of sicker people. The contract bundles the healthy and the sick people together so healthy people opting out is less of an issue. But the demographic component of the cost is basically averaged across the group, plus there is rating based on the actual experience of the group.
The exchanges are basically a group insurance scheme. However, they do allow charging different premiums based on age. The ratio between the highest premium and the lowest premium is capped at 3 to 1, whereas before in the individual market, this was more like 6 to 1.
Monetarily, the law is going to be worst for people who are young, have good underwriting characteristics and who already have individual insurance. But you are also getting a guarantee that you will be able to buy insurance next year. You don't have that under your current plan. Also, that 3 to 1 cap will work in your favor over time. You are getting less per dollar for the upcoming year of coverage, but you are getting guarantees that extend far beyond that year of coverage.
If it were possible to buy an individual insurance policy with guaranteed renewal for life under the pre-ACA regime, I'm guessing it would have cost an awful lot more than that bronze plan since they would have to price in the possibility of you moving into a higher risk class later.
Unless someone commits fraud, I don't see how connecting buyers with sellers is parasitism. It's a useful service, and like other useful services it is worth paying for.
There is no need for middlemen, therefore it is not a useful service. Investment markets are like politically connected men putting up a tollbooth at the end of your driveway and saying that connecting you to the road is a useful service, and like other useful services it is worth paying for.
Let's say I have a computing job I want to complete some time in the next couple of years. I'm not especially concerned about when it's done but I want it done for below a certain price. With a futures market, I could look for a good time of year when prices are low and lock that in now, establishing a contract that the counterparty will either provide the service at that time or pay whatever it costs to find a provider that can.
The benefit to providers is that they can sell anticipated capacity in advance and lock in their budget numbers.
It is ludicrous, but it's also kind of brilliant. The NSA is arguing that they can use correlations to figure out what data they can snoop in. However that is also an admission of technical capability to determine other kinds of correlations. And it is in fact illegal for the government to build a gun ownership database. The NSA would have to argue that they cant figure out who gun owners are with their data. They cant just argue that they don't do that, they have to argue that they can't do that.
It's technically correct... The best kind of correct.
A mouse button has a hair trigger while you have to push a keyboard key down a pretty good bit before it registers a press. On the reaction time test, the margin between keyboard and mouse narrows to about 10-20ms when I try to make sure that I press down on the key as quickly as possible.
The Carrington Event caused aurora borealis to be visible around the world. I'm not aware of anything else like that being reported in recorded human history. Even if it had happened before the development of writing, you would think it would be the sort of thing that would have a major impact on legends across all world cultures. So my best guess is that from the span of time from, let's say, 3000BC to 2013AD, this has happened exactly once.
Wikipedia says that ice core studies show that events like this which produce high energy protons comparable to the Carrington Event occur with a frequency of roughly once every 500 years, however it briefly mentions that these other events aren't necessarily comparable in terms of geomagnetic impact.
Not necessarily. The data as of 2010 (a census year) is going to be more detailed and more authoritative since BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) makes use of census data where available and computes estimates of some figures between censuses. I would only call it outdated if there's newer data that contradicts the trend.
There are many externalities where I can come up with plausible sounding assumptions that give it whatever value I want.
I'm not sure you can get as far out ahead in resource planning as you might hope. Making decisions on this basis often requires making decisions that can't be made objectively and if you fail to anticipate a shift in which resource constraints are binding, the objective decisions you did make may not provide a useful advantage.
That said, I tend to think that most functions can either be performed by the private or public sectors, but depending on the structure of the issues, one or the other may have an edge in efficiency. There are trade offs between improved efficiency through microspecialization (favors decentralization) and improved efficiency through fluidity of capacity (favors centralization). Efficiency isn't the only element, though. Individual determination, community determination, and national determination issues can also come into play.
Even for the nonclueless users it would be kind of obnoxious. I'm not a settings minimalist, but I happen to think that if its hard to tell what flipping a setting has actually done, maybe it shouldn't be there.
Dunno. Napkin: 250000000000000 / (120*60*48*2); ~2 hour movie (120 minutes), 60 seconds per minute, 48 frames per second, one for left-right eye (2); or ~360MB per-frame. Perhaps a dozen or so layers per frame (different lighting models, shadow models, etc.,) leaves ~30MB per ``frame layer'' in super-duper-master resolution losslessly compressed. Animation paths/models/textures/voices, etc., also probably take up quite a bit, but likely not nearly as much as the raw image data.
Scalar theories of value all break down in the end. I identify four fundamental quantities that aren't generally interchangeable: energy, mass, information, and computation power.
You may think that, for example, computation power is a function of energy, but instead it's a function of energy, resources arranged so as to do computation with that energy, and time to do the computation. If tomorrow you gave me enough energy to power all of the world's computers for a year, I still wouldn't be able to do two day's worth of computation in one day, but if instead you gave me two days I could do two days worth of computation.
Gathering information requires energy. If you spend one joule gathering information, are you sure you're one joule wiser, or might there be some information that might save less energy than the cost of collecting it? The existence of r-strategist species in nature seems to indicate there are times when that is the case.
Computer programs are resources. Institutional policies are resources. Networks of relationships are resources. All of these things take energy to build and maintain, but there is never a guarantee that they can be built for a fixed quantity of energy. How do you plan to account for happy accidents where a good solution was happened upon quickly with little energy investment, or for situations where a great deal of energy was wasted pursuing an unworkable idea? I don't think you can analyze away the underlying stochastic nature of information when analyzing the value of these kinds of resources.
You're missing some finer nuances here. There are some definitions of free will that are clearly impossible to implement. If you throw out those, and look at where we are out of the remaining options, I'd say that our universe's structure is the most "free willish" of those remaining options.
If the universe had processes that were non-deterministic and intractable to stochastic analysis, which I gather would meet your criteria for free will, they would actually render efforts to predict future outcomes impossible. Generally I understand free will to mean the concept that we have a notion of decisions, these decisions are based on anticipation of future events, and those future events can to an imperfect extent be predicted by analysis of past events.
The universe we live in is the middle ground between a deterministic screenplay and a universe without any kind of organizing principles that you can inscribe a story on. I'd say that a pure idealized notion of free will with both unconstrained action and meaningful decisions is impossible to achieve, but we live in a universe that actually achieves an approximation of the ideal with actions that are constrained, but with occasional surprises, and decisions that are meaningful, but always have a chance to fall short of our aims.
I agree that this is a big deal, but it's not the entire problem. As I noted, these models don't deal with real probabilities, they're a framework for dealing with market implied probabilities in such a way that arbitrages can be constructed that pay out regardless of the outcomes. It's actually a framework for constructing portfolios that are independent of future outcomes, not one that actually predicts them, although the distinction is lost on a lot of people.
Yes it actually is that complicated, although the majority of people working in finance and related disciplines don't understand the model and at best just know how to plug prices into Black-Scholes.
There's more to it than that. The model has developed into a philosophy which has been built out beyond its workable foundation.
It starts with the risk neutral measure. Basically the concept is that you can construct a probability measure (basically a reweighting of probability of events) from market prices. Basically the market prices of a stock, a forward contract (a contract to deliver the stock at a fixed point in the future), a call option (an agreement to offer the option of buying the stock at a given price in the future), a put option (an agreement to offer the option to sell a stock at a given price in the future), and other contracts related to the price of the stock in the future all have to have prices rationally related to each other. If the price of one of these things deviates from the risk neutral measure implied by the others, you can construct arbitrage positions where you can make a profit with negligible risk and executing this arbitrage has the effect of moving the market prices closer toward their theoretical values.
Observably, market prices don't reflect real probabilities. Safe investments such as treasury bonds are disproportionately more expensive than highly rated bonds with a low chance of default based on historical default rates. This is explained due to risk aversion and philosophically, the risk neutral measure is said to reflect the market's assessment of the risk of each investment and also the risk preferences of market participants. This concept is the basis of financial economics, and the school of thought derived from this position has been dominant in economic related disciplines for the past 30 years.
As a means of analyzing for arbitrage opportunities and pricing of marketable securities in a way that avoids offering others arbitrage opportunities, this methodology is largely unassailable. However, where they overextend themselves is that in conjunction with the efficient market hypothesis, they've started to assume that this framework lets you farm out the function of assessing the likelihood of future events to the market and even in some cases they've asserted that it's immoral to use methodologies which imply prices for non-marketable securities which aren't directly comparable to marketable analogues.
It's basically a religion at this point. They honestly believe that the risk neutral measure isn't just a post hoc rationalization imposed on market prices, but a normative guide to upright living and that the market's assessments of the ("risk-adjusted") probability of future events is the best and most rational basis for making all decisions and for framing all policy and regulation.
Slashdot Mirror
The primaries I was on were perfectly driveable without any issues. The issue was that the primaries were backed up because hills on the side roads iced to the point where cars were sliding back down them if they didn't have steady momentum all the way up them. People did figure this out, but it took volunteers coordinating people to keep traffic moving at a slow but steady pace over these trouble spots.
Under saturation conditions (i.e.nearly every possible square foot of road occupied by a car), the flow of traffic is reduced to the rate of flow at the outer bottleneck points, which was less than 3 miles per hour. The issue was the capillaries not the arteries.
Target has a system where you can return anything without a receipt if you can show the credit card the item was purchased with. Plus Target makes heavy use of data to track customers. Not that that's a good thing.
I would have to guess that Target views these things as strategic advantages over their competitors and they may have a culture which views IT infrastructure only as a means to further develop these advantages. In that kind of environment, "what we can do if we hold onto this data" is going to trump security concerns.
It's kind of interesting that a concept of user data being innately dangerous to hold onto hasn't taken hold in the same way that the concept of raw chicken being innately dangerous to hold onto. Most industries where users can get hurt have some sort of "hygiene" practices that ensure segregation of dangerous materials if followed rigorously. Continuing on the raw chicken metaphor, the current state of things seems to be as if the health inspector had to analyze the design of every machine and process in the meat packing plant to determine whether it's safe.
PCI seems to be intended to tackle this, but it doesn't seem to be stringent enough to do the job.
I'd have been extremely surprised if solving for the shortest regex golf pattern for a pair of lists weren't NP hard. And greedy approaches are fairly obvious.
The point is, that's what makes it analogous to golf. The optimal solution is your hole in one. Some greedy algorithm solution is your par. Those aren't the interesting areas, they're just the end points.
For those who couldn't work it out for the,selves, here are the rules of regex golf:
How many characters you use in your regex is your score
Lower is better
There's a par calculated for each hole, and totaled for the course, which serves as a frame of reference for performance
The premise seems to be:
1. There is a gene associated with a brain pathway responding to the smell.
2. The more this gene is expressed, the more the stronger the pathway.
3. Brain functions that depend on this pathway have a feedback mechanism that result in hypomethylation of the gene in at least sperm cells (egg cells weren't mentioned). This increases expression in the descendants. From what I understand, hypo methylation does not entail any alteration of base pair sequences.
4. As the parent post mentioned, this doesn't mean passing on aversion/affinity, but potentially increased sensitivity which may aid in speed of learning these traits.
That's based on my reading of the abstract. The abstract didn't mention any kind of known or discovered chemical signal for the brain activity to result in the hypomethylation in the sperm. My question would be if anything else in the experimental protocol could have triggered this in a manner not directly caused by the brain activity. My next question would be if this work can be reproduced with a different chemical pathway.
The very short version of that theory is that in a perfect market all investors have the same information and thus the only difference in their investment decisions comes from their risk preferences and over time several high risk investments inevitably give exactly the same total return as lower risk investment since whilst the successful high risk ones give higher returns, more of them fail whilst the latter give lower returns but with greater certainty.
The theory doesn't really work that way. The theory says that under arbitrage free conditions there exists a probability measure that results in the expected return between the risky investment and the low risk investment being identical relative to that probability measure. This does not constitute an assertion that this probability measure is predictive, merely that it exists. The probability measure is essentially a rationalization applied to market prices. The spread between high quality corporate bonds and government bonds is much larger than the difference in default rates between the two.
Basically the theory doesn't say that risky investments even out with safe investments over time, it says that there is a premium you pay for safety. That premium can be neutralized by creating a fun house mirror probability measure that overstates the risk of the investment failing. The fun house probability measure isn't real, it's just something used to analyze prices.
It does work for group insurance which is what 90% of people who have private insurance have. Most people who have group insurance don't want to buy individual insurance.
Whoops, I forgot to mention that since the survey was from 2009, those numbers have grown with 4 years of medical cost trend (plus one more to grow on to project to 2014). Fortunately that's been lower the past few years compared to the average for the last 20 years. I think it was only a bit over 6% last year, compared to a more typical trend of around 10%.
http://www.aon.com/attachments/thought-leadership/2011_Health_Care_Trends_Survey_Final_FINAL.pdf
http://www.ahip.org/Individual-Health-Insurance-Survey-2009/
In 2008, 12.7% of all individual insurance applications were denied. For ages 50-64, the denial rate was 20-30%.
Did you say you are paying $75 per month for your current plan? For 2009, the national average premium for individual insurance with single coverage and a $500 deductible was $259 per month.
You haven't been the one who's been seeing the worst of the current system and I'm not convinced that you are going to be the one who's seeing the worst of it next year.
You realize that as someone who was satisfied with the individual health insurance market you are something of an oddity?
That bronze level plan costs more than twice what I am currently paying.
How old are you? If you're young that may explain what you're seeing.
Here's the deal. The individual insurance market has premiums that are heavily biased towards expected claims for sicker people, but if you look at how premiums vary by age and other underwriting characteristics, it's more proportional to how the average claims change with those characteristics.
For group insurance, there isn't as much bias towards the cost of sicker people. The contract bundles the healthy and the sick people together so healthy people opting out is less of an issue. But the demographic component of the cost is basically averaged across the group, plus there is rating based on the actual experience of the group.
The exchanges are basically a group insurance scheme. However, they do allow charging different premiums based on age. The ratio between the highest premium and the lowest premium is capped at 3 to 1, whereas before in the individual market, this was more like 6 to 1.
Monetarily, the law is going to be worst for people who are young, have good underwriting characteristics and who already have individual insurance. But you are also getting a guarantee that you will be able to buy insurance next year. You don't have that under your current plan. Also, that 3 to 1 cap will work in your favor over time. You are getting less per dollar for the upcoming year of coverage, but you are getting guarantees that extend far beyond that year of coverage.
If it were possible to buy an individual insurance policy with guaranteed renewal for life under the pre-ACA regime, I'm guessing it would have cost an awful lot more than that bronze plan since they would have to price in the possibility of you moving into a higher risk class later.
Unless someone commits fraud, I don't see how connecting buyers with sellers is parasitism. It's a useful service, and like other useful services it is worth paying for.
There is no need for middlemen, therefore it is not a useful service. Investment markets are like politically connected men putting up a tollbooth at the end of your driveway and saying that connecting you to the road is a useful service, and like other useful services it is worth paying for.
Let's say I have a computing job I want to complete some time in the next couple of years. I'm not especially concerned about when it's done but I want it done for below a certain price. With a futures market, I could look for a good time of year when prices are low and lock that in now, establishing a contract that the counterparty will either provide the service at that time or pay whatever it costs to find a provider that can.
The benefit to providers is that they can sell anticipated capacity in advance and lock in their budget numbers.
It is ludicrous, but it's also kind of brilliant. The NSA is arguing that they can use correlations to figure out what data they can snoop in. However that is also an admission of technical capability to determine other kinds of correlations. And it is in fact illegal for the government to build a gun ownership database. The NSA would have to argue that they cant figure out who gun owners are with their data. They cant just argue that they don't do that, they have to argue that they can't do that.
It's technically correct... The best kind of correct.
Now that the mood lighting has been disabled I can proceed with my insidious plot.
A mouse button has a hair trigger while you have to push a keyboard key down a pretty good bit before it registers a press. On the reaction time test, the margin between keyboard and mouse narrows to about 10-20ms when I try to make sure that I press down on the key as quickly as possible.
The Carrington Event caused aurora borealis to be visible around the world. I'm not aware of anything else like that being reported in recorded human history. Even if it had happened before the development of writing, you would think it would be the sort of thing that would have a major impact on legends across all world cultures. So my best guess is that from the span of time from, let's say, 3000BC to 2013AD, this has happened exactly once.
Wikipedia says that ice core studies show that events like this which produce high energy protons comparable to the Carrington Event occur with a frequency of roughly once every 500 years, however it briefly mentions that these other events aren't necessarily comparable in terms of geomagnetic impact.
Not necessarily. The data as of 2010 (a census year) is going to be more detailed and more authoritative since BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) makes use of census data where available and computes estimates of some figures between censuses. I would only call it outdated if there's newer data that contradicts the trend.
no, there is dark energy being added to the system
Unless you can convert dark energy into a useful form of energy, then isn't it only making us use up our useful energy faster?
There are many externalities where I can come up with plausible sounding assumptions that give it whatever value I want.
I'm not sure you can get as far out ahead in resource planning as you might hope. Making decisions on this basis often requires making decisions that can't be made objectively and if you fail to anticipate a shift in which resource constraints are binding, the objective decisions you did make may not provide a useful advantage.
That said, I tend to think that most functions can either be performed by the private or public sectors, but depending on the structure of the issues, one or the other may have an edge in efficiency. There are trade offs between improved efficiency through microspecialization (favors decentralization) and improved efficiency through fluidity of capacity (favors centralization). Efficiency isn't the only element, though. Individual determination, community determination, and national determination issues can also come into play.
Even for the nonclueless users it would be kind of obnoxious. I'm not a settings minimalist, but I happen to think that if its hard to tell what flipping a setting has actually done, maybe it shouldn't be there.
Dunno. Napkin: 250000000000000 / (120*60*48*2); ~2 hour movie (120 minutes), 60 seconds per minute, 48 frames per second, one for left-right eye (2); or ~360MB per-frame. Perhaps a dozen or so layers per frame (different lighting models, shadow models, etc.,) leaves ~30MB per ``frame layer'' in super-duper-master resolution losslessly compressed. Animation paths/models/textures/voices, etc., also probably take up quite a bit, but likely not nearly as much as the raw image data.
Imagine... All of that just to render a napkin.
Scalar theories of value all break down in the end. I identify four fundamental quantities that aren't generally interchangeable: energy, mass, information, and computation power.
You may think that, for example, computation power is a function of energy, but instead it's a function of energy, resources arranged so as to do computation with that energy, and time to do the computation. If tomorrow you gave me enough energy to power all of the world's computers for a year, I still wouldn't be able to do two day's worth of computation in one day, but if instead you gave me two days I could do two days worth of computation.
Gathering information requires energy. If you spend one joule gathering information, are you sure you're one joule wiser, or might there be some information that might save less energy than the cost of collecting it? The existence of r-strategist species in nature seems to indicate there are times when that is the case.
Computer programs are resources. Institutional policies are resources. Networks of relationships are resources. All of these things take energy to build and maintain, but there is never a guarantee that they can be built for a fixed quantity of energy. How do you plan to account for happy accidents where a good solution was happened upon quickly with little energy investment, or for situations where a great deal of energy was wasted pursuing an unworkable idea? I don't think you can analyze away the underlying stochastic nature of information when analyzing the value of these kinds of resources.
You're missing some finer nuances here. There are some definitions of free will that are clearly impossible to implement. If you throw out those, and look at where we are out of the remaining options, I'd say that our universe's structure is the most "free willish" of those remaining options.
If the universe had processes that were non-deterministic and intractable to stochastic analysis, which I gather would meet your criteria for free will, they would actually render efforts to predict future outcomes impossible. Generally I understand free will to mean the concept that we have a notion of decisions, these decisions are based on anticipation of future events, and those future events can to an imperfect extent be predicted by analysis of past events.
The universe we live in is the middle ground between a deterministic screenplay and a universe without any kind of organizing principles that you can inscribe a story on. I'd say that a pure idealized notion of free will with both unconstrained action and meaningful decisions is impossible to achieve, but we live in a universe that actually achieves an approximation of the ideal with actions that are constrained, but with occasional surprises, and decisions that are meaningful, but always have a chance to fall short of our aims.
Just because my choices conform to probability distributions doesn't mean they aren't my choices.
I agree that this is a big deal, but it's not the entire problem. As I noted, these models don't deal with real probabilities, they're a framework for dealing with market implied probabilities in such a way that arbitrages can be constructed that pay out regardless of the outcomes. It's actually a framework for constructing portfolios that are independent of future outcomes, not one that actually predicts them, although the distinction is lost on a lot of people.
Yes it actually is that complicated, although the majority of people working in finance and related disciplines don't understand the model and at best just know how to plug prices into Black-Scholes.
There's more to it than that. The model has developed into a philosophy which has been built out beyond its workable foundation.
It starts with the risk neutral measure. Basically the concept is that you can construct a probability measure (basically a reweighting of probability of events) from market prices. Basically the market prices of a stock, a forward contract (a contract to deliver the stock at a fixed point in the future), a call option (an agreement to offer the option of buying the stock at a given price in the future), a put option (an agreement to offer the option to sell a stock at a given price in the future), and other contracts related to the price of the stock in the future all have to have prices rationally related to each other. If the price of one of these things deviates from the risk neutral measure implied by the others, you can construct arbitrage positions where you can make a profit with negligible risk and executing this arbitrage has the effect of moving the market prices closer toward their theoretical values.
Observably, market prices don't reflect real probabilities. Safe investments such as treasury bonds are disproportionately more expensive than highly rated bonds with a low chance of default based on historical default rates. This is explained due to risk aversion and philosophically, the risk neutral measure is said to reflect the market's assessment of the risk of each investment and also the risk preferences of market participants. This concept is the basis of financial economics, and the school of thought derived from this position has been dominant in economic related disciplines for the past 30 years.
As a means of analyzing for arbitrage opportunities and pricing of marketable securities in a way that avoids offering others arbitrage opportunities, this methodology is largely unassailable. However, where they overextend themselves is that in conjunction with the efficient market hypothesis, they've started to assume that this framework lets you farm out the function of assessing the likelihood of future events to the market and even in some cases they've asserted that it's immoral to use methodologies which imply prices for non-marketable securities which aren't directly comparable to marketable analogues.
It's basically a religion at this point. They honestly believe that the risk neutral measure isn't just a post hoc rationalization imposed on market prices, but a normative guide to upright living and that the market's assessments of the ("risk-adjusted") probability of future events is the best and most rational basis for making all decisions and for framing all policy and regulation.