There have been two major factors in human decision making since human’s have existed: Risk and Reward. How much effort or damage is a pay off worth? How much benefit will I get from a certain course of action? We’ll be looking at two things that deal with these concepts today.
Risk and reward have been a common topic for me over the weekend, so I decided it was time for another look at the topic. we’ll start with the more metaphysical topic first and move into more cost/benefit centered examples.
Generally I’ll have at east one Bible study a week, and this helps me to keep sharp and continually try and build on my faith. But this last Bible study that I participated dealt with an interesting risk and reward scenario.
The example is found in Mark chapter 8 verses 36 to 37, “For what will profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?”
Now this might seem like a fluffy mumbo jumbo topic to some because the mainstream trend today is to emphasize that we’re just physical people and nothing spiritual exists. There has always been a group to espouse that idea and it’s only made worse by the misunderstanding of what the soul is. Today the soul and the spirit of individuals are considered interchangeable terms. This means people today think that the soul and spirit are both ephemeral, untouchable things that make mankind what they are. That these two things are the intelligence and essence of man. But in the ancient world they were two very specific and different things.
It’s easy to find that a lot of cultures believed man consisted of a physical body, an unseen spirit, and a nexus between the two. The body is obviously our physical selves and the spirit is our minds and intellect. But what was the nexus? This was considered to be the soul, a bridge between the physical and the spiritual while itself being the very personality and uniqueness of that individual.
It was believed to be the blood of an individual was their soul. The soul was the essence of that individual and carried everything about them in it (much as we find DNA does today, un-ironically found in white blood cells in addition to most other cells). So the giving up of one’s soul is the giving up of one’s individuality, the thing that makes you who you are. would you give up everything about you to get something? Hopefully not.
This brings us to a bit more light hearted look into the Risk and Reward example. High risk and a high pay off are one of the central economic points of the Stalker series. People flooded into the Zone as treasure hunters, adventurers, and researchers.
In Call of Pripyat, which I have been playing lately, the cost of travel has gone up in comparison to the other games in the series. This means I have to have a steady income in game in order to achieve my objectives.
So last time I played I decided to try and fill my pockets with money so that I could more easily repeated trips to Pripyat (which costs 4000 rubles one way). I picked over the remains of other people’s fire fights, mainly looting guns and some food. The guns to repair and sell and the food for me.
But then I thought about all the artifacts I could find. I had a few rolling around in my stashes and they are not much use to me. So I decided to try and fill some of the orders that the bar of owner, Beard, had. and that’s where the profit lay.
Once you get a certain achievement, Beard is the guy you need to sell artifacts to because he pays the highest price. I had one artifact that I didn’t need but he wanted and he bought it for 24,000 rubles. To put that in perspective, a full inventory of guns will fetch about 1000 to 4000 rubles, but some of them need repairs. So the actual profit might be about 500 rubles per gun, depending on the model. That 24,000 was pure profit.
So I began to search the anomalies for artifacts, going here and there as other Stalkers did the same. It was worth the amount of effort I put in because the cost was low. Medical supplies, if that, and some repairs to my suit of choice was about 1100 rubles rounded up. And that was only the suit repair, because I get a lot of medical supplies for free.
We have determine just what exactly we are willing to do for a pay off. Obviously somethings are way too costly while others don’t pay off enough. We need to figure out what the sweet spot is for risk and reward. Then we need to do it.
Think about it.
Sincerely,
The Irreverent Gentleman
gentlemansuniversityofmanliness 