Living in Someone Else's Bet

This is the second in a series on risk-maxxing. The first piece defined the phenomenon and its drivers. This one examines what it means for everyone caught in the blast radius. The one after this looks at risk from a Gen Z point of view.

The previous piece described risk-maxxing as a strategy—the deliberate externalization of downside by actors powerful enough to make their bets everyone else's problem. This piece is about the other side of that transaction: what it means to carry risks you didn't choose and can't assess, imposed by decisions made elsewhere.

What distinguishes this moment isn't that risks exist—risks have always existed—but the growing disconnection between who creates them and who carries them. The mechanisms that once linked consequences to decisions have weakened, or been deliberately routed around.

Involuntary Exposure

In finance, the exposure is often invisible until it isn't. Ontario's teachers pension lost $95 million when the FTX crypto exchange collapsed. State pension funds in Wisconsin and Michigan now hold bitcoin ETF positions. The beneficiaries didn't vote for these allocations; most don't know about them. They learn about their exposure, if at all, when valuations swing.

In healthcare, algorithmic systems get deployed faster than their failure modes can be understood. A sepsis prediction tool used at hundreds of US hospitals was found to miss two-thirds of cases while flooding clinicians with false alarms. A risk-scoring algorithm affecting 200 million Americans systematically underidentified Black patients for needed care—not through explicit racial coding, but because it used healthcare costs as a proxy for health needs, and Black patients had historically spent less. The pattern isn't malice but speed: systems deployed before adequate testing, consequences discovered in operation.

The anti-vaccine movement demonstrates a different pathway to the same outcome. When vaccination rates drop below herd immunity thresholds, populations who cannot be vaccinated—infants, the immunocompromised—carry risk created by others' choices. The "personal decision" framing obscures the epidemiological reality: these are bets placed with other people's outcomes as stakes.

In environmental systems, the exposure is planetary. Geoengineering ventures raise capital to conduct atmospheric interventions without binding international governance. A decision made in California or Beijing to proceed with stratospheric aerosol injection would reshape monsoon patterns in South Asia and agricultural conditions across Africa. The populations most affected have no seat where the decision gets made.

Losing the Ability to Judge

Living inside others' experiments does something else: it degrades the capacity to assess risk at all.

Risk assessment depends on two things working. Experience that teaches you which dangers are real—but experience fails when rules change faster than you can learn them. And institutions you can trust to handle what you can't evaluate yourself—but institutions fail when they've been captured or discredited. Rating agencies blessed the instruments that blew up the global economy. Regulators cycle through the industries they oversee. Platforms optimize for attention, not accuracy.

So people can't outsource their judgment anymore, but they don't have the tools to judge well on their own. Some respond by treating everything as dangerous. Others give up on evaluating anything. The middle ground gets harder to hold.

Compounding this: research itself returns less than it used to. A decade ago, searching for information would turn up institutional sources, journalism, expert commentary—imperfect, but you could triangulate. Now search results are gamed and optimized. AI-generated content floods every channel. Even primary sources have become harder to trust. You can do more research than ever and end up less sure of what you've learned.

This would matter less if the bets being placed around you were cautious and well-understood. But they're not. The same epistemic fog that makes it hard for you to assess risk also surrounds the people making billion-dollar decisions — and many of them are making bigger, faster bets anyway, whether because they don't know what they don't know, or because they've decided the uncertainty is someone else's problem. The result is an environment where the scale of risk-taking is increasing at the same time the tools for understanding risk are degrading. You're not just navigating fog; you're navigating fog full of people driving fast with their headlights off.

The Hidden Tax

All of this imposes a cognitive tax—a background drain that accumulates across decisions.

The standard advice is to stay informed. But when research returns diminishing value and the systems you're trying to understand are opaque and unstable, inquiry often just reveals how much you can't know. The effort goes up, the confidence comes down.

The tax falls unevenly. Those with resources can buy some insulation—diversified portfolios, professional advisors, multiple options. Those without face the same uncertainty with fewer tools.

And the deepest cost may be to long-term thinking. Investing in skills, relationships, institutions—any of it depends on some expectation that the future will be recognizable. When that expectation erodes, the rational move is to shorten your horizon, reduce commitments, keep options open. This is reasonable when taken individually. Collectively, it produces underinvestment in exactly the things that might make the future more stable.

The condition described here—carrying risks you didn't choose, with weakened capacity to assess them—isn't a temporary disruption. The forces generating it are structural, and structural forces don't reverse quickly.

This is turning into a series of posts as I think about this idea more broadly. The next piece I have planned in this series looks at how young people are responding—the behavioral and political adaptations emerging as a generation raised under these conditions starts to exercise power. These unwilling participants are developing their own strategies. What those produce will shape the decade ahead.