Why would you want insurance for predictable events when you can just put the money to one side yourself and not feed the insurance companies' profits?
You have a 1% chance of sustaining $1MM in damage. Do you carry around a million dollars or do you get insurance?
What about a billion? What about a thousand? Congratulations, you now know what you’re willing to pay for a deductible and what you’re going to look for in an insurance policy max.
Similarly, insurance companies frown on people getting insurance when the person knows that they have a claim to make - when there is certainty, then insurance is the wrong product and may be considered insurance fraud.
I think you're mixing up predictable events with probabilistic events. Just because you know the average likelihood of an event occurring does not mean that it is predictable. (e.g. the chance of getting red or black on a roulette table has known odds, but you're only going to be able to win if you can predict the outcome)
My point was that insurance isn’t about unpredictability, it’s about cash flow and risk hedging based on probabilities.
I disagree. If you can predict that your house will never be burnt down, then you wouldn't need buildings insurance - it's the unpredictable nature of these events that makes insurance useful. Yes, the costs of these unpredictable events are spread out across the insurers so that they can turn an unpredictable event that causes a huge expense into a predictable insurance premium instead.
You define predictable as: I can predict if and when this will happen to me.
I define predictable as: I can predict that this will happen one in one hundred times.
Both are correct definitions of predictability. In the insurance context, your view is the one of the insured and mine is the one of the insurer. The switch between the two occurs at some risk-adjusted monetary threshold. In other words, whether you are an insuree or an insurer depends on your risk tolerance. For example, most home owners are insurees for the purposes of fire. Most home owners are also (self-)insurers for the purposes of, say, a leaky faucet. The decision to procure insurance is therefore not predicated on the unpredictability of the event but on a risk adjusted monetary basis (ie, cash flow and risk hedging).
Sorry, but you're using a bizarre definition of predictability. If I were to say that the chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one, then you'd be considering it "predictable".
These types of statistical analyses are exactly why insurance is as cheap as it is.
I'm no fan of all the discounts insurance companies hand out for handing over private data like driving behaviour or healthcare stuff, but insurance companies with no risk management can't compete in any kind of open market.
I would argue that in terms of broader accessibility of insurance, these microtargeting approaches may actually be an improvement for many. If you live in a troublesome neighbourhood you may be paying through the nose for getting categorised as "one of the bad ones", but these individual data points can help prove you're a responsible driver and escape some of the cost of having a shitty start in life.
I'm still against these data collection practises ("you want privacy? Live in a rich neighbourhood and get a college degree!", plus a lack of any kind of law preventing these companies from sharing or selling that data) but there are solid arguments in favour of feeding insurance companies more data.