Oh and if risk is indeed your jam then look no further than Nassim Taleb's Real World risk institute. I've spoken to some alums of this course and they swear by it! Of course you could read his books too but I think he makes his books stupidly long for no reason.
How 12th-century Genoese merchants invented the idea of risk
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: How 12th-century Genoese merchants invented the idea of risk
#22Interest, risk, insurance etc. are such intrinsic economic concepts that it is hard to believe they didn't naturally originate in some form in the earliest human societies. While I'm sure the word risk and formal methods of actuary can be traced to the era mentioned by the author, I'm more hesitant to believe that the "idea of risk" was invented there.
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Re: How 12th-century Genoese merchants invented the idea of risk
#23Re-invented, anyway. It was well-understood in India a thousand years before, and in Sumeria thousands of years before that. it got re-invented each place and time it was needed.
By "invent" I presume inventio which is to say "finding or discovering of something"[0]. The concept of risk is virtual in the comprehension of all human beings and it takes abstraction[1] and analysis to extricate the concept from the understanding. In which case, you should absolutely expect many people to discover the concept independently, as it were. (See logos or logos spermatikos.)
Re: How 12th-century Genoese merchants invented the idea of risk
#24Re-invented, anyway. It was well-understood in India a thousand years before, and in Sumeria thousands of years before that. it got re-invented each place and time it was needed.
I guess that's how abstractions work in general. You start reasoning in them explicitly when the need (or benefit) to do so is sustained for some time. Then you discard them when they're not needed anymore.
There's a difference between "abstraction" as used in computer science and software development, and "abstraction" as an intellectual act or process.
The former itself seems to have a few different but related uses, but generally it is often a matter of modeling.
The latter is generally that act of the intellect that draws out something from a whole. So it's kind of an opposite process, in a very loose sense. The concept "greenness" is abstracted from images (or phantasms, in classical parlance) of particulars we encounter through the senses. We never encounter "greenness" in the world as a thing, only things which are green.
Where risk is concerned, I would expect the intellect to seize on the concept through abstraction (2), but any modeling of risk would involve the use of (1).
Re: How 12th-century Genoese merchants invented the idea of risk
#25Interest, risk, insurance etc. are such intrinsic economic concepts that it is hard to believe they didn't naturally originate in some form in the earliest human societies. While I'm sure the word risk and formal methods of actuary can be traced to the era mentioned by the author, I'm more hesitant to believe that the "idea of risk" was invented there.
Ancient greeks had actually a very similar system of participation on maritime endeavors. They even supported poets in order to create fiction and propaganda about the amazing things and riches that were abroad. Making young people travel also relieved demographical pressure. If you lost a ship by shipwreck, you lost it all, but it was very profitable if the ship returned. Like anything in life, the were "naturals" t…
There's some interesting details from Rome too. Take this on Cato:
>As his income grew, Cato also became a regular investor in commercial lending. Although a law from 218 BC banned senators from engaging directly in commercial shipping, Cato formed partnerships of fifty investors that backed the commercial operations of fifty ships. He fronted all of the initial capital and then lent money to investors that they could each use to buy a share in the enterprise. Cato himself entrusted one share to a freed slave who acted as his agent. He then profited from the trading activities as well as the interest on these loans, while following the letter of the law and limiting his direct exposure in case the cargo was lost.
Re: How 12th-century Genoese merchants invented the idea of risk
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's something incredibly surreal about a dispute over trading standards between two people who have been dead for literal millennia and couldn't possibly have conceived of the internet and the technology that makes it possible becoming a meme. I wonder if there's any correspondence out there today which will amuse people 3500 years in the future?
>I wonder if there's any correspondence out there today which will amuse people 3500 years in the future? I really hope RickRolling is still a think in 3500 years
I wonder how it might get translated into future languages? There's dozens of Bible translations and while they all say the same thing the tone of the text can be quite different between them, the Valley of the Shadow of Death (KJV) conjures a much more vivid picture than the darkest valley (NIV) for example.
The idea of a future historian painstakingly translating and trying to figure out the "deeper significance" of each phrase in Never Gonna Give You Up makes me smile! Maybe we should print out Wikipedia on the kind of paper the ancient Israelites were using to give them a hand.
Re: How 12th-century Genoese merchants invented the idea of risk
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess that's how abstractions work in general. You start reasoning in them explicitly when the need (or benefit) to do so is sustained for some time. Then you discard them when they're not needed anymore.
There's a difference between "abstraction" as used in computer science and software development, and "abstraction" as an intellectual act or process. The former itself seems to have a few different but related uses, but generally it is often a matter of modeling. The latter is generally that act of the intellect that draws out something from a whole. So it's kind of an opposite process, in a very loose sense. The con…
I fail to see the difference between these two abstractions. Is modeling, as you put it, not drawing something out from a whole? I think if abstraction meant different things in different contexts, the definition would be to blame.
Re: How 12th-century Genoese merchants invented the idea of risk
#28These kinds of articles always make me wish there were some sort of "financial history book" (or series) that tracked the flows of capital through history and endeavors. We see so much of how ideology and politics evolved, but history of capital flows in any specificity is (or, seems to me) so opaque.
I expect someone to point out that opacity is natural given the sensitive nature of the subject. Consider how much commonly known history is made up of once dire secrets.
Then again, perhaps it's all out there. I guess a good place to start would be US, UK and French treasury reports on actuals. Maybe with python that becomes a more manageable task.
Re: How 12th-century Genoese merchants invented the idea of risk
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's something incredibly surreal about a dispute over trading standards between two people who have been dead for literal millennia and couldn't possibly have conceived of the internet and the technology that makes it possible becoming a meme. I wonder if there's any correspondence out there today which will amuse people 3500 years in the future?
>I wonder if there's any correspondence out there today which will amuse people 3500 years in the future? I really hope RickRolling is still a think in 3500 years
Most probably it will be as alien to people in 3500 years as the babylonian gods are to us.