An ancient Greek approach to risk and the lessons it can offer the modern world | Hacker News Reader

An ancient Greek approach to risk and the lessons it can offer the modern world

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48 pointsdiodorus17 comments

Doggedly pursuing the elimination of one risk while blinding oneself to all other risks and costs is not good risk-management. The author intuitively knows this, because he's still asking the questions about going to the supermarket or the doctor, but is still writing about "risk" as a single dial that you turn up or down. That's not as useful as thinking about "which risks am I introducing or amplifying by taking this action, and which ones am I mitigating; what total set of (each outcome times its probability) am I willing to accept?" "[x] was a bad risk" is something that history's winners get to decree about [x], which is how we get stories of which oracles had the gods' favor.

For the more modern development of the idea of risk, check out Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Bernstein (ISBN: 978-0-471-29563-1):

* https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Against+the+Gods%3A+The+Remarkab...

> With the stock market breaking records almost daily, leaving longtime market analysts shaking their heads and revising their forecasts, a study of the concept of risk seems quite timely. Peter Bernstein has written a comprehensive history of man's efforts to understand risk and probability, beginning with early gamblers in ancient Greece, continuing through the 17th-century French mathematicians Pascal and Fermat and up to modern chaos theory. Along the way he demonstrates that understanding risk underlies everything from game theory to bridge-building to winemaking.

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/128429.Against_the_Gods

Holding a person accountable is a good lesson. But an incident involving superstitions and witch-hunts is not a good example for it.

When everything goes horribly wrong, blame the goat

And when everything goes awesomely right, praise the GOAT.

I describe this as the blamestorm. The focus is on an individual rather than how do we not do this again.

>>> Chresmologoi played so much of a role in bolstering public confidence that the wealthy Athenian politician Alcibiades privately contracted them as spin doctors in order to persuade people to overlook the risks of an expedition to Sicily in 415 B.C.

"Fake news and predictions" as old as civilization itself.

cf _Phaedrus_:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737221

Although I have no reference available for this, I have read that the ancient oracular practice of examining animal's intestines was similarly manipulated and contracted for. The priests knew that some plants (containing teratogens) created mutant offspring whose insides (if they lived at all) would be messed up. By feeding some animals those plants, they could offer up either a bad omen or a good omen (regular animal, normal intestines, liver etc) at will as their leaders wished. Because teratogens were beyond the imagination of the ordinary citizen, it had to be the Gods' speaking, 'cause they usually did give pretty good advice.

One thing I badly want to know but fail attain.

Who are the ancient Greeks that made up these myths?

We know some of the philosophers mentioned in the article, but pinpointing the origin of mythology is pretty much impossible. Most mythology is itself just earlier mythology that people adapted.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hesiod#/Life

This. The myths, mentioned in the article, were written down at the end of the Greek dark ages, and probably has their roots in the folklore of the centuries before

It seems likely they weren’t the same Bronze Age people like Hesiod, but rather Neolithic, pre-literate ancestors speaking some sort of proto-Indo-European language, the so-called Aryans.* Some of those folks later migrated into India, the north-east shores of the Mediterranean, and Persia (today’s Iran, i.e, “Aryan”), and possibly north west as well.

* Ignore the contemporary racist use of this term, has caused the term to fall out of contemporary scholarly use. Calling them “proto-indo-europeans” isn’t really that inconvenient and avoids unfairly inflaming some people.

It’s surprising how detailed a drawing we can make of these people from linguistic, cultural, archeological and DNA triangulation. Of course there’s no way to confirm the inferences, and there’s a big risk of bias (see what happened with the ancient word aryan!) but there is good scholarship.

I would have avoided even mentioning th A-word but wanted to mention the Persian connection.

Only in early 20th-century racist fantasies is the term "Aryan" used to describe the speakers of Proto-Indo-European. In modern scholarly terminology, "Aryan" is only identified as a self-appellation of some speakers of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages, not Proto-Indo-European itself. We don't know what the speakers of Proto-Indo-European called themselves. (Before anyone brings up the old claim, still in some pop-sci works, that Ireland's Irish name Eire comes from Aryan, that has been discredited for decades now.)

Besides that, it is recognized that most of Greek myth originates in Eastern Mediterranean cultures, both in Greece and in interaction with Anatolian peoples, and actually very little in Greek mythology can be traced back to Indo-European myth.

> it is recognized that most of Greek myth originates in Eastern Mediterranean cultures, ... actually very little in Greek mythology can be traced back to Indo-European myth.

Is that the case? It's been a couple of decades since I was immersed in the scholarship of this domain so it's quite possible there is more recent scholarship I'm utterly unaware of. It's pretty overt that there are common religious and linguistic elements of the ancient vedic and greek mythologies (less so with zoerastrianism) though it's indeed impossible to unscramble the egg to try to ascertain how much might have been brought in from some ur-culture and how much arrived via later transmission between cultures (that had an even longer history of trade).

As for the use of Aryan, well, it's a millennia-old self-descriptive term in old Persian and Sanskrit, but I certainly agree its adoption by Europeans in the mid 19th century was in support of a particular racial Weltanschauung. Hence my specific calling out of this factor. Another trace can be found in the common (English, French, Spanish, Russian, Marathi etc) use of "Indo-European" vs the German "Indogermanisch''

Work in reconstructing both Indo-European myth and Eastern Mediterranean myth has made great strides in the last 20–25 years. As I said, Greek myth has a handful of things that go back to the Proto-Indo-Europeans in the Urheimat, but most of Greek myth must be derived locally from Greece, Anatolia and the Levant instead. The standard modern reference for all this is M.L. West’s Indo-European Poetry and Myth (Oxford University Press, 2007), and then you can mine its bibliography for more reading material.

Exactly, Aryan is self-descriptive in Old Persian and Sanskrit, so only the Indo-Iranian branch and nowhere else in the Indo-European family. It is inappropriate to even mention this term if you are talking about the Proto-Indo-European-speaking community, not only because it is wrong, but also because it will only turn laypeople off because of the racist associations.

I prefer to think of such practices as an emerging recognition of more scientific principles. Signs and portents could be thought of as necessary but insufficient conditions or even a half-baked recognition of leading indicators. Consulting an oracle could be thought of as seeking out a sounding board or getting a second opinion.

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