How 12th-century Genoese merchants invented the idea of risk

>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.

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).