⭐⭐⭐ Against the Gods by Bernstein
| Full Title | Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter L. Bernstein |
| Year Published | 1998 |
| Date Read | July 04, 2022 |
| Rating | 3/5 stars |
Some cool explorations here. It’s crazy how recent our thinking on risk and probability is — basically just starting in the Renaissance. Funny too how the first forays into this area came from trying to optimize gambling or as a result of playing with toy math problems, not really as a way to solve problems in economics, finance, or business (which I perceive to be today’s biggest users of the innovations discussed).
Bernstein does a good job of investigating reasons as to why even otherwise-advanced cultures earlier didn’t make the leap to probability, in particular focusing on the Greeks’ obsession with truth as derived from proofs rather than from experimentation. To come up with the concept of chance, you’re thinking less from first principles and moreso observing results of trials and trying to deduce what that might mean empirically. Of course, having a better numbering system than Roman numerals would have helped too. But even without such a numbering system the
conceptualization of risk and “this event is more probable than this other one” could have been possible.
I am only giving three stars because I found there to be too many threads going on at once across the length of the book. The number of individuals that are presented — ancient Greek philosophers, Renaissance mathematicians, economists from the 1900s… keeping the competing concepts from each of these individuals in my head proved to be difficult. Perhaps I can return to this book and get more value once I gain more familiarity with the character set.
Recommended in particular for folks with an existing good background in at least two of the three aforementioned groupings of individuals. Maybe a skip until then for others.