Risk/Uncertainty: Demonology

Abishai100

VIP Member
Sep 22, 2013
4,956
250
85
Let's say you're a Wall Street stockbroker and someone dares you (one of your trading-floor peers) to make an outlandish investment near the Closing Bell. You start to consider the profitability of such a daring trade, and you also wonder why your co-worker friend is daring you to make the unusual trade. If your trade is a success, you will feel elated for taking a risk, but if you fall flat on your face, you will feel somehow rattled by your co-worker friend you dared you to make the risky trade in the first place.

You go home and buy champagne (if the trade was successful) or maybe some whiskey to drown your sorrows (if the trade was a failure). Either way, you feel the 'dare' itself posed by your co-worker friend has qualitatively 'colored' your trade experience that day on Wall Street. You may decide never again to accept an unusual trade-dare, or you may in fact decide to try a few more trade-dares during your Wall Street career, depending on your disposition.

The reason the trade-dare is so evocative to you intellectually/emotionally is because trading on Wall Street requires acumen regarding risk analysis, so the trade-dare challenges your confidence in risk calculation.

For some reason, a trade-dare posed by someone else is more challenging and evocative than if you posed the trade-dare to yourself as some kind of personal challenge.

In other words, since human beings are by nature very sensitive about risk assessment (be they Wall Street stockbrokers or Vatican priests), they feel 'extra-challenged' when dared to test their risk-calculation skills by other human beings.

This is the challenge of a teacher (or a priest!). Anyone can teach themselves, but a teacher is required to teach others. When you accept the wisdom (or folly) or 'dare' from someone else, you are conceding that there is something you do not know that someone else does.

This is why Wall Street stockbrokers have to work with doses of humility, since risk-calculation on the trading-floor is sometimes extremely challenging. The trading 'network' affirms the stockbroker's 'faith' in the equity of shared risk distribution among all investors.

Maybe this is why Hollywood (USA) makes films such as Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and The Wolf of Wall Street.

When you deny that risk is real or that someone might know more about a risk-scenario than you do, you may be in danger of proverbially 'hiding in the closet' from a natural fear of uncertainty.

Perhaps then this is the study of the modern exorcist studying daredevil behaviors (e.g., gambling) in our new age of profit-driven and risk-valued activities (e.g., Wall Street).

So the basic question arises, "What kinds of demons arise from our natural fears about uncertainty and risk?"



cartoon (2).jpg
 
Snake-House


Isn't it interesting that Americans make the most horror films?

Maybe America's brand of multiculturalism makes for a wide panoply of entertainment tastes, funneling into the proverbial pepperoni-pizza of horror cinema.

Think about it, no matter where you are from, you will agree that Jason Voorhees is a psychopath!

Americans love consumerism (e.g., eBay, Burger King, etc.), so it would be interesting to do a study comparing risk-calculation differences (with respect to culture) among investors/consumers in America (a capitalism-heavy country) and England (a parliament-focused country).

Connections between culture and psychology offer insights into our new world of networking-gauged exchange (e.g., European Union, NATO, ISIS, etc.). After all, risk-evaluation is considered wed to governance.



se.jpg
 

Forum List

Back
Top