I read an interesting article on probability and gambling
1 and I also recently watched the DS9 episode 4x08 "Starship Down," which has some great Quark scenes where he teaches Hanok the thrill of gambling and taking risk. Together, these two things made me think about how Quark is both a gambler and a gambling house proprietor, and how the attitudes toward risk and gambling line up (or don't) with the concept of profit in Ferengi culture. So have some meta about Ferengi...
One thing that’s quite funny to me is that one of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition is #62: "The riskier the road, the greater the profit." Now, this sounds like a very Nightmare Person doctrine to believe in, because there's all
sorts of risky actions you can take that have basically no chance of a reward, so this rule sounds like it's encouraging people to take risk for no good reason on the mistaken belief that risk and reward generally go together when they don't. While perhaps there are certain limited circumstances where more risky actions lead to higher rewards, as a general rule, you would not expect these two things to correlate. In fact, there's plenty of cases in life when the more profitable course of action is to secure
guaranteed rather than chancy profit (as Hanok correctly points out in "Starship Down"). So why is this a rule? It seems more like a fallacy of a gambler to believe this odd thing rather than any kind of sensible money-making advice.
But actually, this rule does make sense if you replace "profit" with a different sort of reward -- namely, the dopamine hit of pleasure. If we're talking about pleasure, then yes, the riskier the wager you make, the more relieved you are when it works out. So here, the notion of reward is actually a subjective one: how it feels after you make a risky play, rather than what the status of your bank account is.
This conflation of profit and pleasure is generally a feature of Ferengi culture. Despite how much emphasis they put on earning profit, from all we know about them, the Ferengi are actually probably pretty subpar profit-makers -- they're very short-termist, and they lie and cheat frequently, which alienates customers/trade partners and forces them to continually have to move to new markets. Hanok is understandably a bit confused why they consider this a viable profit model because on its face, it looks pretty dumb.
But for Ferengi, the notion of "profit" isn’t just monetary but more holistic -- it includes any kind of benefit you might get in life such as pleasure, social standing, etc. So in "The riskier the road, the greater the profit," the profit here is probably referring more like to how it
feels when you win rather than objectively how much you’ve won. But there doesn't seem to be a lot of self-awareness about this. I think the Ferengi do think they are profit-maximizing (in the monetary sense), while in actuality caring a bit more about short-term pleasure than long-term profit. It's kind of interesting because I also think this makes them similar to the Klingons and the Vulcans, who both think they care about honor and logic, but instead actually seem to be chasing after a nearby thing that they confuse with honor and logic (for Klingons, socially-awarded accolades which they call "honor" and for Vulcans, conformity to a specific utilitarianism that is culturally normal which they call "logic").
This makes sense of the way that Ferengi also regularly chase after sex partners and engage in conspicuous consumption, even if this might conflict with earning a profit. (You can imagine an alternative version of Ferengi who are like the Calvinist stereotype: people who drily accumulate without conspicuous consumption and who eschew pleasure, which would be very different.)
And it makes sense of Quark as both a gambler and the owner of a gambling house. I imagine that Quark (who, like a typical Ferengi, is good with math) has a very dry method for calculating payouts for different types of bets in a way that benefits the house and ensures he always makes a profit. That's profit in the monetary sense of the word, and there's very little risk involved (except when there's uncertainty about the likelihood of different outcomes, or when something goes wrong, like someone cheats). But Quark is also very willing to play gambling games even when the odds are unknown or unclear (e.g. 1x10 "Move Along Home") and even though he has
personal knowledge of the fact that "the house always wins." That's his appreciation for profit in the pleasurable sense of the word, where the very existence of risk is what creates the reward, like when he and Hanok experience a thrill from disarming a bomb because the personal stakes were so high.
So Quark is a pretty orthodox Ferengi in that he appreciates these multiple forms of "profit," as suggested by Rule #62, even if this means he probably doesn't make as much money as he could.
1 Barboianu, Catalin. "Mathematics for gamblers." Aeon, 20 April 2021,
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