## Metaveri Başlık: **Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters** Yazar: *Brian Klaas* Kategori: #books ## Altı Çizilenler - When we consider the what-if moments, it’s obvious that arbitrary, tiny changes and seemingly random, happenstance events can divert our career paths, rearrange our relationships, and transform how we see the world. To explain how we came to be who we are, we recognize pivot points that so often were out of our control. But what we ignore are the invisible pivots, the moments that we will never realize were consequential, the near misses and near hits that are unknown to us because we have never seen, and will never see, our alternative possible lives. We can’t know what matters most because we can’t see how it might have been. - Yet, when we try to explain the world—to explain who we are, how we got here, and why the world works the way it does—we ignore the flukes. The squished bugs, the missed buses, all of it we dismiss as meaningless. We willfully ignore a bewildering truth: but for a few small changes, our lives and our societies could be profoundly different. Instead, we return again and again to the stripped-down, storybook version of reality, as we seek new knowledge of straightforward causes and effects. X causes Y, and X is always a major factor, never a minor or random or accidental tweak. Everything can be measured, plotted onto a graph, and controlled with just the right intervention or “nudge.” We are seduced by pundits and data analysts, soothsayers who are often wrong, but rarely uncertain. When given the choice between complex uncertainty and comforting—but wrong—certainty, we too often choose comfort. Perhaps the world isn’t so simple. Can we ever understand a world so altered by apparent flukes? - There is a concept in philosophy known as amor fati, or love of one’s fate. We must accept that our lives are the culmination of everything that came before us. You may not know the names of all eight of your great-grandparents off the top of your head, but when you look in the mirror, you are looking at generational composites of their eyes, their noses, their lips, an altered but recognizable etching from a forgotten past. When we meet someone new, we can be certain of one fact: none of their direct ancestors died before having children. It’s a cliché, but true, to say that you wouldn’t exist if your parents had not met in just the same, exact way. Even if the timing had been slightly different, a different person would have been born. - Your life depends on the courting of countless people in the Middle Ages, the survival of your distant Ice Age ancestors against the stalking whims of a saber-toothed tiger, and, if you go back even further, the mating preferences of chimpanzees more than 6 million years ago. Trace the human lineage back hundreds of millions of years and all our fates hinge on a single wormlike creature that, thankfully for us, avoided being squished. If those precise chains of creatures and couples hadn’t survived, lived, and loved just the way that they did, other people might exist, but you wouldn’t. We are the surviving barbs of a chain-link past, and if that past had been even marginally different, we would not be here. - Amor fati means accepting that truth, even embracing it, recognizing that we are the offshoots of a sometimes wonderful, sometimes deeply flawed past, and that the triumphs and the tragedies of the lives that came before us are the reason we’re here. We owe our existences to kindness and cruelty, good and evil, love and hate. It can’t be otherwise because, if it were, we would not be us. - I am a (disillusioned) social scientist. Disillusioned because I’ve long had a nagging feeling that the world doesn’t work the way that we pretend it does. The more I grappled with the complexity of reality, the more I suspected that we have all been living a comforting lie, from the stories we tell about ourselves to the myths we use to explain history and social change. I began to wonder whether the history of humanity is just an endless, but futile, struggle to impose order, certainty, and rationality onto a world defined by disorder, chance, and chaos. - In a world of rapid change, many of us feel lost in a sea of uncertainty. But when lost at sea, clinging to comforting lies will only help us sink. The best life raft may just be the truth. - Contingency might change how the discovery happens, but the outcome is similar. It’s as though hitting the snooze button in the morning might delay your journey, but not change your life path. You get to the same destination no matter what. That’s convergence. - Convergence is the “everything happens for a reason” school of evolutionary biology. Contingency is the “stuff happens” theory. - For centuries, the dominant worldview in science and society has been defined by an unshakable faith in convergence. Newton’s laws weren’t supposed to be broken. Adam Smith wrote of an “invisible hand” that guides our behavior. Biologists initially resisted Charles Darwin’s theories because they put too much emphasis on random chance and too little emphasis on elegant order. Uncertainty has long been shunned, shoved aside by rational-choice theories and clockwork models. Small variations are dismissed as “noise” that should be ignored, so we can focus on the real “signal.” Even our famous quotes are infused with the neat logic of convergence. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” What it doesn’t ever do, we are told, is bend at random. - The tapestry of life is woven with a magical sort of thread, one that grows longer the more you unspool it. Every present moment is created with seemingly unrelated strands that stretch far into the distant past. Whenever you tug on one thread, you’ll always meet unexpected resistance because each is connected to every other part of the tapestry. The truth is, as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his letter from a Birmingham jail, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” - Other scientists and philosophers reject the clockwork world of Laplace’s demon. It’s not that we lack understanding or the right tools to measure a clockwork universe, they argue, but rather that the mysteries of the universe are unknowable. Our lives could be different. The future will always be enigmatic, no matter the technology, no matter the omniscient demons we can imagine. It’s not that we don’t know. It’s that we can’t know. - Because small changes can make such a big difference, the universe will always appear uncertain, even random, to us. No matter the technological leaps we make, humans will never become Laplace’s demon. If there is a clockwork universe ticking away behind everything we see and experience, we will never fully understand it. - Whatever the reasons for why we tend to discount the total unity of our world and instead divide everything into neat boxes, interconnectedness is reality. It drives everything. Ours is an intertwined world. Once you accept that entangled existence, it becomes clear that chance, chaos, and arbitrary accidents play an outsize role in why things happen. In an intertwined world, flukes matter. There can be no true split between “the signal” and “the noise.” There is no noise. The noise of one person’s life is the signal for another, even when we can’t detect it. - **We control nothing, but influence everything.** - Our language reflects these misconceptions. As the writer and philosopher Alan Watts noted, when we speak of our birth, we often say that we came into the universe when plainly we came out of it, an aggregation of atoms that happen to be rearranged, happily and temporarily, into a human being. Everywhere you look, flawed assumptions abound, flowing out of this deceptive paradigm—especially the lie that the tiny fluctuations of life can safely be ignored. Our Western culture, which prioritizes individualism more than all other human societies in history, has made it easy to ignore the astounding connections that bind us together. - It’s easy to understand the extremes of this thought experiment. Swap one cell and you’re still “you.” On the other extreme, if the tweezers swapped every cell in your respective bodies, it would be absurd to say that “you” were still sitting in the chair where you started. After all, a person looking and feeling exactly like yourself would now be sitting in the other chair. But here’s the baffling question: At what exact point do you stop being you? Are you still “you” when 30 percent of your cells have been replaced? How about 50.1 percent? There’s no clear answer. - **Recognizing that often meaningless, accidental outcomes emerge from an intertwined, complex world is empowering and liberating. We should all take a bit less credit for our triumphs and a bit less blame for our failures.** - **We’re particularly prone to inventing and clinging to false explanations in the face of seemingly random misfortune. We can’t easily accept randomness as an explanation for why we get cancer or end up in a car accident. Bad news requires something behind it that makes sense.** - Conversely, research has shown that people will happily accept randomness or chance as satisfactory explanations when they experience an unexpected positive, such as winning the lottery. In those moments of surprising joy, we are like a dog attending its own birthday party, unsure why chicken and cheese are suddenly and inexplicably abundant, but happy to gobble them down unquestioningly. - Yet when we try to explain anything important, randomness and chance fly right back out the window. Consider how we try to make sense of variation between humans. We almost always end up relying on a simplistic dichotomy: it must be due to some combination of nature (genes) and nurture (our environment, upbringing, and experiences). But a third possibility is often ignored. What if, as with the mysterious marmorkrebs, some variation between us is just accidental or arbitrary? - To digest citrate, this “freak” line of bacteria had first undergone at least four unrelated mutations that provided no apparent benefit to the population—seemingly meaningless errors. But if those four mistakes had not all occurred, in that specific order, the fifth mutation, which gave them the ability to eat citrate, wouldn’t have been possible. Five contingent mutations were stacked on top of each other, and they were utterly improbable, too. Contingency all the way down. - **We tell ourselves that we’re in control of our lives. The truth is that everything is constantly in flux, including ourselves.** We live, as do E. coli, in a world defined by what we might call contingent convergence, which is broadly how change happens. There’s order and structure, but the snooze-button effect is real. That leads to an unsettling, but also exhilarating, truth: every moment matters. - These ideas are related to a concept called survivorship bias, in which we can only observe that which has survived. Much of our knowledge of cavemen comes from cave paintings. It’s possible some didn’t live in caves and painted more often on the bark of trees, so we should think of them as treemen. But the trees are long gone, so we can’t say, while the cave paintings survived. Similarly, classical thought from Greece and Rome has profoundly shaped modernity, but our interpretation of it is influenced by an arbitrary factor: which ideas survived through manuscripts while others were lost to history. Some aspects of human history, as with nature, are irreducibly arbitrary. - In February 2014, many workers on the London Underground, or Tube, went on strike. Tens of thousands of commuters were affected. It forced commuters to experiment with alternatives. Using anonymized data, economists from Oxford and Cambridge examined 200 million data points, both before and after the Tube strikes. Many people stuck to the route they were forced to use due to the strike. They had been unaware of a better or nicer pathway to work, and it took a minor diversion to push them out of their rut. After crunching the numbers, the economists came to a surprising conclusion. With hundreds of thousands of commuters discovering a more efficient route to work, the Tube strike had inadvertently provided a significant net benefit to London’s economy. - In a perhaps apocryphal story, a visitor to the house of the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Niels Bohr noticed a horseshoe hanging over the door. Astonished that one of the founding fathers of atomic theory and quantum physics would put his faith in superstitions, the visitor asked if Bohr actually believed the horseshoe would bring him luck. “Of course not,” Bohr allegedly replied, “but I am told that they bring luck even to those who do not believe in them.” - **Superstition is the daughter of the unexplained and the apparently random.** We invent it to deal with causal uncertainty, a disorienting feeling we experience when we don’t know why something is happening and we feel like the playthings of chaos. Superstition is not, as many unfairly believe, the providence of simpletons. Instead, it is an understandable and nearly universal way that humans assert control when they feel that ordinary, rational methods of manipulating the world have become fruitless. In the words of Theodore Zeldin, superstition functions the same as the “modern car-driver, who does not know how his car works, but trusts it all the same, interested only in knowing which button to press.” - We sometimes see patterns and meaningful relationships where none exist because that’s better than seeing nothing. In the words of the late philosopher Susanne Langer, “Man can adapt himself somehow to anything his imagination can cope with; but he cannot deal with Chaos.” - Because of our relentless drive for ruthless, perfected optimization, most modern social systems have little slack—such as our economies and our politics—and the levels of interconnection are now so great that even minor perturbations can create major shocks. We, by design, race toward the cliff edge, but continue to be surprised when we fall off it. - We delude ourselves into believing we’re in control, until we are, yet again, thwacked by a devastating crisis, such as a financial crash, a disruptive new technology, a terrorist attack, or a pandemic. But rather than understanding those inevitable avalanches as the normal functioning of the system—a sandpile existence working exactly as it’s designed—we mistakenly think of them as “shocks.” - We’ve built a world that seems regular and controllable, so long as we pass the right laws and enact the correct monetary policy. When we’re surprised by a social shock, the lesson people tend to learn is that we just need to work harder to control the world better. If only we had better laws, better regulation, better forecasting data, Black Swans might become a scourge of the past. That’s not true. The real lesson is that the modern world, like the locust swarm, is fundamentally uncontrollable and unpredictable. Our hubris deludes us. Modern society is a complex system, seemingly stable, teetering on the edge of chaos—until everything falls apart due to a small change, from the accidental to the infinitesimal. - Ideas, even false ones, spur action, and billions are now being exposed to new ideas at a rate that has never before existed. As the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto writes, “Ideas are the main motors of change in human cultures and… the pace of change is a function of the mutual accessibility of ideas.” That motor of change is now in overdrive. - Complex-systems thinking can teach us important lessons. We fit our lives into informal social rules, patterns, and expectations, a bit like human basins of attraction. That creates the illusion of stability and regularity out of 8 billion wildly diverse, unique people. But we get into trouble when we allow ourselves to be fooled by the mirage of regularity, focusing only on the highly predictable and repeatable aspects of the world, while dismissing accidents, outliers, and chance fluctuations as merely white noise to be tuned out, rather than understanding what it really is: the buzz of complex life. - People were contemplating odds, even if they didn’t create a systematic logic for them. Similar games of chance also existed in other cultures throughout history. For example, the Arabic word for dice, al-zahr, is where we get the word hazard, a modern synonym for risk, and the Spanish word azar, which means “chance” or “randomness.” The math lagged the games. - Then, the first usage of the Latin word resicum, which gave birth to our word risk, emerged from a notary contract in the Italian maritime republic of Genoa in 1156. It was used to proportionally award the spoils of risky shipping journeys across the Mediterranean, which would typically result in riches, but sometimes in ruin. - Too many people believe human knowledge is on mop-up duty, cleaning up those pesky lingering unknowns that will soon be satisfactorily answered. There’s no cure for cancer, but it’s within reach; there’s no man on Mars but there will be soon. The apparent all-knowingness of modern science seems to confer protection on the rest of us from the risks of contingency and chaos. - I am, after all, a (disillusioned) social scientist. Yet all social scientists know a secret that we rarely discuss openly: even our best minds don’t really understand how our social world works. This is particularly true for rare, nonrepeatable, and contingent events, which are often the most important events to understand. Our intertwined social world is too complex for us to master, driven by feedback loops and tipping points, forces that are constantly changing, swayed by chance and chaos, accidents and flukes. - In the early twentieth century, a renegade economist named Frank Knight challenged the conventional economic wisdom, which relied on a series of simplistic assumptions. Knight persuasively articulated the difference between, in his terminology, uncertainty versus risk. (Risk in this context relates to volatility, not the risk of something bad happening.) Knight argued that risk, the more manageable of the two, occurs when a future outcome is unknown but the precise odds of something happening are known and are stable. We don’t know what will happen, but we do know how or why it’s happening. For example, tossing a six-sided die is a matter of risk rather than uncertainty. We don’t know which exact number it will land on, but we do know that each number has a one-in-six chance of ending up on top. Risk can be tamed. - Uncertainty, by contrast, refers to situations in which a future outcome is unknown and the underlying mechanism producing that outcome is also unknown—and may even be constantly changing. We don’t know what will happen and we don’t have any way of assessing the likelihood that it will happen. We’re completely in the dark. In this formulation, the IMF constantly fails to predict the onset of recessions because it is treating uncontrollable uncertainty as though it’s resolvable risk. It’s not, so the forecast fails. - Knight’s dichotomy between uncertainty and risk is useful. To avoid catastrophic errors of judgment, it’s crucial to separate what can and can’t be known, as some realms are simply unknowable. To cope, many have turned not to the old superstitions of divination, but rather to the sometimes misleading comfort of probabilities. Much of the time, probabilities are properly applied and help us navigate risk by making wiser decisions. But if you venture into an unknowable, uncertain realm armed with your trusty probability to make decisions, you might be in for a nasty—and potentially catastrophic—shock. Don’t mistake untamable chaos for tamable chance. - Sometimes, however, we must choose, even when we’re hopelessly uncertain. The world of questions can be split into two categories: those that must be answered and those that need not be. We might call these the “take your best shot” questions versus the “don’t bother trying” questions. If you have a rare disease, doctors must decide how to treat it, even if they don’t know what’s causing it or what’s likely to work. Saying “I don’t know” isn’t a viable option to deal with a mysterious form of cancer. Take your best shot. - Saying “I don’t know” doesn’t mean that you must throw up your hands and do nothing. It just means avoiding making silly forecasts when it’s not necessary. When it is necessary, it’s important to at least acknowledge the unpartable mists of uncertainty and to incorporate an acceptance of chaotic dynamics into decision-making. Unfortunately, the exact opposite viewpoint tends to dominate our societies. Rather than rewarding intellectual humility, we too often mistakenly conflate (false) certainty with confidence and power. Too many people rise to the top following the strategy of always certain, but often wrong. - The frequency type is mostly based on how often an outcome will occur, particularly over the long run during repeated trials. - Belief-type probabilities are completely different. They are expressions of a degree of confidence that you have in a specific claim or future outcome, based on the available evidence. - It’s impossible to calculate what you can’t anticipate. - If you understand that seemingly insignificant flukes constantly sway an intertwined world, you’ll recognize these limits of human understanding. By contrast, with the mindset that everything is controllable risk, you’ll simply ignore these problems and rush headlong into catastrophe. - The shelf life of probability is getting shorter. This has created a strange paradox. The future is becoming more uncertain and often impossible to predict. At the same time, we are making increasingly precise predictions that often turn out to be wildly wrong. We put blind faith in probability at our peril. - If uncertainty is slain, so are surprises, serendipity, and flukes. The unanswerable mysteries of our lives, of our world, and of our universe spark curiosity, wonder, awe, and, yes, frustration and despair. But without them, we would not be ourselves. There can be upside to uncertainty. - Rather than embrace a healthy dose of uncertainty, we cling to false certainty. Much of our world now runs on complex models that few of us understand. The problem, however, is that the models have become so influential that we can forget that they are models—deliberate simplifications that are, by design, inaccurate representations of the thing itself, just as a map helps us navigate a territory. But the map is not the territory. There are trade-offs to using models. As the French poet Paul Valéry put it rather succinctly, “Everything simple is false. Everything which is complex is unusable.” Nobody wants a map with a 1:1 scale. - Decision theory is therefore a flawed, sometimes useful, way of navigating the garden of forking paths before us. But everything goes disastrously wrong when we forget its serious limitations within our complex, chaotic world. When hubris combines with an overly neat map to navigate a messy world, we get into trouble. It’s best to constantly remind ourselves that there will always be some uncertainty that can never be conquered.