This book review was written by Eugene Kernes
“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.” – Brian Klaas, Chapter 1: Introduction, Pages 11-2
“If you squint at reality for more than a moment, you’ll realize that we’re inextricably linked to one another across time and space. In an intertwined world such as ours, everything we do matters because our ripples can produce storms – or calm them – in the lives of others. That means that we control far less of our world than we think we do, because earth-shattering events can develop based on strange, unexpected interactions that are nearly impossible to predict. It feels more comforting to pretend the opposite: that we, as individuals, are in charge of an ordered, separable world. So, pretend we do.” – Brian Klaas, Chapter 2: Changing Anything Changes Everything, Page 29
“Our brains are therefore designed to allow us to quickly categorize people and assess, even subconsciously, whether we should listen to them. We often get it wrong. Plenty of serious-seeming people in slick suits with eminent degrees and an abundance of charming confidence have repeatedly crashed the economy, dragged us into wars, and inflicted tremendous global suffering. So, it’s not just who says something, but how we perceive the person saying it. Contingency upon contingency upon contingency. We may refer to the messenger mattering as much as the message as the Cassandra problem, yet another cognitive bias that can change history in irrational, arbitrary ways.” – Brian Klaas, Chapter 9: Everyone’s a Butterfly, Page 157
Is This An Overview?
The methodology of cause and effect has enabled people to
navigate a complex reality, to make reality understandable. The problem is that cause and effect leaves
out other causes of change, such as flukes.
Events occur not just because of a rational decision, but because of
random events. An outcome can be
dependent on a series of contingent events, which just happen to coincide. Outcomes might not be proportional to the
cause, as small changes can drastically affect what happens through a cascade
of influence. A reason for failing to
notice how flukes effect life, is due to how the brain processes
information. The brain operates by
finding patterns, even in randomness.
The brain will rationalize the randomness into a coherent narrative of
events, that discounts randomness and chance.
The options that a person has, or does not have, depends on
everything and everyone that came before, and contemporaries. Everyone is linked, intertwined, for every
moment is a composition of decisions and fluke events that affect others and
oneself. Small acts can wreak havoc or provide
calm in the lives of others. Individuals
do not have much control over their own lives, but everyone influences
everything.
Caveats?
This book is filled with various examples of fluke
events. Interest in the examples depends
on the reader. The examples can be
short, and can miss details which can produce a different evaluation of whether
an event was a fluke or not. A fluke can
sometimes appear as an event that lacks an explanation, an event that needs to
be studied more. As the emphasis is on
fluke events, on randomness, as they tend to be culturally dismissed by those
seeking cause and effect explanations, the emphasis can seem to dismiss cause
and effect.
