Strategising chaos

“Everyday Chaos” is a book about handling chaos. A version of “Sensemaking”, “Unchartered” and “Metaskills”.

Sensemaking

Making sense of model makers. Starting with computers and AI. As computation gets more advanced, it gets more mysterious. For example, if you subtract the number of possible chess moves from the number of possible moves in the Chinese game of go, the remainder is many times larger than the number of atoms in the universe. Deep learning’s algorithms work because they capture better than any human can the complexity, fluidity, and even beauty of a universe in which everything affects everything else, all at once.

The world is super complex

But now that our new tools, especially machine learning and the internet, are bringing home to us the immensity of the data and information around us, we’re beginning to accept that the true complexity of the world far outstrips the laws and models we devise to explain it.

Logic does no longer apply

Since the ancient Greeks, we’ve defined ourselves as rational animals who are able to see the logic and order beneath the apparent chaos of the world. Giving up on this traditional self-image of our species is wrenching and painful. Evolution has given us minds tuned for survival and only incidentally for truth. Our claims about what…