“I am basically a cosmic Fluke” and the chaos of science, policy, and human narratives

Riskgaming

Humans are enamored by a good story. The world overloads our mammalian senses, and so we seek any simplifying structure to narrate what we are witnessing and make it more accessible for processing. That simplification doesn’t just reduce the complexity of the world, but also makes it difficult to see the extent by which luck drives the successes of our geniuses — and the failures of others. From scientific discoveries and power-law venture returns to legislative breakthroughs and decisions during war, the world is, essentially, chaos.

That might trigger a bout of deep existentialism for many of us, but for Brian Klaas, the hope is that confronting the stochastic nature of the world can lead to better governance and progress. In his new book Fluke, Klaas argues that we need to upend the simplistic statistical analyses and modeling that are common across social science and other domains and replace it with one that can encompass a theory of flukes. That means understanding timing, path dependency, and how the world is a complex system that is far more of a continuous variable than a binary one.

With Lux’s scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman and host Danny Crichton, we all talk about how chaos rules our lives; how a better understanding of complexity can improve investments, science, and life; Darwin’s luck of publishing his research on natural selection; the dangers of the human penchant for finding narrative; the random luck of our life experiences; and why understanding flukes can be a counterpoint to the ideas of moneyball.