What Order Out of Chaos?
August 5, 2008
Certainty does not exist in this world. Yes it feels nice to assume so, but it simply is not there. People like the idea of having stability like that of a job, as it provides a sense of certainty with every paycheck. They have however ignored the fact that vocational demand relies heavily on performance of employers; i.e. they put their lives at the mercy of the local economies.
Conventional “wisdom” then pushes the idea of luck determining winners from losers of life, mathematicians beg to differ. Most individual events occur with arbitrary outcomes; collectively, respectable forecasts have become possible.
E.g. it is unfeasible to predict how long it takes an individual atomic nucleus to lose energy, or experience “radioactive decay”. But studied collectively, the half-life periods of groups of them remain stable. This makes the outcome predictable. Ironic, isn’t it?
Finding and exploiting order out from randomness has served many business models well for centuries, most apparently the lottery scheme, casinos, and the financial markets. The minds behind these industries designed the games in deterministic manners.
The sole purpose of them serves to extract wealth from the uninformed public, hence the veil of mystique. Read more