Chaos Is Inevitable

"The first message is that there is disorder. Physicists and mathematicians want to discover regularities. People say, what use is disorder. But people have to know about disorder if they are going to deal with it. The auto mechanic who doesn't know about sludge in valves is not a good mechanic ... in the past, people have seen chaotic behavior in innumerable circumstances .... they're running a physical experiment, and the experiment behaves in an erratic manner. They try to fix it or they give up. They explain the erratic behavior by saying there's noise, or just that the experiment is bad." - James Gleick, Chaos

The book is about science, but the principle is universal.

People get weirded out when shit gets weird. We reject it or explain it away.

You get fired. Dumped. Your favorite team loses. You can't lose weight. Someone unexpected gets elected. Nobody will buy your book (oops, sorry, that's me).

Sometimes it is random. We notice variance because it jumps out. It's not always meaningful. Sometimes it's noise.

That said, maybe it's a signal. Maybe there's a reason. Just because the reason is confusing or unexpected doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

The thing happened. There's often a deeper explanation -- the only problem is that it doesn't fit our existing, linear model of explanation.

We need to stop ignoring stuff we don't immediately understand. It's human nature, and it's self-destructive.