Why Chaos

Human limbic systems cannot survive additional complexity - AI layers, transhumanism, and big data support, don’t keep our emotional stop loss systems from preventing us from incorporating all available data. Even leaps like cyborgs cannot fully resolve human reactivity. Nor do we want to lose it. We must live on top of chaos. Inchoate energy tricks us into pattern seeking. The chaos is the pattern

We naively make decisions trying to increase flexibility; like freelance work, not having children, not owning long term or permanent assets like a family home. But it makes us unproductive and miserable. Humans can’t live like that. Our limbic base system is biological and committed to abiding organic rhythms. We like routine and predictability. 

The problem is we’ve had it backwards. Don’t make your human decisions more flexible. Apps and portable data are limited by our emotional capacity. Our attention span doesn’t scale. We have huge powerful data systems and neglect to realize that virtually no one, not even the most cognitively powerful, can effectively live in them. Financialization is good in this system. It lets you buy stability without committing to it. Yes we recognize it has negative externalities, that’s not the point. We must capitalize on chaos.

Tech has increasingly engaged in cargo cult behaviors, trying to increase the largesse for individual players, but we’re building the wrong shrines. Largesse comes from the war, not our individual worship practices. The war is being fought regardless of our own worship. It does not care about our rituals. Our portfolios keep going up because the market is, not because you’re a disciplined investor that sees all the numbers clearly. Your process and protocols give illusory control because human systems and concerns are of little interest to natural law. We recognize this limitation. Our ego is not tied up in ritualistic concerns. 

The only complex systems we can understand as humans are simple. That means complex systems which are actually more dangerous to humans because we THINK we understand the system, when we really don’t. We think we understand it because it is simple. But because it is simple it is prone to cascades. So we think we’ve set up control around it, that we understand the cascade potential, but we don’t. It’s never the thing that gets you.

As the world shrinks and more hands are involved in everything, the complexity of the system only increases. Exponentially in some cases. 

Humans believe intentionality creates control, but it doesn’t actually (see Epsilon Theory ‘Zeitgeist’). The corollary to humans telling stories by the fireside is gods smiting heroes for hubris. We install post hoc rationalizations to explain chaos in the system. The only reason the hero is the hero is because he survived (survivorship/recency bias) the gods. Of course the gods chose that fate for the hero. Heroic stories are a chaos stories

The reason the smiting matters (hubristic punishment) - is that it's our rationalization of chaos in the system. It is the Gods. Now it is the capital markets or the political bureaucracy or climate change driven storms. 

Narratives are dangerous because they’re inherently rearlooking, but we use them to try and forecast the future (past performance doesn’t guarantee future results).

Humans are the only animal that can live outside of their natural habitat. Other animals go extinct from ecosystem collapse. Humans find another niche. So humans can live outside of their natural ecosystem and can make choices about future living arrangements. The rest of the planet is stuck in the ecosystems that are killing them, making climate change an opportunity for humanity and a death sentence for everything else. 

When a hero gets hit by the gods for hubris and survives, it isn’t that he is a hero or the gods are real. He was hit by chaos not Zeus. The hero’s journey is real. It is a backwards post hoc narrative we tell ourselves. But there were 9 other heroes who didn’t make it. They were not better or worse, they simply didn’t survive the chaos. We need to stop believing Joseph Campbell tales. Those are pattern layers we put on top of the chaos to justify survivorship bias. 

Watching a dryer turn we see patterns. Ellie in Contact. But one time she looked into the chaos and got a message back.  We care about what happens in the unlikely event that a message makes it out of the chaos. History unfolds and is not currently reversible.

Startups can function as put options to hedge against institutional collapse. It isn’t shorting society so much as realizing that institutional crisis points are on the rise as technology and complexity undermine the foundations of daily life. One put option can not just return the fund but the entire firm. You must make enough bets to survive these inflection points.