The Hidden Paradox of Predictability

The weather forecast hasn't been very accurate in our region this year. Warnings of heavy snow storms were mostly false warnings. The response to the warnings was peoples started to store food supplies, fill tanks with fuel for heating homes and cancellation of some scheduled activities. The perceived risk acted as an external force for people to plan.

This is the irony. The unpredictable weather forecast led to the predictable behavior of people to snowy weather. This isn't the whole story. We live in an open system and we change the environment. By doing so, we increase the unpredictability of the weather forecast at the same time we depend on this unpredictability to determine our deterministic future plans!

We may heat limestone in a closed vessel. The volatile produced gas, carbon dioxide, has no way to escape. However; if we use an open vessel this gas may escape, release into the atmosphere, leading to the warming up of the atmosphere and make the weather more unpredictable. We still depend on weather forecasts to make plans for the future.

We interact socially. Like attracts like and we find people forming clusters of people that are bonded by a shared hobby. A cluster of fans supporting a soccer team in opposition of another cluster of fans who support another team is an example. The two clusters may be closed and information circulates among the cluster members. We may predict the behavior because of the closeness of the two clusters. Freedom and free will are confined because the shared denominator among the clusters' members is the support for their favorite teams. But football is a game and so is life. The rules of the game change, the players change, the tactics change, the coaches change, the referees change, the playing grounds change and the weather at playing times change. A soccer match may start in a sunny weather and only to be later interrupted by thunder and rain. How the players adapt will decide to a great extent the result of the match. The closed clusters of supporters can't change the result of the match. It is more what happens at the varying playing ground. It is the creativity of finding new ways to deal with changes and the individual creativity that decide more than anything else the result of the game.

We are like the waters in our bodies that may exist in solid, liquid or gas phases over a short range of conditions. We warm up the environment to warm us and produce more volatiles. As these volatiles escape they cause further warming up of the environment and making it more unpredictable. Yet; we still draw definite plans from the increasingly less predictable weather.

We prison ourselves in determinism. And we are the cause of making the environment (natural environment and work environment alike) less predictable. Back to the soccer example, one team scores a goal that the referee disallows. Tempers boil up, warming and warning heat up, volatility increases and arguments scale up in rejection for the referee's decision. The ball didn't cross the line and the referee shouldn't have crossed the line. New ideas emerge. Why not use video recording? Suddenly the rules of the game change.

May be in future matches we have self-tracking balls such as the self-tracking keys developed for cars. No matter what it is from the chaos that new ordering ideas shall emerge. We take our system to new levels of order that emerges from the chaos we induced.

Do I plan? Yes, but only to change the rules of planning.