Parwy's Blog: The science of randomness, flukes, and fate

Control, Influence, and the Limits of Agency

There is a distinction between control and influence, which challenges the widely held belief that individuals are in charge of their destiny:

It is untrue that we are completely in control of our path through life. The core argument is that we control nothing but we influence everything.
When people accept that they have profound influence but very limited control, they start to see the world and behave differently, accepting the limits of what they can and cannot do.
Western modernity has an obsession with the delusion of individualism, which is comforting because it suggests people are driving change and their lives will unfold the way they want them to.

The Mistake of Believing "Everything Happens for a Reason"

The saying "everything happens for a reason" is untrue. Believing this causes people to make cognitive mistakes and to ascribe fundamentally wrong ideas behind the events of their lives.
The history of ideas is largely a history of trying to cram the complexity and messiness of the world into a tidy story. This drive for order originated partly from religion, which sought elegant order from God, and continued through the Scientific Revolution with its elegant, clockwork models of physics that sought to eliminate accidents.
The causal chain of events that produce outcomes is messy, not neat and tidy. Many things "just happen arbitrarily randomly or as the byproduct of chaos theory".
Ignoring the noise in favor of the signal is a huge mistake, as the noise is where many of the most important and consequential events in life take place.

The Evolutionary Compulsion for Order

The human tendency to seek reasons and patterns is rooted in biology and survival, which makes accepting randomness difficult:

Human brains evolved to over-detect patterns because it was advantageous for survival (e.g., a prehistoric hunter-gatherer reacting to rustling grass by imagining there is a sabre-tooth tiger hiding there).
Through evolution, our brains became hyper attuned to pattern detection. This causes us to be "allergic to the explanation that it was just arbitrary" when random things occur, leading us to stitch together neat, tidy narratives from A to B.
When random events happen that one doesn't control, and one falsely ascribes intentionality to them, the lesson is misunderstood.

Interconnectedness and Unforeseen Ripple Effects

Causality is constantly operating, meaning every action, no matter how small, has vast, long-term consequences, a concept sometimes resisted because it is bewildering:

People instinctively accept the rule of causality when thinking about time travel fiction (the warning not to squish a bug to avoid changing the future), but they fail to apply this mentality to the present.
Cause and effect patterns operate the same in the past and the present: we are constantly reshaping the future, and every single act we perform has unforeseen ripple effects that will change the world.
This concept is illustrated by the story of Ivan the swimmer, whose life was saved by a soccer ball kicked accidentally off a cliff 80 miles away 10 days earlier by children he would never meet. This demonstrates the interconnection between lives.
A macro example is the COVID-19 pandemic, where one virus infecting one person in Wuhan, China, irrevocably changed the lives and trajectories of 8 billion people globally.