C H A O S

What we call chaos is just a pattern we haven’t yet recognized.

Chuck Palahiniuk, Survivor

Is chaos what we think, or is it just an illusion of a complex system from which we cannot see its deterministic logic? Does chaos exist in our objective reality? Quantum physics seems to say, yes, all the way down to the smallest levels of reality, there is perceived chaos whose fundamental basics are unknowable. Some will say it is only probabilistic, be it the vacuum of space bubbling with particles popping in and out of existence or the very solid and very real coffee cup in your hand. That happens everywhere, all the time. Even those atomic building blocks are not entirely solid or stable in the ways we might expect in a seemingly solid physical world. Some of these particles are said to pass through solid objects, while others can communicate over vast distances faster than light speeds. Not only does this hint at a whole other universe(s), but it also demonstrates just how unknowable and seemingly unstable the basic building blocks of our reality are.

Fundamental Chaos. The Magnum Opus of the Universe.

Chaos. The Origins, Modern Interpretations and Popularized Cultural Perspective

Origins. In On the Heavens, Aristotle wrote about his observations, saying, “the least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later thousandfold” (Aristotle, 350 B.C.E.). He described what we now call the sensitive dependence of complex (dynamic) systems as having a high sensitivity to their initial conditions and inputs. Thousands of years later, Professor Edward Lorenz posed the question, “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” Popular culture retold this as a butterfly flapping its wings in China to bring about a hurricane in the Caribbean. Professor Lorenz, who fathered the Chaos Theory concept, meant the opposite of the popular culture’s anything goes interpretation as the Butterfly Effect (Vernon, 2017).

When scientists study chaos, they first define the system. Since the study is that of a dynamic system best described for our purpose as “the evolution of something over time. To create a dynamical system, we simply need to decide (1) what is the “something” that will evolve over time and (2) what is the rule that specifies how that something evolves with time. In this way, a dynamical system is simply a model describing the temporal evolution of a system” (Nykamp, 2021). Therefore, the people system is that “dynamic” system within that defined framework. In other words, a defined beginning, end, and the boundaries of that system.

Stephen Kellert wrote In the Wake Of Chaos that “chaos theory focuses on certain forms of behavior – behavior which is unstable and aperiodic.” Specifically, that “unstable behavior means that the system never settles into a form of behavior that resists small disturbances.” Returning to the examples of quantum physics and pulling the microscope back from the quantum chaos, we see atoms with electrons in stable orbits. We see other atoms bonded together to form elements and matter. Zoom out further, and that matter becomes material objects. The next thing we know, there is a cup in our hand. Real. Solid. That chaotic foundation turns undeniably stable like the rest of the world around us.

According to Nykamp’s example, chaos isn’t a random variation, not when that system returns to its normal behavior. That momentary instability, as Kellert says, is shrugged off, making chaos an “aperiodic behavior [that] occurs when no variable describing the state of the system undergoes a regular repetition of values. Unstable aperiodic behavior is highly complex: it never repeats, and it continues to manifest the effects of any small perturbation,” making prediction impossible and random (Kellert, 1993). Why then all this talk about quantum physics? Because it demonstrates two things, 1) that we make vast, overarching assumptions that the world is easy and predictable and that we control it, when in fact, we cannot. The math of quantum mechanics says it’s not chaotic but probabilistic and allows for (superposition) multiple, simultaneous possibilities. 2) Reality comes from chaos, and from that chaos emerges stability. Therefore, we must accept that the underlying fundamentals of our reality or unknowable, unpredictable, chaotic.

Modern computing means chaos theory remains an active and increasing research area, involving many disciplines such as mathematics, topology, physics, social systems, population modeling, biology, meteorology, astrophysics, information theory, computational neuroscience, and pandemic crisis management, the list goes on. Given enough time, humans may very well be able to overcome the galactic challenges faced in identifying and understanding any underlying patterns, interconnectedness, feedback loops, repetition, fractals, and self-organization that takes place behind or emerges from chaotic systems. Until then, you will encounter and interact with millions of daily inputs, each one branching into and off a million others. Much of that perceived chaos will underlie emergent patterns, and while some have no human explanation and are, to us, genuinely chaotic at the end of it all. The scientific applications of the theory are making great strides in explaining and demonstrating patterns and predictabilities in one system after another and finding order in what once appeared to be chaotic to human perception.

According to the previous definition, you may feel an individual human is not chaotic. They get up in the morning and go through the same routine: go to work, lunch, and back home, repeating that pattern five days a week. That person doesn’t appear chaotic, and they may seem to resist minor disturbances. They get to work on time every day and deliver at work and home (beginning, end, and the boundaries of that system). But even that seemingly stable person is only emergent from underlying chaos due to normative influences, behaviors (Mead et al., 2014), and social scripts (SS., n.d.). Some of those chaotic events occur, big and small, but do not knock them off course.

Focusing on an individual human as a chaotic system, we must define their initial conditions. The problem with this is how far back to go? Birth? Right after birth? If so, how long after birth? Should we start before birth? Establishing those initial conditions is challenging. Simplifying this study, we will limit those initial conditions to the beginning of that particular human day upon wake-up. Like a dynamical system, humans will evolve and are susceptible to being thrown off the course of their daily patterns when the expected initial conditions are not met or when the continuous inputs throughout the day deviate from the mean.

Example: The subject of study is hit by a driver trying to beat a red light. That accident has thrown off the pattern of their day. Now, they must deal with the unplanned event and its ripple of consequences, interacting with first responders, insurance, getting their vehicle towed, maybe going to the hospital to get checked out. They may not even show up to work that day. If they do, they will be late and maybe not perform to their usual level. Over the next few days, they may have to deal with their insurance company, find a repair shop or perhaps even get a new car. Over time the emotional trauma might fade, but for most humans, it never entirely goes away. Eventually, they are back to their routine in one form or another. If you were to graph their daily events, we would see them returned to the mean. On the scale of events, the accident was a statistical outlier. And their daily routine has been restored. The graph shows them returning (reverting) to the mean on the chart. You might also agree that the human system will no longer be the same after that. Even though they have returned to normal, that may not be what the normal used to be, and it may have changed in a small but critical way. That change may only have been small and may never have registered on that graph. They might drive a little more cautiously around intersections for a few months, a year, or maybe never. They may appear to have returned to what the outside observer would call normal.

Caution: The McNamara Fallacy warns about the unmeasurable. There are always intangibles that quantitative measurements cannot capture. That example focused primarily on what is observed or measurable as the physically intangible but very real emotional trauma and its short and long term effects. A person can experience a significant emotional trauma that doesn’t appear to the outside observers in their daily life pattern and may only manifest under stress and must be a consideration.

Concepts and Proposal

Concepts.

This study aims to propose a model of thinking. This first requires us to define what we see in humans and define the observable effects of chaos. First, we will explain some terms and then explore some thought experiments with those terms in mind.

Emergent Truth. Defining emergent as arising as a natural or logical consequence or newly formed or prominent. Viewed as a greater whole, “the emergence of something is the process or event of its coming into existence.” Neil deGrasse Tyson popularly defines and defends science as an “exercise in finding what is true.” The scientific method involves testing hypotheses and peer review. Done repeatedly over time, and out of such a process rises what he calls “emergent truth” (Ratner, 2017).

The Decline Effect. A phenomenon is mystically known to “occur when scientific claims receive decreasing support (supportive evidence) over time.” The reality isn’t so unbelievable. A given study’s results don’t just magically change over time. They are simply a snapshot in time (figure 1), and it is not until after the continued collection of data over time that what appeared to be a great effect was, in fact, no significant outlier. You find it is just a reversion to the mean (figure 2) and a stable system with no significant outliers. The intent is to illustrate that what appears to be a significant event in each moment is reduced in their intensity over time and demonstrate that moment in time was no different than any other.

Similarly, the explanation of convergent evolution theory gives us the words that demonstrate how many seemingly “random effects eventually average out” and converge to produce similar patterns in their “given environments” (Parson, 2021). Therefore, the repeated nature of the ebb and flow of events independently develops patterns that move towards logical endpoints that appear to operate independently from one environment to the next. That example illustrates how we quickly determine an outcome or root cause and attribute group behaviors and patterns to their presupposed causes (Al-Sibai, 2021) simply because we have seen it happen before.

Reversion, not Regression Toward the Mean. Regression toward the mean is a phenomenon where outliers of statistical data show up near the upper and lower portions of the distribution in an isolated point of view. As the experiment moves on and collects more data over time, the mean becomes more self-evident as the significance of those initial outliers diminishes. On the other hand, regression is not considered universal. It is best described as reversion as it returns to its normal or previous state, a correction in a sense when observed over a more extended period (Samuels, 1991). Understanding this concept is key to preventing incorrect assumptions or leaping inferences, and designing experiments or interpreting data (Chiolero et al., 2013). Caution: “Ignorance of the problem will lead to errors in decision making” (Morton & Torgerson, 2003).

Relational Interpretation. “In the relational interpretation, any interaction counts as a measurement, to the extent one system affects the other and this influence depends on a variable of the first system. Every physical object can be taken as defining a perspective, to which all values of physical quantities can be referred” (Federico, Rovelli, 2021). This view then of space and time is said to be only in relation to the object that is related temporally (in time) and spatially as occupied space (Evans, 2021).

Cause and Effect. Connections to causality in the natural world or human agency that connects one process with another process or state, where the first is partly responsible for the second, and the second is partially dependent on the first.

Proposal

Chaos Buffering. If we could see every interaction in the world all the time, we may very well be able to remove chaos from the equation. Until then, know that every system of human involvement at a large scale can become deterministic but not 100% predictable. Chaos will always exist in humans or any other sentient organism. The systems around us, social or economic, are made to make sense out of chaos. Control the uncontrollable. Humans, therefore, will always be chaotic.

Imagine dropping a large rock into a calm, still lake. The rock’s impact creates a chaotic event, a singularity at the point of impact. Waves propagate from that event, affecting the water around it, creating causal connections as the water molecules making up the wave are pushed against each other, transferring their energy to the next water molecule. Immediately the inverse square law takes effect (see Figure 4) as the intensity of those waves of water (just like sound or light propagation) begin dissipating (see Figure 3).

The continued propagation loses energy and intensity as each water molecule, fish, and microbe absorb more and more of that energy as they are pushed against the otherwise unmoved water until the wave is no more.

Think of a real-world event of an earthquake ruptured landscape. Broken roads, power lines, buildings, and critical infrastructure near the epicenter are immediately affected by the quake’s peak intensity. People’s lives are up heaved by the uncontrollable and unstoppable events that ensue for hours, days, months, and even years to come. But the farther you go out from the epicenter, the lesser those effects until you reach an area where there are no effects. The radiating waves dissipate as the landscaped absorbs the energy, just like the lake of water. The power of the event is absorbed, buffered by the outlying structure from those calamitous effects. Time moves on, and people find a new normal or return to their patterns. In time, the event is forgotten. Its emotional intensity fades.

Now consider this scenario—a person killed in a car accident. The immediate family, mother, father, siblings, husband, wife, daughter, and son all feel the very frightening and painful effects of that death. We’ll call it an intensity level 10 (1-10) event. The first responders are affected, hospital staff, due to their position and professional commitment, are exposed to the immediate trauma. Their direct emotional effects? 8 to 9. The secondary family members of the deceased. Aunts, uncles, nephews, cousins (who may have a little emotional distance through lessor connection than immediate family) might feel lessor affects—their level of effect, between 7 and 8. Friends and coworkers might be a 4 to 7 on the scale. Telling their spouse or other friends about the event, we might expect the emotional trauma to drop even further, 2 to 5 maybe. Like the earlier examples, this illustrates that the further you are from the event, physically, socially, and emotionally, the more you are insulated or buffered from the trauma of the event. Like a decline effect, we are buffered by the natural world, be it physical, social, cultural, or technological machinations between us and the singularity of chaos. The farther you get, the longer the timeline, the lesser the effects and a reversion to the mean. Chaos Buffering.

Critical Thinking – Counterpoints

The theory of chaos alone can be interpreted very subjectively, making it hard to counter the propositions and ideas in the thinking presented here. At best, we have applied abductive reasoning to the previous scenarios to predict, determine, and understand the chaos we think we see or that exists and add that to our formulation of leadership. Therefore, we must do our best to grapple “with one fundamental truth, which is that almost all ideas are wrong. It doesn’t matter if they’re your ideas or someone else’s ideas — they’re probably wrong. Even if they strike you with the force of brilliance, your job is to assume, first of all, that they’re probably wrong, and then to assault them with everything you have in your arsenal and see if they can survive” (Peterson, 2019).

Alternative: Causal Determinism. Perhaps what we think of as chaos is what is called Causal Determinism. Biswas et al., (2018) wrote that “a deterministic system is a system in which no randomness is involved in the development of future states of the system.” They also defined a chaotic system with the following characteristics:

• No periodic behavior
• Sensitivity to initial conditions
• Chaotic motion is difficult or impossible to forecast
• The movement looks random
• Non-linear

Are humans based on chaos? Is human consciousness, or the operations of the brain thereof, based upon quantum physical components and interactions such as entanglement or the multi-state theory of quantum qubits like quantum computers? Is the function of sentience linked or found in what is popularly termed quantum chaos? None of these can be definitively answered, but it doesn’t make them any less possible. On the other hand, they are untestable with today’s current technology and understanding, and much like this study itself is almost entirely a thought experiment. Therefore, it’s seemingly impossible to critically evaluate with anything further application of conventional critical thinking models.

Stupidity and the Attribution of Blame. Hanlon’s Razor is a philosophical razor that allows for the explanation or attribution of stupidity and never attributes to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Shane Parrish does well to describe it from a pseudo leadership perspective in that “we should not attribute to malice that which is more easily explained by stupidity. In a complex world, this principle helps us avoid extreme paranoia and ideology, often very hard to escape from, by not generally assuming that bad results are the fault of a bad actor, although they can be. More likely, a mistake has been made.” Neo in the Matrix said, “choice, the problem is choice” (Wachowski, 2003). We must separate when an appearance of chaos is a matter of choice from an event that is an immediate chaotic singularity or a systemic result (root cause) of choice. We also need to determine when that choice is the result of ignorance, poor cognitive functions, a negligent reaction, an uneducated or ill-informed choice. Do not assume stupidity right away. Eliminate all other possibilities to include the most straightforward answer before attributing a cause to stupidity.

Caution: Do not allow yourself the easy intellectual get out of jail free card with the attribution of stupidity even though it may be reasonable and sometimes even innumerable as a root cause. The assignment of stupidity can have severe consequences, especially if you are wrong.

Warning – The Observer Effect. The concept of the observer effect started with quantum physics and has found applicably in many other fields of research. The key takeaway is the presence of the observer. When human subjects are the focus of study, the mere presence of the observer or the awareness of being observed changes the behavior observed. Additionally, human observers are, by nature, non-objective. Technology, management practices, and thinking frameworks can help to compensate, but not all of them, and not all the time.

Between a deterministic or chaotic system, humans are neither of these. Strictly speaking. Are humans based on chaos? In a sense, yes. Move up a few levels to the macro, and you find a more stable world that can still be thrown off course. A mean word can affect a person’s mood for days to come. Days or years later, a stray thought of the encounter can emerge out of nowhere and derail a thought process or task. The micro can be chaotic (Figure 1) but may not always affect the macro. Over days, what appears to be chaos is often buffered out through a reversion to the daily mean (Figure 2). A real Decline Effect. In the end, it is human agency that will prevail in the debate of choice. In our attribution of blame or efforts to determine root causes, we must consider if a person has the ability to and resiliency to make that choice. You might think it is simply a binary outcome. Do it or don’t. On or off. Yes or no. But it’s not always that simple and has to be considered in the interrogation or preparation for a chaotic singularity.

If chaos is real or not, it is now simply up to you. You can further educate and prepare for the inevitabilities, or don’t. They will happen all the same.

You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every moment. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.

FRANK HERBERT, GOD EMPEROR OF DUNE

Adaptations to Chaos

It seems that the entirety of systems building can be perceived as an attempt to abate and hedge against the perception of or the inevitabilities of chaos. A structural form of Chaos Buffering.

Learning Systems. If we wanted to start over or address the root cause of the world’s myriad problems. How we educate ourselves is one. How we learn is often by repetition and regurgitation, and that rote nature removes any form of imagination. The fears of chaos lie in those assumptions about a desire for a predictable reality. Therefore, we find those exact mechanisms. Customs, conventions, and dogma have become an arranged hierarchy of institutionalized systems of belief and practice. No questions, just repetition and false limitations. Standardized testing of learning objectives, unit measurements, and examinations. Even popular fiction saw it.

The reality is what you might expect here. We don’t know what we are doing. We can’t even say that we know precisely how the brain works. Memories are fallible and prone to being carelessly overwritten with the wrong information. The worst example of this is the banking education model that says children are empty vessels to fill with knowledge. Paulo Freire popularized this idea in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). The title says it all when you hear the origins and arguments of how prevalent education systems are built within or for (choose your poison) a capitalist economic system. Does capitalism serve that system, or does that system serve capitalism? Whatever the answer, you see now that people want everything to be easily referenced, quantified, and categorized with much of the world we see. Creativity, imagination, or even lateral thinking are alien. Abnormal. Too chaotic for everyday life and the attractor of hostility.

It hits all by itself

BRUCE LEE

Problem-Solving. A result of rote learning systems is problem-solving through analogy. The analogous method is the adaptation of previous experience to solve a given problem. Often unimaginative but considered safe while it eschews any creative thinking. This unimaginative thinking often results from the unconscious (implicit), inherent, or innate bias, and motivated reasoning, including some forms of psychic driving by the observer to find safety and insist on the ordered and rational, not the chaotic. That bias creates a false sense of security as it ignores how the brain works and that its outputs are the quantitative and qualitative result of what it has learned. Just as the saying goes, you are what you eat. So, your brain outputs what it has learned and experienced. The expectation of order ignores the natural, unconscious process of the brain. When we act or decide, it is only afterward that we rationalize what we have done.

Project Management. This is a system that reels in human nature, and understandably so. Project management as a system and, in principle, puts an end date on a thing. It attempts to account for every step, every cost, and every person in a process and lends a sense of control and predictability to the project owner. What it is not good at is adapting. The traditional approach is unable to adjust and, in the case of failure, brings the question, “what is your recovery plan.” The question is asked because there is an expectation (often by those outside of the project’s core work) that the project’s critical path (essential task determined to complete the project) can be saved and returned to the original timeline. This is the inherent flaw in traditional project management and its inflexibility and inability to cope with the real world, just like the theory that breaks down in real-world application. When a traditionally governed project hits the ground, it will inevitably break down in one manner or another. Good project managers will prepare for the unexpected in the planning by building time buffers to compensate for the slippage. But those buffers of failure are not just an inherent waste of resources but a coping mechanism that solves nothing.

The lessons of these failures have manifested in different project management principles and spawned new systems designed to overcome those inevitabilities; Agile project management is a prominent example. The history behind methods has its roots in software development and a manifesto written by many prominent developers that advocated for a change in their approach. As Scott Ambler would later point out, “a project plan is important, but it must not be too rigid to accommodate changes in technology or the environment, stakeholders’ priorities, and people’s understanding of the problem and its solution” (2011). One of the manifesto’s signatories would later write that “the Agile movement is not anti-methodology, in fact many of us want to restore credibility to the word methodology” and that “we plan, but recognize the limits of planning in a turbulent environment” (Highsmith, 2001). A turbulent environment, chaos.

Traditional project management methodologies have tried to reign in the chaos while not allowing for the flexibility to deal with the unplanned. The successive adaptions of SCRUM and Agile originally developed for software development have been adopted in other unrelated fields simply because of the flexibility it brings to planning, executing, sustaining, and closing a project.

Human Systemology. The need and use of systematizing for humans to survive and grow are not in doubt, nor is it being argued against. The intent is to demonstrate their inflexibility. They do not account for either the chaotic and unpredictable human nature, but the inverse, they do not allow for the intangible nature of the intuitive and calculating human mind. Many experts like Jonathan Haidt explain in The Righteous Mind (2012) that our beliefs are primarily intuitions driving after rationalizations of our words, decisions, and actions. We then consciously try to explain what our brain did automatically or unconsciously, appearing to the observer as chaos. Do you see? We have created conscious systems that fight against and even thwart the genuine benefits of the unconscious mind. The “deterministic nature (Robert 1976) of these systems does not make them predictable (Biswas et al.” (2018). Suppose the study of human dynamical systems has a distinct beginning and end. In that case, humans have none of these, and they seldom, if ever, stay within any boundaries, despite our habits and practice behaviors. We are all genuinely chaotic.

Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news!

CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA

Conclusion. Chaos: A Foundational Leadership Principle

Chaos Buffering happens around us naturally, all the time, and prevents (intentionally or not) chaos from spreading. It can be viewed as an application of the interpretation of the decline effect as a reversion to the mean. Chaos is real even on the macro scale of spacetime. As time moves on, entropy bears down on that hot cup of coffee. It eventually cools down and equalizes with the temperature of its surroundings. Everything reverts to the mean.

We know “chaotic systems are unstable [and] resist – outside disturbances [and] react in significant ways.” They “do not shrug off external influences but are partly navigated by them” (Biswas et al. 2018). Humans do not always fit the model unless the initial disturbance reaches such a threshold that the person or persons cannot return to the mean. Think about the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The initial and successive ripple effects were far too significant for millions to return to a “normal” life. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster resulted from the singularity that was the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami. The lives of those in and around the immediate earthquake damaged and the nuclear disaster areas were irrevocably changed. Many never to return. The COVID-19 pandemic is another global example where a return to “normal” may not have the same meaning it used to. We now see how many are buffered by significant events as the systems of human society absorb the outward rippling effects of such events.

With Chaos Buffering in mind, we can build better systems. Not to escape the chaos, but to better deal with their harmful effect, and maybe even harness its potential power. Even more, so is creating the understanding and acceptance where we can better explore and harness the powers of the unconscious mind as described by Kahneman as System 1 (2011), which does, among many other things, what Malcolm Gladwell (2005) popularized as Thin Slicing.

Machiavelli saw it, would be people who could shape their own character, call up the qualities that were necessary for the moment, and know how to bend to circumstance.

ROBERT GREENE AND 50 CENT, THE 50^TH LAW

Understanding how we see or measure chaos is an essential tool that can underlie your leadership practice. It will be crucial to know how a thing can or does happen, tracing it back to a root cause or initial conditions. Coupling this with other methodologies such as first principles will help you find and address root causes. It will help you gain a better, more intuitive understanding of human nature, decision making, and how the human consciousness is often more a prediction generator and a narrative writer of itself and its observations, with or without the interference of the observer’s bias. Chaos Buffer proposes to help you gain insight into both the cause and effect of any given event singularity and better understand its impact on you and those around you.

A leader must accept that reality is based, in every sense, upon chaos and that it underpins everything we see and do. Therefore, the perception of disorder is a natural phenomenon. But it is not the “why” we think it is. Despite what we believe, patterns emerge from the chaos. We find predictability and understanding potent tools for the leader because the chaos others see is not there in any appreciable way. There are ebbs and flows, patterns, and predictability, no matter how imperceptible. This idea, this concept, no matter how intangible, vaporous, or heady, works. For the leader, chaos can be a smokescreen or red herring that will throw others off. In reverse, there can be a bone-deep understanding that can bring a leader calmness on the one hand and powerful insights into what may be usefully lurking just beneath the surface.

If your body and mind are made from the same unstable building blocks as quantum physics describes. Then you are built on chaos. Your mind and your thoughts, rooted in chaos. Will you embrace that fundamental truth?

Chaos, good news.

KEVIN FLYNN, TRON LEGACY

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Samuels, M. L. (1991). Statistical Reversion Toward the Mean: More Universal Than Regression Toward the Mean. The American Statistician, 45(4), 344–346. https://doi.org/10.2307/2684474

Schooler, J. (2011). Unpublished results hide the decline effect: some effects diminish when tests are repeated. Jonathan Schooler says being open about findings that don’t make the scientific record could reveal why. Nature, 470(7335), 437. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A250579073/HRCA?u=anon~c9e661ed&sid=googleScholar&xid=a0d320e7

Meng, H., (2008). Social Script Theory and Cross-Cultural Communication. Intercultural Communication Studies XVII: 1 2008. https://web.uri.edu/iaics/files/14-Hongdang-Meng.pdf

StarTalk (2017, April 19). Science in America – Neil deGrasse Tyson. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MqTOEospfo

Morton, V., & Torgerson, D. J. (2003). Effect of regression to the mean on decision making in health care. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 326(7398), 1083–1084. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.326.7398.1083

Vernon, J. L. (2017). Understanding the butterfly effect. American Scientist, 105(3), 130. https://doi.org/10.1511/2017.126.130

Silver, J. (Producer), & Wachowski Lana and Lilly (Directors). May 7, 2003. The Matrix Reloaded [Motion picture]. U.S.: Warner Bros. Pictures.

Research Notes

Did you know that cosmic rays and radiation from the sun can and do interfere with computers all the time? It’s not unusual for one of those particles to “flip a bit” in a computer system. Changing that bit from a 1 to 0 or vice-versa.

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“Exponential Causality”

A does not lead to B to C and so on

A lead to a multiplicity of outcomes, and each of those lead more and so on.https://youtu.be/kNv2PlqmsAc

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You can see how this study of chaos is limiting anything outside of the system? Keeping outside influence out.

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People can resist small disturbances. But no all the tie and not entirely. Though the disturbance may not have left an imprint on a macro level. It may very well have done on a minute micro level. Psychological for instant. That micro may not manifest for a sometime or in ways that are not perceptible until patterns or event emerge at a later date.

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Self: Governments. Dictatorships instinctively understand chaos as thing to be controlled. Population. Thought. Image. Installing systems of control to prevent the very human nature. Chaos.

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People generally prefer the predictable. Few recognize how destructive this can be, how it imposes severe limits on variability and thus makes whole populations fatally vulnerable to the shocking ways our universe can throw the dice.”

Assessment of Ix, Bene Gesserit Archives. Heretics, 84.

Frank Herbert

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Something Happens By Chance. Then underlying things is “we do not understand the causality chain,” that led to the event. https://youtu.be/kNv2PlqmsAc

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The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed. We feel threatened by such demands.

The Zensufi Master. Chapterhouse, 12

Frank Herbert

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Social Script

A behavioral or social script is a series of behaviors, actions, and consequences that are expected in a particular situation or environment. Just like a movie script we know what to expect in many social settings. Individuals learn from past experiences and use these expectations to build scripts that make things easier for us cognitively.

An example can be seen when you go to the grocery store. You park, get a cart, walk down the aisles getting what you need, you check out, take your groceries to the car, load them, return the cart, and drive away. This is a typical and expected scenario to encounter when you go to the store and is a behavioral script that has been developed and fine tuned over time.

https://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Social+Script+

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But on the other hand, imagine if they didn’t have insurance and were unable to afford another car? They could no longer get to work.

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Emergence definition and meaning | Collins English Dictionary (collinsdictionary.com)

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Science in America – Neil deGrasse Tyson – YouTube

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Think, order out of chaos

or

Order emerging out of chaos

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The Decline Effect – Regression to the Mean – The most likely explanation for the decline is an obvious one: regression to the mean.

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This reversion simply means that what happened was out of the norm and that the reoccurring cycle of events has returned to normal.

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“Random effects eventually average out so that evolution converges, tending to produce similar organisms in any given environment.”

Many seemingly random effects eventually average out, converge, and tend to produce similar patterns (like an emergent truth) in their given environments. Therefore, we see the same repeated nature or eb and flow of events independently over time. Pulling this idea from convergent evolution theory 

Scientists Say There May Be “Humans” All Over the Universe (futurism.com)

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Regression to the mean (RTM) occurs in situations of repeated measurements when extreme values are followed by measurements in the same subjects that are closer to the mean of the basic population

Ostermann, T., Willich, S. N., & Lüdtke, R. (2008). Regression toward the mean–a detection method for unknown population mean based on mee and chua’s algorithm. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 8(1), 52-52. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2288-8-52

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Effect of Regression to The Mean On Decision Making In Health Care “Ignorance of the problem will lead to errors in decision making.” Morton, V., & Torgerson, D. J. (2003) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1125994/

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“Quantum mechanics – allow for simultaneous possibilities: superposition” https://www.wired.com/story/quantum-mischief-rewrites-the-laws-of-cause-and-effect/

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Relational Quantum Mechanics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) From the 1.3 Observer and measurement section

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“Embrace this wild situation where you have no definite causal structure.”

–quantum gravity will surely inherit general relativity’s radical feature and lack fixed time and fixed causality. https://www.wired.com/story/quantum-mischief-rewrites-the-laws-of-cause-and-effect/

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The microcosm of quantum probability at the large scale.

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Singularity (system theory), in dynamical and social systems, a context in which a small change can cause a large effect

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[Direct} relationship between cause and effect.

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Auditorium test example http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Acoustic/isprob.html

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Consider the Great Tohoku earthquake that struck the Fukushima Prefecture, Japan and created the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The lives of those in an around the earthquake damage and the nuclear disaster were irrevocably change. Never to return. But for those in downtown Tokyo and further out only felt moderate shaking. Life quickly returned to normal. Some a few months longer.

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Causal determinism is “the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature”.

Causal determinism is, roughly speaking, the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature. The idea is ancient, but first became subject to clarification and mathematical analysis in the eighteenth century. Determinism is deeply connected with our understanding of the physical sciences and their explanatory ambitions, on the one hand, and with our views about human free action on the other. In both of these general areas there is no agreement over whether determinism is true (or even whether it can be known true or false), and what the import for human agency would be in either case. 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/

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Nonlinear system

In mathematics and science, a nonlinear system is a system in which the change of the output is not proportional to the change of the input. Nonlinear problems are of interest to engineers, biologists, physicists, mathematicians, and many other scientists because most systems are inherently nonlinear in nature.

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Examining the Agile Manifesto (ambysoft.com)

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Thinking, Fast & Slow: System 1 vs System 2 | GreenBook

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Nonlinear system

In mathematics and science, a nonlinear system is a system in which the change of the output is not proportional to the change of the input. Nonlinear problems are of interest to engineers, biologists, physicists, mathematicians, and many other scientists because most systems are inherently nonlinear in nature.

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Causal determinism is “the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature”.

Causal determinism is, roughly speaking, the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature. The idea is ancient, but first became subject to clarification and mathematical analysis in the eighteenth century. Determinism is deeply connected with our understanding of the physical sciences and their explanatory ambitions, on the one hand, and with our views about human free action on the other. In both of these general areas there is no agreement over whether determinism is true (or even whether it can be known true or false), and what the import for human agency would be in either case. 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/

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Noted to “Your mind and your thoughts.” Now that you know this. Can you really ever say that you “know” what you know? That you “know” what you’re talking about? What you saw or heard?

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Page 125, 129, 132 of Chaos Theory and its Applications

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1.1 A Brief History of Chaos, Paragraph 3, Chaos (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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Schooler, 2011. One of the explanations of the effect is regression toward the mean (this is a statistical phenomenon happening when a variable is extreme on the first experiments and by later experiments tend to regress towards average), although this does not explain why sequential results decline in a linear fashion, rather than fluctuating about the true mean as would be expected.