Libba Bray Quotes

We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

Life is chaotic and unpredictable. If a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it could cause people at the opposite end of the globe to watch a Discovery Channel special on butterflies

If there is no randomness in the universe, then what do we mean by chaos?

I believe that life is chaotic, a jumble of accidents, ambitions, misconceptions, bold intentions, lazy happenstances, and unintended consequences, yet I also believe that there are connections that illuminate our world, revealing its endless mystery and wonder.

The current understanding was that it was impossible to predict how something would evolve because it was a very turbulent environment full of things interacting with each other.

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.

It is such a complex matter we live within, it is impossible to track logic and decision making really, so therefore each choice can actually only be seen as coincidence.

A very small cause which escapes our notice determines a considerable effect that we cannot fail to see, and then we say that the effect is due to chance.

The world is deterministic, but it's chaotic and emergent.

We are all just the tip of a pinprick of the millions of things that had to happen in order for us to be here.

'Entropy' broadly means tending towards chaos constantly.

You're an entropic chaos factor

The real truth that dare not speak itself, is that no one is in control, absolutely no one... Nobody is in control. This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos. Now, there may be entities seeking control - the World Bank, the Communist Party, the rich, the somebody-or-others - but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself... It's like trying to control a dream.

Oh what a friend chance can be — when it chooses.

A little-known truth: Every aspect of the world is fundamentally unpredictable. Computer scientists have long since proved this.

Entropy shakes its angry fist at you for being clever enough to organize the world. (p 2)

Most of the time-- 99 percent of the time-- you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes.

Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.

Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything.

But really, there are no coincidences. Coincidences are just other people's choices, plans you don't know about.

So the world is much more correlated than we give credit to. And so we see more of what Nassim Taleb calls "black swan events" - rare events happen more often than they should because the world is more correlated.

And I wanted to tell her that the pleasure for me wasn't planning or doing or leaving; the pleasure was in seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together.

Chaos theory, a more recent invention, is equally fertile ground for those with a bent for abusing sense. It is unfortunately named, for 'chaos' implies randomness. Chaos in the technical sense is not random at all. It is completely determined, but it depends hugely, in strangely hard-to-predict ways, on tiny differences in initial conditions.

If I could, I'd write a huge encyclopedia just about the words luck and coincidence