The Garden of Forking Paths

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2024-05-08 01:00:04

Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. This article is for everyone, but if you’d like to support my work—please consider upgrading to a paid subscription for just $4/month. Or, you could support my work by buying a copy of my new book, FLUKE: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters.

This is a story about the hubris of data analytics; about the perils of treating Calvinball problems as though they are Moneyball problems; and how modern attempts to control our world have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the complex systems that govern our lives.

It’s also a story of cultural sludge, convergence toward boring averages, and the catastrophic consequences that occur when you treat mysteries as though they are puzzles. In short, this is the story of how and why we misunderstand modern society in the age of Big Data—and how we can learn to be smarter.

When I was a kid, I learned to read partly by perusing the Minnesota Twins’ baseball box scores—the original mechanism for quantifying sports and translating on-field performances into numbers that could be analyzed and compared. It was a crude method, capturing hits, runs, and averages for individual ballplayers.