Constraints in the unknowable
About patterns persisting but not being eternal, I rather like Ralph Stacey’s saying that the ‘the future is unknowable but not unrecognisable’. Along the same lines, Nicholas Nassim Taleb points out that the unknowability of a roulette wheel (highly constrained) is very different from the unknowability of a complex system (much more flexible in terms of evolving boundaries and interactions) – there is no chance at all of the roulette ball falling into all 37 slots at once, or suddenly turning into a piece of cheese!
- Mark McKergow
Related
Complex systems include patterns, randomness does not
(Source: synthesisips.net)
