Fate
For something to be predictable, absolutely certain, then the position, orientation and trajectory of all the objects in the vicinity would need to be known. This would include things moving at the speed of light heading over too. Objects are vibrating, dancing, and oscillating about. There is a limit to the precision at which you can measure the trajectory of an object. There will be rounding errors. Those approximations make it impractical to predict whether an object will head left or right after a collision. Each object you track might have its path interfered with by other entities. That includes spontaneous radioactive decay. The numbers involved in the computations are beyond huge. Instead of predictability we have probability. Randomness with most reliable statistical chance of a certain outcome.
Accurate simulations rely upon something that is impossible to overcome; You need hundreds of atoms to store the data regarding each atom you are tracking. You need to specify its position relative to other atoms, its velocity, and its temperature. To map one atom, you need more than one atom to store the data. That is an unsurmountable problem. Treating a tennis ball as one object rather than a collection of gazillions of atoms introduces errors. These errors count in the real world. Fate is a nonsense.
How can we explain away fate? It sure seems like people were fated to meet, fated to get a job, or fated to die young. You have interests in a certain field based on your inbuilt preferences. That and your curiosity mechanism helps you notice job vacancies. Hence, you were set from birth to be drawn into certain occupations. As for meeting someone, you draw on the probability process. Those who stay in their bedroom everyday encounter very few people. Some become so ill they end up having a nurse pay a daily visit, who then falls for them. For the rest of us, to increase the chance of romance blossoming we can tidy ourselves up, upping the probability of a match. We can go out, and out, and out, and that raises the likelihood of bumping into a potential partner. We can smile, appear happy and be a someone that people want to be with. We can give fate a chance. We can make our own luck by doing things that increase the probability of meeting the one for us.
Was it inevitable that you and your partner got together? Many random chance events led to the initial encounter for sure, but you select according to your inbuilt affinities. Your inbuilt affinities determine who you end up with. Some you rule out point blank. Some people you grow fond of over time. Whatever the case there are things that chime and things that jar. Nothing will change that. We get the impression that fate played a role, but our fixed affinities did most of the work. If you didn’t go out on a particular night, would you still have met on another night? Most of us tend to meet in places that we all go to regularly anyway, institutions, workplaces and so on. A singleton is on the lookout for another singleton. Our body language gives off signals. A coupling may appear fortuitous but there was always some inevitability to it. Luck is a wonderful thing. Luck stands out, we notice luck. It has such a big impact on us, whether that is when it is giving or taking things away. There are a lot of things that could have happened but didn’t. One night, you may decide to flip a coin. Go out, stay in - based on heads or tails. If you use a mechanical device to flick the coin, it will land the same way every time. Portents are at the mercy of human trickery.
You can set the force applied to the coin to ensure it lands heads every time. If you increase it by a set amount it will land tails every time. You can fine tune it to land randomly. A slight fluctuation of air temperature will nudge it one way or the other. Even a ray of light shone on the coin could alter the outcome. You can make it predictable if the force is within certain parameters. It becomes unpredictable when on the cusp between the force needed for heads and the force needed for tails.
Fate would take quite a lot of planning. God needed to get Laura’s parents together, encourage her conception and guide her towards me. Her role was to inspire and annoy me profusely. God then needed to do the same for dearest Megan. He then had to provide me with someone who drew me out of the pit of despair in time for me to do what I wanted to do.
Early deaths befall some of the most beautiful people on earth, many of which never paid much attention to the main risks that lurk unnoticed around them. Not noticing a bald tyre leaves you at the mercy of a blowout. The tyre may fail when you are not travelling very fast, and the incident is rather benign. However, luck may intercede, and the tyre failure can cause your vehicle to plough into oncoming traffic. A bald tyre affair gives rise to, when not if. When is key. When something else compounds the problem, the result can be most unwelcome. The compounding effect is notable. You may die in a house fire one day. An electrical fault may start the fire, and one thing leads to another. Having a decent fire extinguisher could be a great help. A mask gives you a chance as acrid smoke kills many, mostly those that didn’t wake up because they failed to maintain a fire warning device.
Balance being a killjoy with dying for a small joy. Are you aware of your surroundings and ready to react to someone else’s recklessness? Are you one to stop and consider safety before turning on a do-in-yourself power tool. People say you only live once. I say you only die once, and if it is well before you have had your fill it is not luck. I may be a boring damp squib sort, but I have dived amongst magnificent reefs, piloted small planes looping the loop and aggravated a spin, planted trees, refurbished my homes, skied slippery slopes, rode horses, surfed, shot thirty thousand clays, had eight thousand hours of tantric style sex, poured many a casting at eleven hundred degrees, floated in the dead sea, walked in the last of the rainforests and lots more. Risk with reason. Risk with hesitation prior. Some of us only come alive when taking risks. We decide how fast, how close, how much more we can push things. Our dedication to detail and good decision making allows us to repeat it tomorrow.
Pins arranged evenly spaced, triangular shape, balls drop down bouncing left right producing a bell curve at the bottom. This portrays our life - with more than one tringle in play. Your triangles overlap other peoples’ triangles. The overlap can cause a collision, sometimes a grievous car collision, or you spend the rest of your life with someone that has hit upon you. Shift the triangles to alter your fate. You can change the chance of something happening.
Nothing surpasses buying a child yet more plastic. You don’t want children playing with toys for longer by giving them wooden, felt or metal ones as that labours their senses. So long as they look different and feel the same. Some are cut into primary shapes and include a dodecahedral skeleton with respective orifices in which to push these shapes through. This is mating. We find the suitable match that suits our personal shape. Some you would hope and expect to fit but fit they do not. Toddlers have gnawed on some with their teeth, barring their entry. Others were left by the fire and melted, distorted by the heat. Some of us were destined to be cast aside. Often because an imperfect fit is hard to swallow.
Could my fate be at the mercy of an insect flapping its wings in a distant land? No, or to be precise, unlikely. Systems have tipping points. A huge number of insects need to be on the move to get anyway near such tipping points. There are buffers that absorb the waves tiny insects make.
An accident hurts. An accident can cause us to suffer in hideous ways. It takes a long time to heal after a serious accident. We might not be the same after. These factors weigh on our assessment of risk. Lots fear dying in a certain way rather than dying per se. Climbing ladders can have a far higher casualty rate than drowning inside a tunnel beneath the sea, but what do some fear the most?
The probability of reaching old age unscathed is lower than you might expect. If one in a thousand fall victim to some calamity each year, then over twenty years each person could have a one in fifty chance of suffering the same fate. If you add up all the various potential perils you face, it can look quite alarming. A potential recourse; invest in yourself. Examine the main pitfalls. Focus on the big risks. Don’t be lazy. I will spend ten minutes tying off a ladder so that it will not slip sideways. I spend extra on a good diet. We think nothing of spending a fortune on getting an education, but many will scrimp on quality food.
Medical risks
People ignore the detrimental side effects of most medications. All hospital treatments have risks attached. Medical treatments are not always heaven sent, but a day tragically spent. You put your life in the hands of the doctors, anaesthetists, and nurses Once you give the go ahead you are not in control. We know the dangers of driving but if we are at the wheel, we see it as a part of our own destiny, so it doesn’t bother us so much.
Things become the norm, standard practice, and we don’t always look at alternatives. People have blood transfusions and sneer at those that refuse them. People recover sometimes, despite having them, not always because they did. You could be given the wrong type, no matter how good the procedures are in place. Mistakes are always possible. Screening is not infallible. You could get diseased or tainted blood. Having a procedure done without a transfusion carries a risk but it is sometimes slightly lower than with it. Maybe 6% of people die or have major complications having had it compared with 4% of people who don’t have it. There may come a time when automation reduces the risk considerably and alien blood is no longer a problem. It is simply an example where we accept things as they are. Ways of doing things go full circle. The ancients suggested we take a long rest to recover. We learnt more, so started to intervene straight away. Then we reverted to; stabilise, then wait a while before operating further.
People in impoverished regions are the most susceptible to the problem of clubfoot. They also have the least money to do anything about it. Sufferers not only have difficulties walking and working but are stigmatised and shunned by many. In rich nations the doctors would do highly complex, lengthy operations on patients. The operations were expensive and traumatic. People became accustomed to letting talented surgeons handle it. It was considered wonderful that these procedures could be done. However, one individual heard of another way to deal with the deformity and went to investigate. Rather than slice open the legs, break the bones, and set them straight, he found that a patient’s legs could be bound against a stick and forced into a straight position. By binding and gradually tightening, over the months, the legs and feet would straighten out very well indeed. Not only is this non-invasive, but it is also something that can be carried out at near zero cost, anywhere. It doesn’t have the problems with aftercare and infections. The moral of the story is that having blind faith in the way things are done sometimes closes us off from exploring simpler less risky alternatives. Having said this, we might have come across the placebo effect or wish to try alternative medicines. They are all well and good for some but do not have the power of great research and study that accepted medicinal practices do. On that note you can’t think yourself better but positivity and having a lot to live for will aid a recovery.
Patterns
We spot patterns in data; we think they have significance. They may seem noteworthy, but many patterns have no significance whatsoever.
5 4 0 2 5 6 5 4 5 4 1 6 7 1 4 3 1 4 1 7 8 7 6 4 8 7 7 9 4 1 2 3 4 5 6 4 5 7 7 0 7 0 7 5 4 0 9 0 3 1 2 5 5 5 0 9 0 9 2 2 1 7 5 4 5 8 4 8 6 4 3 2
Can you spot anything that stands out in this string of numbers? I put sections in that stand out. I put them in, on purpose to demonstrate a point. You can find patterns in strings of numbers, even ones that were spewed out by a random number generator. The curiosity machine in your head looks for patterns. It prefers neatness. Untidiness can be bothersome. We spot the unusual. We spot something amiss. One black grain of sand dents a creamy beige beach. Curiosity spots it. Curiosity is a hole in our knowledge. It interrupts the flow. A lack of neatness interrupts the visual flow. We get an urge to rectify it. A lack of knowledge or a lack of neatness distracts us.
This obsession with making things neat extends to neat gardens, neat piles, and tidiness in general. The attraction to neatness. Most of us suffer from it. Helpful to some degree but a catalyst for strife. You want it neat; I like it a little unrestrained. Some will throw all their cutlery in a box and fish out what they want, when they need it. Others prefer a draw with separate compartments for the knives, forks, spoons, and other cooking utensils. It makes it easier to see what you have, and it makes it easier to locate things quickly. I tell you; philosophy is about the everyday. Those making it seem more than that are leading you astray.
Neatness can have a practical purpose. There is a logical reason for neatness, however, if we look at the natural world our obsession with neatness is grim. We will not accept that nature knows best. We plant trees in rows, often the same variety with little diversity. We remove plants that aid the soil. Weeds perform symbiotic soil and ecosystem enhancements, free of charge. Weeds will do for your garden what your gut bacteria does for your health. We trim to make things suit our cosmetic petulance. Were we to set the lens such that we view the natural world from a distance we could see the beauty. Or zoom in and view the microscopic elegance. Things in the natural world thrive best when left alone from human ordering.
Games and gambling
Rather than working for a coal mining corporation or getting my hands oily fixing cars, I thought that perhaps I could make a living betting on horses instead. If I studied the subject comprehensively there might be a way. There was a way, but it meant limiting the bets to about ten races a year when the odds are in my favour - small fields, no jumps, non-handicap, top racecourses, and good ground. What I found was that the pundits and the punters were good at selecting the winners. Too good, and as a result the skill of the punters lowered the odds the bookmakers offered on the horses that were most likely to win.
I want to talk about overround as I spent a lot of time on it, and it feels a shame not to write something on the subject. It makes the difference between making a profit – which very few do, making a small loss – a fee for the entertainment and losing lots of money. Bookmakers have an overround, casinos a rake and lotteries take a massive slab for some worthy causes.
A coin flip, two possibilities, heads, or tails. If I bet on heads and it comes up heads, I receive double the stake. If it comes up tails, I lose. You could bet on both heads and tails and come out losing nothing, winning nothing. Equally you could place proportional sized bets on every horse in a race. Whatever horse wins you will get a set sum back. Unlike the fairness in the heads or tails game, the racecourse bookmakers are not so kind-hearted. To win ten no matter which horse wins, the total of all the bets on each horse totals more than ten. You may have to stake twelve. That extra two is the overround. The higher the overround the less you get when you win.
In general, the more runners there are in a race the higher the overround. It is easier to hide the size of the overround when there are more horses in a race. Seven is the point where it begins to get very unfavourable for the punter. Prestigious racecourses tend to set a lower overround. At low-ranking events you have more low-income people placing tiddly bets hence the overround needs to be high to make it worthwhile for the bookmaker to stand there all day. A handicap race is designed to even out the field. That is not at all good for a professional punter. Jumping over hedges is exciting but too much good money is lost when horses you back pull up or throw the rider off. All in all, the market for making money is limited. To make a profit, bet just a few times a year on very specific races. Namely prestigious events, with a small number of runners and on horses that are on form. The same can be said for stock markets. You need to be picky to reduce the losses.
People claim to have systems that turn a profit. None have been shown to work. The classic system: keep raising your bet each time you lose to cover the last string of losses suffered. This works if you can cover a bet billions of times the size of the first bet and the bookmaker will accept those huge bets. Believe me you can get long losing runs, 50 in a row. That is the thing with randomness, it can produce long strings of the same number or long strings without a number.
What do we have for those that want a dream, a wish to escape the drudgery and are far too lazy to build it? We have the lottery. We insist on giving it a shot, even though we know that in any given week we can be a hundred times more likely to perish than win. Saying ‘you have to be in it to win it’ gets more to play and ramps up the top prize.
People assume poker is gambling. How wrong they are. Luck will be intertwined with skill, but over the long course of play those with the most skill and patience lose the least. Some can profit from it, enough to service a good lifestyle. They are few and far between though. People exaggerate their wins. Few keep an honest tally of their losses and expenses.
The fruit machine effect is a huge trap. You keep feeding it as you believe it will pay out soon. The more you put in, the closer you think you are to getting a jackpot. Every spin costs you a certain amount, typically about 20% depending on how shrewd the machine owner is. These machines work in the same way as you might wait and wait for a bus, clenching to the hope that one will turn up. You find yourself wishing that you had walked instead.
The steal and share game. If one person selects steal and the other share, the thief gets it all. If both choose to steal, they both get nothing. If both elect to share, they split the prize. Those that opt to steal are faced with all or nothing. Those that opt to share are faced with half or nothing. Bad people focus on all or nothing. That is far more inviting that half or nothing. Those that think the world ought to be fair, just, and decent are happier with the half or nothing option. They walk away pleased with themselves. They believe that good will overcome evil eventually. It will, but not in our lifetime. This game partly explains why bad people seem to win most of the time. Bullies have little to lose. They win twice as often or twice as much as a good people.
If you only get the chance to play this steal or share game once, you may act differently to when you get to play once a week. If you play regularly, the co-operation strategy can be fruitful. An array of strategies are on offer. Some entail reprisals, others ignoring times when you are a sucker. Most people do not operate by logic; they make emotional choices and gauge the trustworthiness of the other players. They will share in some circumstances and not others. The idea of using such games for study is fundamentally flawed by the complexities of human nature. The problem with running models on behaviour is that dreadful assumptions are made. We overlook the issue of converting an idea to a number. Five people is not five people. One is obese, one is blue eyed, one has an arm amputated, one is pregnant, and the other is normal like me. If the sign states, maximum 6 persons, and the lift has five massive people in it, are you tempted to take the stairs this once?
People enjoy sharing. They enjoy doing one another favours. People like helping. Do they help others so that they get something in return. Maybe, but not always. Nor is it always a subconscious duty. People usually feel good when they are kind, caring and generous. Co-considerational selfishness. People do not always consider that being a sucker is detrimental. Many animals including humans find that helping one another is rewarding, sometimes more so than helping yourself. People will say, “I got more enjoyment from giving it away than I ever would spending it on myself.” Selfishness is a double-edged sword with the greater gain made when giving in so many cases. Some people make you feel appreciated. Others less so. Occasionally, helping out lands us in trouble. When we lose out from helping, it can be a bit off putting but nevertheless we tend to keep on doing it. We may have to co-operate to survive, but in most cases, we co-operate because it is joyous. You can’t place a number on the joy you get from being a fantastic person. Imbeciles put numbers on human behaviour. They are silly, silly, silly. I give. I get reward. Not money, but a chemical reward in my head. I don’t give, I feel guilt, or not. Or a little awkward and embarrassed. Or shamed. Or whatever. Retarded morons put numbers on our actions to compute foolish game theories.
Losing
The first time I visited a casino I got bored, so I put my remaining chips on number 23. It came in. Unbelievable. I cashed out and never played roulette again. Not so for others. Winning on their first trip can be a hook towards addiction. They say money won is twice as sweet as money earned. That can be the allure with gambling. A little gambling is fun but some of us are in denial about the true cost. Lives are ruined. Families suffer. Put your hands up and admit it. Seek help if you want to live differently.
We need to learn to lose before we learn to win. Losing dents our pride. Some get quite annoyed, visibly so, when they lose. The winner sees your frustration and takes pleasure from that. Hence, losing gracefully on the surface avoids handing someone the win and the gratification of seeing you squirm. We beat ourselves up when we lose. We fret about what we did wrong. What did we learn. How can we improve for next time. What did we do well. Think about what you did right. In many matches you will have done a lot more right than wrong. It is difficult to avoid berating yourself though as small mistakes can hand victory to your opponent. Whether it is a game or a business loss, we can laugh it off and move on.
Few succeed until they experience the pain of a significant loss. Losing small bets has no real impact. Those with money have made a lot, lost a lot along the way and care less about money than those without. Oh boy the money I have lost in business is frightening. Then when profits came torrenting in, the government stretched out a hand to take a portion. I filled a bucket for them, then a barrel, then what seemed like a reservoir. It was all handed over to them gladly. It was spent wisely, fully accountably, thanking me with investigations and compliance checks recurrently.