Dancing with Uncertainty: Navigating the Unpredictable
In a time before time was counted, there lived a boy named Arios in the floating city of Vaeloris, a realm built on clouds and prophecy. The people of Vaeloris believed the future could be read in the winds. They trained scholars called Whisperbinders who studied the sky’s every sigh and swirl, mapping out destinies with mathematical precision.
Arios, however, was not a scholar. He was a weaver’s son — nimble-fingered, wild-spirited, and prone to staring too long at the chaotic dance of the wind rather than the patterns taught in school.
Every year, a festival called The Flight of Certainty was held. Young citizens were given maps made by the Whisperbinders and were tasked with building gliders to fly toward a mountain called Tomorrow’s Peak — a rite of passage that proved their trust in the predictions of the elders.
Arios, like the others, built his glider.
The day came. The sky was calm. The air obedient.
The gliders soared.
But halfway through the flight, the winds changed — violently and without warning. The charts burned in the air like false promises. Gliders built by blind trust shattered mid-flight. Young dreamers fell, not to death, but to disillusionment — their faith in certainty broken.
All but one.
Arios turned his glider.
He adjusted not to where the wind was supposed to go, but to where it wanted to move. His glider twisted and tilted, caught in chaos, but never collapsed. He landed not on Tomorrow’s Peak — but on an uncharted island no one had known existed.
There, he found strange flowers. Singing stones. Creatures that spoke in echoes.
He named the place Possibilia.
Years later, when he returned, the elders asked:
“Why did your glider survive?”
Arios smiled.
“Because I stopped asking the wind where I should go — and started listening to where it could take me.”
The future does not honor predictions. It honors the ones who dance with change.
Maps are useful, yes — but adaptability is the sail. Understanding is the rudder.
And sometimes, the wind itself is the teacher.
The Illusion of Predictability: Understanding Our Inability to Forecast the Future
When I was a kid, whenever I looked forward to something great and imagined it, the opposite or something different would happen. This led me to believe that imagining something in the future would prevent it from occurring. So, I stopped imagining good things happening, hoping to avoid making them not happen. Eventually, I realized that my imagination wasn’t the issue; it was my inability to predict what would actually happen. I was simply bad at forecasting the future.
This seems to be true for most of our predictions. More often than not, our future predictions are incorrect, even when made by experts. Studies show that expert predictions are no better than random chance. This provided some comfort to the child inside me but also sparked a new debate or quest to understand this phenomenon.
As I later came to understand, the future is far more random and unpredictable than it once seemed to me. The culprit is the so-called benefit of hindsight, which is more like an illusion of a cause-and-effect pattern in history.
We fall into the trap of hindsight, where everything seems easy to understand in cause-and-effect relationships. We perceive history as a cause-and-effect pattern, so we think that by making linear predictions based on the past, we can determine the future.
I believe that we humans are linear thinkers. If you watch a movie by a visionary director in the 1970s, you would not find the mention of current technologies anywhere because it was outside the collective consciousness of anyone.
A turkey is fed every day by a kind human.
Each day, the turkey grows more confident that it will continue to be fed and cared for.
For 100 days, life reinforces this belief.
But on the 101st day — Thanksgiving — everything changes.
The turkey is killed.
We humans might not be eaten by someone in the future, but the illusion we have is no different than that of a turkey’s. There is a difference, though: we are humans, and a turkey is a turkey. If you feel sorry for them, some of them can fly.
Since we’re on this topic, I can’t wrap my head around the fact that those pigeons living in the cities walk around on people’s feet. Those birds can fly as well, but they seem too lazy. I’m not sure if I’m the only one who finds it funny.
Anyways, this may be tied to the need of humans for order and certainty. that is what we want. we plan our future so we can have a sense of order and security going forward. We need certainty for the future this is how we are wired. not having secure future at least on paper is a chaos and triggers worrisome response from mind. we want social security, we want job security and all other kinds of certainties.
Here is what Nassim Taleb, an influential thinker and writer, has to say about it.
The black swan, Taleb: "I developed the governing impression that our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena, and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability. These events were unexplainable, but intelligent people thought they were capable of providing convincing explanations for them—after the fact. Furthermore, the more intelligent the person, the better sounding the explanation. What’s more worrisome is that all these beliefs and accounts appeared to be logically coherent and devoid of inconsistencies"
The Black Swan by Taleb: "our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (improbable according to our current knowledge)—and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the known, and the repeated." - Nassim Taleb
Limits of Imagination and future planning
There is a line from the movie mile 22 that caught my attention,
“The definition of unknown Known is a thing which exists, but which you don't know about and which you cannot even imagine.”
When I was 19, someone asked me about my future plans, and it was challenging to decide where I wanted to go. When I discovered the role of a project manager, I was fascinated by it. It struck me how I could have planned to become a product manager a year ago when I didn’t even know the job existed. This realization made me think that our dreams might be limited by the scope of our current knowledge.
I believe we cannot dream or imagine something beyond our consciousness or knowledge, except for the creative creation of something new, which the mind can do. This was a sign for me to learn and explore more.
If you had asked my grandfather what his grandchildren would become after growing up, he would have said, “teacher.” For him, the ‘master ji’ (teacher) in his village was the most educated person in the world. That was the ceiling of his dreams set by his knowledge.
Future is not Russian Roulette
Like Russian roulette, life does not have a set number of outcomes. What will happen next is largely determined by our actions, the most important of which is the process of creating new knowledge.
As David Deutsch mentions, “The future of civilization is unknowable because the knowledge that is going to affect it has yet to be created. Hence, the possible outcomes are not yet known, let alone their probabilities.”
Predicting the future is challenging because knowledge creators, such as humans, can generate abstract knowledge seemingly from nothing. There are no physical laws that limit the creation of new abstract knowledge, allowing humans to transform the world and make the future uncertain and unpredictable. The future will depend on humanity’s ability to introduce new knowledge into the world.
Short Planning Horizon
Two known entities are capable of knowledge creation: Evolution by Natural Selection and Humans by conjecture and error. The difference lies in their capabilities: humans are better, yet they were created by evolution itself. Our rate of innovation far exceeds that of evolution.
In a 2018 TEDx talk, Deutsch highlights a "fundamental limit on the power of science and technology and reason to predict the future." He argues that significant innovations have knock-on effects that are impossible to foresee after a few steps, and as knowledge grows faster, the "planning horizon" for predictions becomes shorter. This means the more humans create knowledge, the less certain we can be about the future.
We humans create knowledge by seeking understanding, and I believe this habit has the potential to make you a better knowledge creator.
The knowledge economy is fascinating because the increase in new knowledge creation makes the world even more unpredictable and shortens the planning horizon. There’s only so much ahead that we can predict, which can feel intimidating from a longer-term order or planning perspective. However, I personally see the value in it.
Since ‘free will’ seems real, I believe it. Humans have more power to shape the future the way we want it, and in other words, we can create our own future.
You can read my thoughts on this here: https://www.pavisingh.com/gods-plan-free-will-and-the-power-of-understanding/
As Steve Jobs famously said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
As I’ll explain later, optimism about the future is equally important.
Navigating the future is different than looking at history. History, as I mentioned, due to the so-called benefit of hindsight gives us an illusion that things happen in a cause-and-effect pattern. However, the future with a short planning horizon is like walking in the fog, and there’s only so much far ahead we can see. This increases the possibility of facing problems that never before existed.
New problems require novel solutions, and analogies don’t work. Advice-seeking doesn’t work either. We need to create new knowledge to understand those problems and create solutions that never before existed. That’s the process of going from “o” to “1.”
"Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them." - Zero to One by Peter Thiel
One thing that fascinated me most about writing about human understanding was the fact that current AI technology is not capable of creating new knowledge like humans can. This primary differentiator between humans and AI is the ability to create new knowledge. In a world with increasing use of AI, knowledge creation will likely become the skill in high demand. (Just a speculation of my mind.)
We humans solve problems by creating new knowledge, and our drive to understand is at the core of it. In that sense, our approach to life is the process of continuously solving problems that we encounter and expanding our understanding of the world. The more knowledge we can create, the better it is for humanity. We need to consider that new problems will arise in the future, and the path forward to being a problem solver is to seek understanding.
Shorter planning horizons demand new ways of thinking and tackling the future. Since the future cannot be predicted, this requires a new approach. We cannot plan things out for years or even months at a time. Goals and milestones are great for direction, but the potential for unpredictable incidents in the future requires adaptability.
Military planners are a great example of adaptability. (Just to let you know, I’m passionate about war history and military technologies—just a personal hobby.) No situation is more critical than when lives are at stake, and those who survive to tell the stories are the ones who had the skills to do so. There’s a famous saying in the military: “Once the first bullet is fired, the whole planning is out of the window.”
During war, brilliant minds work together to understand each other’s capabilities and weaknesses, planning their moves accordingly. I believe military planners are far more adaptable and appreciate the value of adaptability. (Just for the readers, I think war is no good for humanity.)
In his book The 33 Strategies of War, Robert Greene writes:
“Napoleon excelled at adapting himself to the enemy and the moment. He was not bound to past methods or rigid plans. He focused on the present reality, and he moved fast.”
Napoleon didn’t believe in static blueprints. He often made his most critical decisions on the battlefield, adjusting according to what he saw — not what he had planned.
We need to learn to manage uncertainty and solve problems with deliberate effort. Adaptability is key as new information becomes available.
More Coming Soon...
I will posting additional parts of this topic soon...