Unknowability

Anand Sridharan talking about how predicting future events cannot help us predict the future consequences.

Herein lies the true unknowability of the messy world around us. It is not just we cannot predict major events. It is that, even if we could, we have no idea how their consequences will play out. It is impossible to reliably unravel a chain of future events in a manner that is useful in real-world decision making.

I used a 2-level thought experiment merely to illustrate that the world is unknowable at many levels. There is no reason to stop at two levels. Cause-and-effect plays out at many more levels, often with feedback loops tying certain consequences back to original events. In fact, in the real world, it is far from clear what the original causes are for whatever transpires around us.