Caitlin Johnstone — Things Are Only Going To Get Weirder

I often hear people in my line of work saying “Man, we’re going to look back on all this crazy shit and think about how absolutely weird it was! 

No we won’t. Because it’s only going to get weirder.

It’s only going to get weirder, because that’s what it looks like when old patterns start to fall away.

The human mind is conditioned to look for patterns in order to establish a baseline of normal expectations upon which to plan out future actions. This perceptual framework exists to give us safety and security, so disruptions in the patterns upon which it is based often feel weird, threatening, and scary. They make us feel insecure, because our cognitive tool for staying in control of our wellbeing has a glitch in it.

When you’re talking about a species that has been consistently patterned towards its own destruction, though, a disruption of patterns is a good thing....

Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue Journalist
Things Are Only Going To Get Weirder
Caitlin Johnstone

Ugo Bardi — Should we Prepare for a New World War? Answers from the Patterns of Past

Systemic uncertainty in a complex adaptive system. Spontaneous natural order is messy.

Cassandra's Legacy
Should we Prepare for a New World War? Answers from the Patterns of Past

Ugo Bardi | Professor in Physical Chemistry at the University of Florence

See also

Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
Hey! Here’s what to do when you have two or more surveys on the same population!
Andrew Gelman | Professor of Statistics and Political Science and Director of the Applied Statistics Center, Columbia University

See also

Strategic Culture Foundation
We Are Heading for Another Tragedy Like World War I
Eric S. Margolis

Mark Buchanan — Actually, Economists Can Predict Financial Crises

Economists have long argued that they shouldn’t be expected to predict crises, such as the one that almost sank the global economy five years ago.

That depends on how you define the word “predict.”...

The answer is that predictions can be useful without being quite so precise. Scientists make valuable predictions all the time that have little to do with foreseeing the future, but develop our understanding of cause and effect....

In this sense of a causal relationship, quite a few people did foretell the financial crisis....
The challenge for economists is to find those indicators that can provide regulators with reliable early warnings of trouble....

One problem has been “physics envy” -- a longing for certainty and for beautiful, timeless equations that can wrap up economic reality in some final way. Economics is actually more like biology, with perpetual change and evolution at its core. This means we’ll have to go on discovering new ways to identify useful clues about emerging problems as finance changes and investors jump into new products and strategies. Perpetual adaptation is part of living in a complex world.

Bloomberg
Actually, Economists Can Predict Financial Crises
Mark Buchanan, theoretical physicist
(h/t Mark Thoma at Economist's View

Philip Pilkington — Keynes on Parts and Wholes

Complex adaptive systems, emergence, non-ergodicity, reflexivity  etc. make an atomistic mechanistic reductionist approach irrelevant to the data and context.

Fixing the Economists
Keynes on Parts and Wholes

Philip Pilkington