Malcom Gladwell and I Are Wrong (Issac Assimov is probably not wrong)

What you know about malcom gladwell i know but only moreso.  i don't have any secret knowledge you couldn't have if you just looked and not even very hard.  but what i do know about him is a very healthy sampling of his work and voice.  i always liked that he was looking at the big picture, trying to fit it all into a single plan.  This is the central conceit of the Foundation Trilogy as well.  I only know about the foundation trilogy what you know about the foundation trilogy but moreso.  Actually, while technically still true some people probably know way more about it than i do and some people are only vaguely aware that people read science fiction.  But the point here is that there is a grand algorithm that we can plug everything into and use it to make predictions that help make the universe a better place.  While it may be True, it will never be true.  You can't fit that inside anything.  If you want to simulate the universe, well just look back and see how good we are at figuring out stuff that already happened.  Every time you look some place you see that it's way bigger than you ever imagined. there is more happening that could ever be documented let alone predicted.  to attempt to noodle out a daily lesson from the data available is so tempting as to be worthy to spend a life pursuing.  but to think that it will lead to an answer is the decent into madness, it's the child filling a hole in the sand with all the water of the ocean.  it's to constantly underestimate how much of everything there is, to use similarities to categorize and treat your answers as facts, to prize efficiency over product.  There's an old story about the last human being who could actually explain how they know the earth is round talking to an old lady.  The guy has used a fact or six to cordon off that which is possible rendering its probability complete.  so he turns the question back on her, asking her if she has facts of her own that can support her claim.  she does, but not as many, and not as perfectly calculated to ward off attack.  but for all the people who have ever taken the side of the young man must merely remember that in the entire conversation, the woman said the only True thing.  It's turtles all the way down.