The last Open Thread was in October 2017, so I thought we were overdue for a new one.
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A lot of big events of in my life have had pretty in-the-moment-trivial-seeming things in the causal chains leading up to them. (And the big events appear contingent on the trivial-seeming parts of the chain.)
I think this is the case for a lot of stuff in my friends' lives as well, and appears to happen a lot in history too.
It's not the far future, but the experience of regularly having trivial-seeming things turn out to be important later on has built my intuition here.
It's surely true that trivial-seeming events sometimes end up being pivotal. But it sounds like you are making a much stronger claim: That there's no signal whatsoever and it's all noise. I think this is pretty unlikely. Humans evolved intelligence because the world has predictable aspects to it. Using science, we've managed to document regularities in how the world works. It's true that as you move "up the stack", say from physics to macroeconomics, you see the signal decrease and the noise increase. But the claim that there are no regular... (read more)