Exploring Fluke, Chance, Chaos, and Significance of Actions

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Delve into Brian Klaas' book discussing themes of fluke, chance, chaos, and the impacts of our actions, along with details of his website, Twitter, and the Garden of Forking Path sub-stack. The chapter wraps up with details on the host's book, links to discussed content, and how to support the podcast.

In this episode we sit down with Brian Klaas, author of Fluke, to get into the existential lessons and grander meaning for a life well-lived once one finally accepts the power and influence of randomness, chaos, and chance. In addition, we learn not to fall prey to proportionality bias - the tendency for human brains to assume big, historical, or massively impactful events must have had big causes and/or complex machinations underlying their grand outcomes. It’s one of the cognitive biases that most contributes to conspiratorial thinking and grand conspiracy theories, one that leads to an assumption that there must be something more going on when big, often unlikely, events make the evening news. Yet, as Brian explains, events big and small are often the result of random inputs in complex systems interacting in ways that are difficult to predict.

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