Thursday, July 24, 2008

Inconvenient Uncertainty

I was reminded again today of Al Gore's convincing epic "An Inconvenient Truth". Gigantic images of receding glaciers juxtaposed on massive exponential graphs only reachable with cranes send twitters of alarm, predictably. The prevailing attitude implicit in the film is the implication that scientific consensus is somehow equivalent to scientific fact (well, that and the causal relationship between correlated data sets.)
Which brought me to some thoughts about the inexactitude of prediction. Reading "Black Swans", it becomes apparent that we're quite simply unable to predict anything very much with measurable accuracy, from stock market crashes to the population of Romania in 2020.

Are there certainties of faith? Perhaps not, then. So, Conference or not, outcomes at Lambeth are unlikely to be as predicted. Perhaps.

The world is chaotic. That's the way it is. Live with it. Schrodinger's cat did. Probably.

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