Fascinating but ultimately unsatisfying examination of contingency and complexity in life and social systems

Fluke, by political scientist and commentator Brian Klaas, explores how contingency, convergence, complexity, and chaos drive human existence. It covers much of the same intellectual territory as Nassim Talib’s books Black Swan and Antifragile, although this is a much more pleasant read, illustrated with some fascinating examples.

Klaas tells us to pay more attention to noise, to random factors and incidental details in our lives, because every event and everything and everyone, is connected. It is a beautiful way to look at the world. He looks at convergence (“everything happens for a reason”) and contingency (“stuff happens”) in evolution, history, social sciences, the weather, his personal life. Klaas is a good writer and he tells a good story, drawing connections between different fields of study, between physics and complexity science and history and economics, helping us to understand how our brains, which are evolved to recognize patterns and which are continually crafting stories to make sense of the world, shape the ways that we think and act by essentially lying to us - and how, in today’s rapidly changing, increasingly interconnected world, we need to recognize this and think and act differently..

Klaas takes down analysts like Nate Silver (The Signal and the Noise), who try to use statistical models to provide a false sense of certainty about how the world works (although Silver - and his ideas - have already faded from the wider conversation about politics), and the use of models in social sciences especially economics and sociology. He examines the weaknesses of the social sciences, their over-reliance on quantitative analysis and simplistic and unrealistic models, how social research is misaligned and manipulated through p-hacking and other flaws - which made me seriously question what the value of social science, and the role of a social scientist like Klaas, actually is. 

His argumentation style is simplistic, pretending that we need to make hard binary choices between different ways of understanding the world - not surprising for an American political scientist I guess. Klass tells us that people (scientists, politicians, regular folks) think and act as though life, the world, is convergent, that it follows statistically predictable rules, governed by models and routines and optimization, and we screen out everything that doesn’t fit as noise. But reality is often driven by this noise, by accidents, by small arbitrary events and seemingly unimportant decisions, chained together in webs of infinite complexity. This is true, and fun to think about, but what does it mean to our daily lives?

The final chapters of the book are frustrating. 

After building up a story about how everything that we do matters, Klaas takes the air out of this idea, by explaining that we do not have free will (following essentially the same arguments as Robert Sapolsky in his book Determined). 
Klaas explains that there are two ways of thinking about free will (again, a binary either/or choice): strong libertarianism (we are always free to choose our actions) or determinism (every action is predetermined by an unfathomably complex causal chain of events unspooling from The Big Bang and through the - although not completely understood - laws of physics). Klaas - who is clearly a smart person, but not a neuroscientist, not a physicist, not a trained philosopher - explains how anything but a determinist explanation is essentially silly, using contrived examples. I felt cheated here. If free will is an illusion, it is a necessary one.

I could not reconcile the opposing ideas that everything that we do matters, but we are not free to decide what we do. Where does that leave us? Klaas doesn’t offer much beyond some hand waving:
* Academics should inject more randomness into funding scientific research projects (although presumably not in the “social sciences”, since funding this kind of work seems to be a waste of resources). 
* Organizations should not hyper-optimize designs, projects, supply chains (to understand the exquisitely absurd extremes of optimization in global supply chains, read The Material World by Ed Conway, or Christopher Mims book Arriving Today) in the search for increasing efficiencies, they should instead build in more slack and redundancy and decoupling. Unfortunately, short-term incentives, and the obvious success of just-in-time inventory management and outsourcing and offshoring runs against long-term risk management.
* Individuals should delight in the awesome interconnectedness of the world and time, and should recognize that good things in their lives would not be possible without the bad things. Or something like that.

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