Fluke Quotes

“We control nothing, but influence everything.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“Perhaps we can finally accept that we will never be able to fully understand our own existence. Nonetheless, Kurt Vonnegut gives us good advice on how to live fully within that uncertainty: “A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“Rather than rewarding intellectual humility, we too often mistakenly conflate (false) certainty with confidence and power. Too many people rise to the top following the strategy of always certain, but often wrong.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“Whenever we revisit the dog-eared pages within our personal histories, we’ve all experienced Kokura’s luck (though, hopefully, on a less consequential scale). When we consider the what-if moments, it’s obvious that arbitrary, tiny changes and seemingly random, happenstance events can divert our career paths, rearrange our relationships, and transform how we see the world. To explain how we came to be who we are, we recognize pivot points that so often were out of our control. But what we ignore are the invisible pivots, the moments that we will never realize were consequential, the near misses and near hits that are unknown to us because we have never seen, and will never see, our alternative possible lives. We can’t know what matters most because we can’t see how it might have been.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“This is the paradox of twenty-first-century life: staggering prosperity seems to be tethered to surging rates of alienation, despair, and existential precariousness. Humans have constructed the most sophisticated civilizations ever to grace the planet, but countless millions need to medicate themselves to cope with living within them.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“microscopic accident.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“The economist and former governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King put it well in a recent interview: “We’ve all grown up with the idea that if you are intelligent”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“This phenomenon is particularly prominent in market analysis”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“By chasing control, we trap ourselves. By letting go just a little, we may liberate not only ourselves, but our best ideas.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“if we want to maximize the chance that our actions will matter even more, then the best pathway comes from one of the finest innovations our species has ever evolved: cooperation. Humans who work together create change together.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“we may control nothing, but we influence everything.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“phrase. “It’s small,” she says, “but it flies on mighty wings…. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself, ‘I don’t know,’ the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“We should learn our lesson, build more slack into our systems, and trade perfect efficiency for better resilience.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“them. It can be comforting to accept what we truly are: a cosmic fluke, networked atoms infused with consciousness, drifting on a sea of uncertainty.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“thoughts are sending out that magnetic signal that is drawing the parallel back to you.” (Never mind that magnets attract their opposite, not their parallel.)”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“Embracing the beauty of uncertainty means a bit less emphasis on how your individual action in the present can produce an optimized future, and a bit more emphasis on celebrating the present that has been created for you, the symphony of our lives that is being played by an orchestra of trillions of individual beings hitting their respective notes across billions of years, culminating in this utterly unique, contingent moment.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“In a world driven by a sense that deliberate optimization is always the route to progress, sometimes the contingent accidents are the ones that most inspire and improve our lives.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“Dictators may be ruthless, but, by golly, they produce stability.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“you’ll be astounded to realize how much of your day-to-day schedule has been determined by people who are long dead.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“your head is older than your feet.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“We cling to the idea that what matters more than who—”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“When the world changes, the past can’t always guide us.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“We’ve built a world that seems regular and controllable, so long as we pass the right laws and enact the correct monetary policy. When we’re surprised by a social shock, the lesson people tend to learn is that we just need to work harder to control the world better. If only we had better laws, better regulation, better forecasting data, Black Swans might become a scourge of the past. That’s not true. The real lesson is that the modern world, like the locust swarm, is fundamentally uncontrollable and unpredictable. Our hubris deludes us. Modern society is a complex system, seemingly stable, teetering on the edge of chaos—until everything falls apart due to a small change, from the accidental to the infinitesimal.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“to us, the world appears convergent, until we realize, with a jolt, that it isn’t.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“That means that we control far less of our world than we think we do, because earth-shattering events can develop based on strange, unexpected interactions that are nearly impossible to predict.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“We now know that many systems are chaotic—so sensitive to the minutiae of their initial conditions that, even though they follow a clockwork logic, they’re impossible to predict.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones,” Richard Dawkins once observed. “Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“It’s akin to proclaiming the Titanic’s maiden voyage a success because 99.8 percent of the journey proceeded without a hitch or that Abraham Lincoln enjoyed most of the play. Nonetheless,”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“Sentient beings, including humans, are prediction machines.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

“each individual controls almost nothing, but influences almost everything.”
― Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters