Certainty: Difference between revisions

Be careful what you wish for. A world of certainty is a world of no [[doubt]], no mystery, no ''je ne sais pas''; no contingency, no [[disclaimer]]s that [[past performance is no indicator of future results]], not because it suddenly ''is'' an indicator, but because that accursed inductive mode of reasoning is at long last obsolete, all data is at hand and the future can be arrived at ''de''ductively, from first principles, the same way that rice pudding and income tax can be deduced from “[[cogito, ergo sum]]”.<ref>{{hhgg}}, [[as any fule kno]].</ref>

A certain universe is a ''determined'' universe, where each stem in the great branching bush of causal chains is fully taxonomised, catalogued, worked out — if not in theory, then in principle — down to the individual particle in a Saharan dust storm, where the trajectory of each crisp packet that blows across St Mark’s square can be calculated, anticipated and predicted, as can all the trajectories if crisp packets that didn't, but might have tumbled across that palazzo, had the circumstances been different, even through, by immovable presumption of your [[philosophy]], they cannot have been.

A certain workplace is one in which all decisions are made, all outcomes knowable by derivation, all misconceived strategies, all branding misadventures, governance shortcomings, trading disasters and promotion outrages of the future are as inevitable and unstoppable now as the countless ones that have happened and one’s hopes, piled against hopes, that there is something one can do, however feeble, to influence how things might be improved, made better or that any decisions one can make are even capable of bringing about personal betterment or reward