This time it’s different: Difference between revisions

So the strangest thing about the “this time it's different” crowd is how closely it maps to people who believe in a [[determinism|determinist]], [[algorithm]]ic recurring, predictable universe of the kind where things definitively will ''not'' be different.

All the [[data]] piling up, pointing determinedly backward as it does, viewing the the unfolding universe in its rear-view mirror as the great agglomeration of instantly stale information we collect about everything that has already happened necessarily is, including as it does every fuck-up, ''surely'' should tell you, if it tells you ''anything'' at all, that ''there will be fuck-ups''.  

People will be disappointed. People ''will lose money'', in distressingly predictable ways. The universe will ''not'' be suddenly better disposed to the same wilful, wistful, misty-eyed optimism that it has hitherto crushed. For, however measly, niggardly and useless our data is, however infinitesimally tiny a subset it is of ''all possible data, in all times, all places and all dimensions , anywhere in the total space-time of our multi-hued universe, the ''one thing'' it tells us, the single inference we can, with sparkling clarity, draw is that there will be fuck-ups''.  

So isn’t it the richest of dyspeptic ironies that these millenarian, futurologist, reductionist thought-leaders, data pioneers all, somehow manage to extrapolate from this catalogue of resounding woe, that the forward plan for this new fangled-idea is ''different ''.