While the plagiarism of the title from this could have been avoided, it's the discussion about this book that lead to this post in the first place, and so it's only fair that there's a reference to it. The book itself is a take on how chance plays a role in almost all aspects around us, or to put in Douglas Adamsian terms how chance has a big part in The Life, Universe and Everything. And that's quite true, if you think about it.
Life, by its very structure, can never be in equilibrium. By Life, I mean,the whole bloody large piece of jigsaw puzzle that the roughly 6.3 billion people in this world are attempting to solve(from here on, Life, with a capital L shall refer to this macro-state, while life shall refer to the thing that an IITian doesn't have). In purely Engineering terms, when there's equilibrium achieved, all the components are in their most 'satisfied' state and are not going to (or even want to) move to any other position. Now, in Life, if there was a force that pushed everyone towards this ideal point, and it was doing its job perfectly then at some point of time t in the Universe's existence, Life would have equilibrated. This raises the question, what next. What happens at all times t+, if at t, everyone has achieved what they wanted to achieve. This is where Chance comes in. Or to stick to engineering, Chaos. Or Randomness.
Since Life itself is made up of each of the single lives, each of these lives has the potential to disrupt entirely, the overall design that is Life. Even if each person's life is tending towards its own micro-ideality, the ideality may not be what that person set out to achieve in the first place. This might be a bit of a ramble, but imagine you could break down each of your achievements into its smallest logical unit. For every pragmatist out there who believes in 'My life is what I make of it 'or 'There's no such thing as Lady Luck, I've never been good with ladies anyway', it's fairly simple to show that there was at least one point in their path of life where whatever happened was not a planned act of the person in question. Anywhere there is a question of choice, there's a bit of chance involved, as no amount of logical rationalizing can ever pick a 'better' choice, at least between two near-similar options. And every life always has its moments of picking between choices. And every life then follows the path that such a choice leads to. And thus every life, at its smallest opening step, is adulterated by chance.
Which then leads to the question of whether, once this initial disturbance from equilibrium has been set in motion, there is only one place it can lead to, and whether if the other choice had been made at that point, there is another path which will lead somewhere else, a sort of a parallel universe. Like in the whole concept of movies like The Butterfly Effect and Sliding Doors and, closer to home, 12B. Three months with an Equity Research firm has also only strengthened my belief that overall, it's just one big gamble. There can be reams and reams of reports from the classiest analysts in the business, and pages of code written by Math Ph.Ds from the Princetons and Dartmouths of the world, but eventually, it's the call of the man on the floor on whether to put in or pull out the billions of Dollars. And that's, basically, a chance. A chance backed up by thirty pages of reports and innumerable Partial Differential Equation simulations, but a chance nevertheless. And if the decision is to pull out, and made by 5 or 6 such people together, each taking a chance on the other being right in pulling out, we end up with something like this.
Eventually, somebody has to get lucky, of course. In an overall 10:1 ratio of misses:hits, there have to be enough lucky people in the world to convince the other 9 that if you try hard enough, you can too. Something like Colbert's claim, if you may. And so the world goes around, with everyone in the 9 trying to become the 1, in spite of the obviously futile exercise that the 1 in 10 is a fixed number, and that Chance is a zero-sum game. But oh well, something has to make the world go around, and love simply doesn't work anymore. So, cool.
Update: And then, this happens.
Life, by its very structure, can never be in equilibrium. By Life, I mean,the whole bloody large piece of jigsaw puzzle that the roughly 6.3 billion people in this world are attempting to solve(from here on, Life, with a capital L shall refer to this macro-state, while life shall refer to the thing that an IITian doesn't have). In purely Engineering terms, when there's equilibrium achieved, all the components are in their most 'satisfied' state and are not going to (or even want to) move to any other position. Now, in Life, if there was a force that pushed everyone towards this ideal point, and it was doing its job perfectly then at some point of time t in the Universe's existence, Life would have equilibrated. This raises the question, what next. What happens at all times t+, if at t, everyone has achieved what they wanted to achieve. This is where Chance comes in. Or to stick to engineering, Chaos. Or Randomness.
Since Life itself is made up of each of the single lives, each of these lives has the potential to disrupt entirely, the overall design that is Life. Even if each person's life is tending towards its own micro-ideality, the ideality may not be what that person set out to achieve in the first place. This might be a bit of a ramble, but imagine you could break down each of your achievements into its smallest logical unit. For every pragmatist out there who believes in 'My life is what I make of it 'or 'There's no such thing as Lady Luck, I've never been good with ladies anyway', it's fairly simple to show that there was at least one point in their path of life where whatever happened was not a planned act of the person in question. Anywhere there is a question of choice, there's a bit of chance involved, as no amount of logical rationalizing can ever pick a 'better' choice, at least between two near-similar options. And every life always has its moments of picking between choices. And every life then follows the path that such a choice leads to. And thus every life, at its smallest opening step, is adulterated by chance.
Which then leads to the question of whether, once this initial disturbance from equilibrium has been set in motion, there is only one place it can lead to, and whether if the other choice had been made at that point, there is another path which will lead somewhere else, a sort of a parallel universe. Like in the whole concept of movies like The Butterfly Effect and Sliding Doors and, closer to home, 12B. Three months with an Equity Research firm has also only strengthened my belief that overall, it's just one big gamble. There can be reams and reams of reports from the classiest analysts in the business, and pages of code written by Math Ph.Ds from the Princetons and Dartmouths of the world, but eventually, it's the call of the man on the floor on whether to put in or pull out the billions of Dollars. And that's, basically, a chance. A chance backed up by thirty pages of reports and innumerable Partial Differential Equation simulations, but a chance nevertheless. And if the decision is to pull out, and made by 5 or 6 such people together, each taking a chance on the other being right in pulling out, we end up with something like this.
Eventually, somebody has to get lucky, of course. In an overall 10:1 ratio of misses:hits, there have to be enough lucky people in the world to convince the other 9 that if you try hard enough, you can too. Something like Colbert's claim, if you may. And so the world goes around, with everyone in the 9 trying to become the 1, in spite of the obviously futile exercise that the 1 in 10 is a fixed number, and that Chance is a zero-sum game. But oh well, something has to make the world go around, and love simply doesn't work anymore. So, cool.
Update: And then, this happens.
