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Do you ever feel like there's something fundamentally wrong with the universe?
The other day I had a horrifying realization, a mathematical reason why everything seems so shitty all the time, and it's so depressingly insurmountable that I don't know if I want to share it.
The other day I had a horrifying realization, a mathematical reason why everything seems so shitty all the time, and it's so depressingly insurmountable that I don't know if I want to share it.
A few years ago, there was this study on why headphones always get tangled no matter how hard you try.
The summary is that statistically there are far, far, far more ways for your cords to be tangled than for them to remain neatly aligned. https://www.sciencealert.com/the-mathematical-law-that-causes-your-headphones-to-tangle
The summary is that statistically there are far, far, far more ways for your cords to be tangled than for them to remain neatly aligned. https://www.sciencealert.com/the-mathematical-law-that-causes-your-headphones-to-tangle
Unless you take active steps to keep them neatly straightened, they're almost guaranteed to become tangled in your pocket or bag or whatever because that's how the math shakes out.
The thing is, this "more ways to go wrong" probability doesn't just apply to headphone cords.
The thing is, this "more ways to go wrong" probability doesn't just apply to headphone cords.
With just about everything around us, there are significantly more ways for them to go wrong than to keep going right. Probabilistically, this means that over time they're almost guaranteed to go wrong at one point or another.
Nothing exists in a vacuum either: when one thing goes wrong, it influences its context of connected situations and events. Just like if you have two headphone cords in your pocket, their aggregate probability of tangling is even greater than each individual tangle probability.
Just like with headphone cords, it takes constant active effort to keep things on the right path and prevent them from tangling. But there's finite time and energy and attention available—considerably less than the amount required to align everything in our lives at all times.
Over time, of course, as everything tangles and influences its adjacent situations, it increases the aggregate probability of systemwide fuckups.
Even things that individually had a good chance of going right have their probabilities dragged down by context.
Even things that individually had a good chance of going right have their probabilities dragged down by context.
So now, at this point in our complex civilization, there are so many things going wrong and influencing the things around them—globally—that not only does each event have more ways of going wrong, each of those failures is itself considerably more likely.
That is to say:
The mathematical probabilities surrounding manifested intention and desired outcome are intrinsically fractally stacked against us and there's nothing we can do about it but exhaust ourselves attempting to keep all our headphone cords simultaneously aligned.
The mathematical probabilities surrounding manifested intention and desired outcome are intrinsically fractally stacked against us and there's nothing we can do about it but exhaust ourselves attempting to keep all our headphone cords simultaneously aligned.
And what's more, the cumulative "bad outcomes are more likely" skew of all these things co-influencing each other means that the WORST possible outcomes become more likely to occur, because the overall probability pool is dragged in that direction in aggregate.
