Fluke
eBook - ePub

Fluke

Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

  1. 336 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Fluke

Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

About this book

This “captivating illustration of the follies of trying to model and forecast the unpredictable world” (Financial Times) is both “empowering” (The New Statesman, UK) and “compelling” (New Scientist) as it challenges our most fundamental assumptions—by social scientist and Atlantic writer Brian Klaas, whom Prospect magazine has named one of the world’s “Top 25 Thinkers.”

If you could rewind your life to the very beginning and then press play, would everything turn out the same? Or could making an accidental phone call or missing an exit off the highway change not just your life, but history itself?

In Fluke, myth-shattering social scientist Brian Klaas takes a deep-dive into the phenomenon of random chance and the chaos it can sow, taking aim at most people’s neat and tidy version of reality. The book’s argument is that we willfully ignore a bewildering truth: but for a few small changes, our lives—and our societies—could be radically different.

Offering an entirely new lens, Fluke explores how our world really works, driven by strange interactions and apparently random events. How did one couple’s vacation cause 100,000 people to die? Does our decision to hit the snooze button in the morning radically alter the trajectory of our lives? And has the evolution of humans been inevitable, or are we simply the product of a series of freak accidents?

Drawing on social science, chaos theory, history, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, Klaas provides a brilliantly fresh look at why things happen—all while providing mind-bending lessons on how we can live smarter, be happier, and lead more fulfilling lives.

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Yes, you can access Fluke by Brian Klaas in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Personal Development & Forecasting. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Scribner
Year
2024
eBook ISBN
9781668006542

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Epigraph
  4. Chapter 1: Introduction
  5. Chapter 2: Changing Anything Changes Everything
  6. Chapter 3: Everything Doesn’t Happen for a Reason
  7. Chapter 4: Why Our Brains Distort Reality
  8. Chapter 5: The Human Swarm
  9. Chapter 6: Heraclitus Rules
  10. Chapter 7: The Storytelling Animal
  11. Chapter 8: The Lottery of Earth
  12. Chapter 9: Everyone’s a Butterfly
  13. Chapter 10: Of Clocks and Calendars
  14. Chapter 11: The Emperor’s New Equations
  15. Chapter 12: Could It Be Otherwise?
  16. Chapter 13: Why Everything We Do Matters
  17. Acknowledgments
  18. About the Author
  19. Endnotes
  20. Index
  21. Copyright