• Skip to main content
  • Skip to header right navigation
  • Skip to site footer
Farnam Street Logo

Farnam Street

Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out

  • Newsletter
  • Books
  • Podcast
  • Articles
  • Log In
  • Become a Member
TweetEmailLinkedInPrint
Uncategorized|Reading Time: < 1

The Future Is Not Like The Past

From Everything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us:

The ubiquity of complex systems in the social world is important because it severely restricts the kinds of predictions we can make. In simple systems, that is, it is possible to predict with high probability what will actually happen—for example when Halley’s Comet will next return or what orbit a particular satellite will enter. For complex systems, by contrast, the best that we can hope for is to correctly predict the probability that something will happen. At first glance, these two exercises sound similar, but they’re fundamentally different. To see how, imagine that you’re calling the toss of a coin. Because it’s a random event, the best you can do is predict that it will come up heads, on average, half of the time. A rule that says “over the long run, 50% of coin tosses will be heads, and 50% will be tails” is, in fact, perfectly accurate in the sense that heads and tails do, on average, show up exactly half the time. But even knowing this rule, we still can’t predict the outcome of a single coin toss any more than 50% of the time, no matter what strategy we adopt. Complex systems are not really random in the same way that a coin toss is random, but in practice it’s extremely difficult to tell the difference.

Still curious? Read How To Predict Everything next.

Read Next

Next Post:The Peter Principle Laurence J. Peter and James Hull defined The Peter Principle: “In a hierarchically structured administration, people tend to be …

Discover What You’re Missing

Get the weekly email full of actionable ideas and insights you can use at work and home.


As seen on:

New York Times logo
Wall Street Journal logo
The Economist logo
Financial Times logo
Farnam Street Logo

© 2025 Farnam Street Media Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Proudly powered by WordPress. Hosted by Pressable. See our Privacy Policy.

  • About
  • Sponsorship
  • Support
  • Speaking

We’re Syrus Partners.
We buy amazing businesses.


Farnam Street participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising commissions by linking to Amazon.