This is part 4, and the last part of an examination of the various ways we can predict the future, their strengths and their weaknesses.
Part 1 is available here, which discusses the turkey problem, and the limitations of data. Part 2 is available here, which examines incentive structures and limiting factors. Part 3 is available here, which focuses on my critique of Hegelian Dialectics.
The last approach to predicting the future I will talk about here is what Nassim Taleb describes in his book Antifragile, which is the plain refusal to try to predict anything specific of what is to come.
Our world is not just so complex that it leads to highly non-linear dynamics, but it's also highly opaque, the opposite of transparent. Actually, it's even weirder than that, our world is both opaque in that the most powerful people are able to do things in the shadow of public view, but also highly visible due to the lightspeed information technologies that we access to. This results in the situation where are both shown only one part of the story of anything happening in our world, and where the other part is discussed to death through a million lenses of the internet spectacle.
In such an information landscape, the antifragile attitude is to learn how to be resilient in the face of future difficulties, or even better than that, how to improve in the face of stresses and various societal collapses.
The ethos of anti-fragility is simple but not so easy to implement in practice, because it invites discomfort and pain into our lives. Firstly, frugality is always a good asset to have in an uncertain world. In the case of a declining economy, frugal people can afford the increasing prices, both on a financial level but also on a cognitive and emotional level. Many people refuse frugality because they tell themselves that they can't, but if hard times were to come, we wouldn't have a choice, and people would simply be forced to adopt.
In contrast, during prospering times, a frugal person can save more money from their income, which means they might not have to work as much at a job they might dislike, giving them more flexibility and a higher quality of life, since after all the best things in life do not come from money. Money is nice as a safety bank, but its value diminishes very quickly after you guarantee your basic needs, which cannot be said about relationships, or working on something you find important, or being healthy.
Which leads me to another key aspect of antifragility, which is the flexibility, both in mindset but also in terms of living situation. Mindset wise, most people are constantly fighting the old war. They are applying the same strategy which has somewhat worked for them in the past years, a strategy which they cobbled from what their parents taught them, what has allowed them to get money and other things they wanted, and also a bunch of coping mechanisms along the way. Most people do not have a conscious strategy, and the awareness of what and why they are doing it.
This is also why most people get stuck in a flinch reaction for a fair amount of time whenever something unexpected and painful happens to them. Unconscious people do not account for pain and losses, even though they are the norm. This is because pain, uncertainty and death terrify the unconscious ego which dominates most people's lives, which leads them to push those away at all costs, preferring hopeful and safe narratives about all the good which will happen to them.
Not that only thinking about pain and the possible negatives is a conscious strategy either. As most things do, extremes come in pairs, which is why a responsible person will acknowledge the inevitability of pain and difficulties, and prepare to the best that they can, but will not get hung up on those, because after all there is much beauty to life too.
Flexibility in lifestyle is usually a result of the flexibility in mindset, and a mature relationship to money and more generally, how one spends their time. It's not too hard to see why, unless you believe you have a lifestyle which is very resilient in the face of societal collapse, it's better to keep exploring and keep your expenses low, until you can find a situation which is worth committing to.
This has its downsides of course, as anything does in life, because a high optionality lifestyle also means an inability to find a community to root yourself in. The problem is that real communities are by and large already quite rare in our times, which means that this problem is made worse as the years go by.
High optionality also means to try a large number of different things in order to see what sticks. It focuses on exploring rather than exploiting, recognizing that it's very difficult to even know what is worth committing to before you have attempted enough things in your life.
Risks are of course worth taking, but not every risk profile is the same. Some have a low cost but a high possible payoff, with the caveat of a low probability. Others have a medium payoff at a medium risk, and others are safer, but with a lower payoff. Taleb's suggestion is to adopt a barbell strategy: one that mostly invests in small risks, and sometimes in the highly risky ones, but never in the middle ones.
I am not here talking about financial investing by the way, which is something I don't believe in, and anyway requires a decent chunk of money to even be worth my time. I am talking about how you spend your time and energy. Taleb's strategy applies to exercising too, with his example that regular walking and heavy weightlifting twice a week is a much better strategy for your health than trying to do cardio four or five times a week.
The barbell strategy in terms of creativity would mean that you are better off working on a steady stream of small projects, which increase your visibility and stretch your skills in different ways, and then once in a while work on a bigger project which you can add to the list of polished and professional works, rather than try to churn out mid-sized project one after another, which will bring little to no attention to what you do, while also requiring a lot more work than the small projects.
All of these are general principles I got from a cursory view of Antifragile, but the real thing obviously comes from applying them, and dealing with the specific problems we will face as the decline of our world due to peak oil is unfolding.
From what I can tell, the naive idea that going to rural areas and trying to start a homestead there will be the best way to get through our societal decline is misguided. Some rural communities might have what it takes to be sustainable, but most of them still rely on long hours of driving to get what they need, especially the things which require a lot of infrastructure. In general, the rural homesteading strategy is one that puts all your eggs in the same basket, which means you better spend a lot of time researching and experimenting to see how truly viable it is for you.
We have looked at 5 different ways to predict the future, and what they might bring to the table. It's interesting to note that for each one, there is also a toxic version associated with the general strategy. My list goes as follows:
§1. Data-driven methods risk running into echo chambers, which we could say is a failure mode of devolving into religion or a cargo cult, when the same assumptions keep getting repeated over and over as if they were the absolute truth—real estate never goes down, science can always be trusted, that type of deal
§2. Analyzing incentive structures can lead to what are essentially conspiracy theories, pondering about the agenda of the biggest players of our times and what they might do together
§3. Looking at limiting factors and their depletion can often create an apocalyptic vision of the future, not just saying that we will run out of this resource, or that we have overshot our ecological capacity for regeneration, but that everything will break down next year, in fact next month, no actually it's right around the corner
§4. Historical analogies also have a way of taking on a religious form, such as Marx's ideas of the revolution of the proletariat, built on the backbone of hegelian dialectics, which has an uncanny resemblance to the second coming of Christ, and incidentally neither of which ever happened, and many people still hope that they will in the near future
§5. Lastly, anti-fragility, or in general any view of the future that focuses on resilience and responding intelligently, instead of predicting specific events or trends, can become a form of prepping doomerism. As John Michael Greer points out again and again, prepping is hardly a solution because all the food you end up storing would also make you a juicy target for any looter or organized form of theft, if the order in our society were to severely break down. And there is also an energy of surrender behind the idea of prepping, because it has given up on learning the ability to build things from a sustainable basis, and focuses instead on hoarding as many resources for yourself as possible just to extend your life by a few months.
As we can expect it, all 5 of those approaches towards predicting the future have their strengths and limitations. These days I am mostly interested in being present and undoing the tension in my body, because no matter what happens in the world, I want to live from a place of embodied relaxation, rather than dissociated anxiety.
My worldview about the future is very much informed by the John Michael Greer cluster of ideas comprised of the Spenglerian cycles of rise and fall of civilizations, and peak oil, as well as Nassim Taleb's view of antifragility, but none of those can ever predict any specific event in the short-term, only the trend of what's to come.
Ultimately I have no idea what's going to happen in the next 5-10 years. Will there be a war breaking out in Europe? I doubt that Russia would attack the rest of Europe, simply because it's a massive country already and it doesn't have much to gain from conquering the rest of Europe, and Ukraine was an exception due to its special connection with Russia. But maybe the EU will think that it's a good idea to attack Russia, or some type of internal wars will happen for one reason or another.
How quickly will the results of peak oil manifest in our world? Same thing, I don't know. But I predict that peak oil will make climate change and the concerns about AI irrelevant, because the global industrial supply chains will break down before those two problems get out of hand.
On the side of the economy, the price of living keeps increasing, but it's also due to the steady rise of real estate prices, which strike me as part of a bigger financial bubble, but I don't understand any of that very well. AI strikes me as a massive financial bubble, as well as much of the financial market, such as derivatives and whatnot, but again the information on all of this is very unreliable to say the least.
The information ecology will somehow get worse. The internet is already becoming very unenjoyable to use, with the polarization of our world seeping in every corner, and the AI slop invading everything. I also predict more and more ways to control how people use the internet, more and more restrictions, as well as a lot of power and security theatres: politicians enacting measures to give the impression that they have control over our lives, when they really don't, all in the name of safety of course.
There are of course all other kinds of aspects of world, and possible trends I could draw, but what I know is that thinking about the future in this manner has a way of making me dissociate from my body, a tendency which I want to undo in my life.
There are other ways of predicting the future, and it's difficult for me to imagine how I could have made a somewhat exhaustive list. This isn't meant to be as such, I was simply curious about alternatives to the stronghold of data-driven methods which dominate the mainstream landscape.
There is for instance an entire esoteric world of predicting the future, with the gigantic field known as divination, which is comprised of the usual methods we know of, such as astrology, tarot reading, looking into a crystal ball, examining tea leaves, palm reading, but also has much more obscure ones, such as looking at the specific shape of an egg yolk, opening a book at a random page and reading the first words you see, examining the entrails of dead animals, or casting animal bones or teeth and interpreting their patterns.
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Prediction Antifragility History Expandable Notknowing Limits Silence Stoicism
2025-12-23