So the whole argument of this Montaigne essay is that employing the same people strategy in different circumstances regularly yields completely different results. Montaigne is saying that you can never find an airtight, logical, rational answer for everything, luck plays too much of a role in how things in life turn out.

And obviously there are counter examples, such as the Apollo program, that demonstrate the value of long term planning, although I guess even that is a much better example for Apollo 11 than it is for Apollo 13, so never mind.

Which brings up an interesting point about AI, by the way. Right now, we have all kinds of AI research and development going on worldwide, including several superscaler projects in the U.S. all at once. And our current assumption is basically along the lines of, well, we’ll find out soon enough if AI can actually achieve superintelligence or we’ll find out soon enough if we’re creating a technology that might kill us.

But if the odds that AI might kill us are, say 1 in 10, what if those same percentages apply to every company running the same training experiments? You may think it’s worth the risk to roll the dice on a 10% chance of extinction in exchange for superabundance (I do not, but I have no vote in this, and likely neither do you.) But what if that same dice roll is per company, not industry wide. Do you still want to take those odds?

I don’t really buy the argument that we’re living in a simulation, but we are living with so much probability in everything we do that it might as well be a randomized experiment. I’m completely convinced that nearly every romantic couple on the planet is the result of dumb luck, even if no app algo is involved in the pair meeting. It is perhaps even more likely in the grand scheme of things that people end up with different people and live entirely different lives, making the life you are living now a rarity in the multiverse, even if there is no multiverse.

By that I mean, even if the world doesn’t literally split off from every decision made, there is still a level of probability to every decision and action. People who are extraordinarily rich or famous or powerful did not arrive at an inevitable outcome, they simply made the most of an extremely lucky set of dice rolls.

The answer to all of this probability should be humility. We should be grateful for the good things we have in life because they were not inevitable. And we should be cautious about our own judgment, because even if we’re always right in life, when it comes to the decisions that matter most, we could be deadly wrong.

What is it that Carl Jung said about fate? “When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” The totality of life on earth comes down to people who are playing out their personal drama on the planet. It’s one thing for people to mess up their own lives with demons unacknowledged. Why do all of us have to be inflicted with other people’s lack of self awareness?