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The Laws of Delusion: To Err is Human

TABLE OF CONTENTS

World Crisis

World Crisis

Image Credit: Petr Kratochvil. Source. Public domain.

Human Error is Pervasive

The Great Recession: If it wasn’t overskepticism about the ability of the real-estate market to collapse, or overoptimism about insuring a market leveraged to points north of $50 trillion, it was the recklessness in erasing laws that had been on the books since the lessons of the Great Depression were learned and then forgotten. Human error: it’s pervasive. One of the errors is that we don’t often accept how much of it there is.


Accidental Spill

Accidental Spill

Image Credit: Steve Buissinne. Source. Public domain.


Fortunately, every mistake or misconception does not factor into an event as widespread as an economic collapse. But we are deluding ourselves to think there are not far more cases than we hear about. Even a string of smaller errors can be almost as bad, for it may burden the system with hidden costs that add up to a silent disaster while its cause remains a mystery for decades. Unless we accept that such deficiencies exist in our thinking, system health cannot be improved to reduce the probability of recurring events.


Petroleum Covered Duck With Ducklings

Petroleum Covered Duck With Ducklings

Image Credit: Julie Gentry. Source. Public domain.


In order to better depict the shortfall in our perception of human beings to “get it wrong,” one could capture the above concept in a general law. In the LAWS OF ALL™ Book 1, this property of our existence is filed under Part I, subchapter 3.5—the Laws of Delusion. Read more about the Laws of Delusion in the Chapter 3 synopsis.


Challenger Space Shuttle Explosion

Challenger Space Shuttle Explosion

Image Credit: Deutsch. Source. Public domain.


One of the purposes of formalizing such concepts into laws is to raise awareness so that the surrounding issues might be managed in some sensible ways. Ignoring that there is such a law maintains a Titanic-like air of human infallibility—and “unsinkability,” which as the Costa Concordia demonstrated, only holds when we’re not in “water” over our heads. But the sad truth is, far more often than is admitted, we in fact are. And so fallibility is highly “misunderestimated.”


Costa Concordia Cruise Ship

Costa Concordia Cruise Ship

Image Credit: Dieter Ludwig Schamagl. Source. Public domain.


Out of Our Sight, Out of Our Minds

Given the evidence of history, we need to sail a new ship. That is, we need a new way of thinking that always keeps us looking for what we got wrong: What misconceptions are we still harboring? What don’t we know that we don’t know? Is anything I learned today actually a fallacy? Are we quick enough to see our mistakes before they become disasters? Are we smart enough to know that we make mistakes?

Given a busy lifestyle, these questions are rarely asked. But where time allows, we need to reduce the throttle and reconsider our first thoughts on a subject. We need to second guess our initial decisions and double back to check if there are better solutions. We need to always be on the lookout for weak points that might become a system’s downfall. And we need to recognize that one of these weak points is overconfidence in our own intelligence and ability to see these weak points.

Often, we are elated to gain any understanding of a new or complex difficulty. Thinking that what little we have acquired may be wrong is not what one generally wants to consider. But without such open-minded thinking, we are forever doomed to repeat the errors of the past. We are sentenced to experience unending cycles of catastrophe.

The above illustrates one dimension of the LAWS OF ALL™ book series: to highlight simple truths that often escape our attention to such an extent that they are replaced by fallacy, at least on a subconscious level. Or they become passive fallacies, i.e., “out of sight, out of mind,” as they say. Or perhaps from the standpoint of delusions, this is better worded as, out of our sight, out of our minds. We can easily lose sight of facts to a point that we all forget that we forgot. And so similar blunders are allowed to occur over and over as if there’s nothing more that can be done.

What’s currently at stake is the loss of our entire civilization. A few weak points here and a few wrong moves there, and geopolitical stability may flee like depositors during a run on the banks. Whether civilization develops a “black-hole complex” and implodes, or explodes like a supernova, in the end, it is a moot point. Both are possible. And at the end of either road is a dark age. Read more about this dark-age prospect in the LAWS OF ALL™: System Laws Reveal Hidden Secrets of the Universe and Approaching Dark Age of Civilization, Part I, Vol. 1/1.2. (Check under Free Access for availability.)

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Explore Further

Access the full version of the Preface [pdf] for LAWS OF ALL™ Book 1 for free.

Check the availability of Free Access to other excerpts or files.

Use the link on the Publications page to find synopses and other information, or to make a purchase.

Find articles of interest in the Article Index.

Access news releases on the News Releases page.

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