Predictable Behaviour Quotes

Love isn’t about predictions or behavioural markers. It just happens, and you have no control.

Ownership is not limited to material things. It can also apply to points of view. Once we take ownership of an idea — whether it’s about politics or sports — what do we do? We love it perhaps more than we should. We prize it more than it is worth. And most frequently, we have trouble letting go of it because we can’t stand the idea of its loss. What are we left with then? An ideology — rigid and unyielding.

Once we understand how they think, we can predict their behaviour. And once we predict it well, we can manipulate it. That is diplomacy.

You can predict anything in this world but not the nature's behaviour

If she was on the porch when we passed, we would be raked by her wrathful gaze, subjected to ruthless interrogation regarding our behaviour, and given a melancholy prediction on what we would amount to when we grew up, which was always nothing.

Understanding men or ideas or movements, or the outlooks of individuals or groups, is not reducible to a sociological classification into types of behaviour with predictions based on scientific experiment and carefully tabulated statistics of observations.

He remained convinced that romantic behaviour was basically monotonous and predictable and that therefore one could write a fairly straightforward formula that would predict the collision course of any two people.

To ascribe feeling is usually to make a prediction about subsequent behaviour.

Mind control of individuals, the general population and even assets of the Web is aimed at ensuring there are no surprises, maverick behaviour or situations and responses the Elite can't predict.

An obsessive is an addict-in-waiting.

When we say that human behaviour is unpredictable, we are right, because it is too complex to be predicted, especially by ourselves. Our intense sensation of internal liberty, as Spinoza acutely saw, comes from the fact that the ideas and images which we have of ourselves are much cruder and sketchier than the detailed complexity of what is happening within us. We are the source of amazement in our own eyes

Whether you are attending someone else's or holding your own dinner party, your main objective should be to lead guests away from the usual road of predictable behaviour and tedious conversation, and towards a shared voyage of epicurean delight. In much the same way as caged animals in zoos are kept mentally healthy by being set mealtime tasks by their keepers, dinner guests will find their repast far more satisfying if it is presented as a challenge and an opportunity for self-expression. For example, instead of the dry old formula of a plate flanked by serried ranks of knives, forks and spoons, today's modern host should show a little more ingenuity when selecting eating utensils. The novelty of using a Black & Decker two-speed drill to sheer flakes of the roast beef or a 15-inch spanner to negotiate the foie gras, will firmly place your party in the minds of your guests as a night to remember.

Thus, they were asking: do higher intelligence test scores from about age 20 predict better educational outcomes, higher social position, and arguably more pro-social behaviours in the thirties? The answer was: they did. They then asked if this was due to (confounded by) parental socio-economic status; it mostly wasn’t.

Trustworthiness therefore comes from consistent, predictable, reliable behaviour over a long period of time demonstrating honesty, competence and reliability.

None can predict one's real nature when everything goes in a perfect way.

For human beings to be able to act freely, the future must be open. However, Big Data is making it possible to predict human behaviour

He learned, like every good novelist, that human behaviour can neither be explained nor predicted, only rendered.

The difference between the Platonic theory and the morphic-resonance hypothesis can be illustrated by analogy with a television set. The pictures on the screen depend on the material components of the set and the energy that powers it, and also on the invisible transmissions it receives through the electromagnetic field. A sceptic who rejected the idea of invisible influences might try to explain everything about the pictures and sounds in terms of the components of the set – the wires, transistors, and so on – and the electrical interactions between them. Through careful research he would find that damaging or removing some of these components affected the pictures or sounds the set produced, and did so in a repeatable, predictable way. This discovery would reinforce his materialist belief. He would be unable to explain exactly how the set produced the pictures and sounds, but he would hope that a more detailed analysis of the components and more complex mathematical models of their interactions would eventually provide the answer. Some mutations in the components – for example, by a defect in some of the transistors – affect the pictures by changing their colours or distorting their shapes; while mutations of components in the tuning circuit cause the set to jump from one channel to another, leading to a completely different set of sounds and pictures. But this does not prove that the evening news report is produced by interactions among the TV set’s components. Likewise, genetic mutations may affect an animal’s form and behaviour, but this does not prove that form and behaviour are programmed in the genes. They are inherited by morphic resonance, an invisible influence on the organism coming from outside it, just as TV sets are resonantly tuned to transmissions that originate elsewhere.

The truth is that, for the Folk, stories are everything. Stories are part of them and their world in a fundamental way that mortals have difficulty grasping; a story may be a singular event from the past, but - crucially - it is also a pattern that shapes their behaviour and predicts future events.

For four decades, since my time as a graduate student, I have been preoccupied by these kinds of stories about the myriad ways in which people depart from the fictional creatures that populate economic models. It has never been my point to say that there is something wrong with people; we are all just human beings—homo sapiens. Rather, the problem is with the model being used by economists, a model that replaces homo sapiens with a fictional creature called homo economicus, which I like to call an Econ for short. Compared to this fictional world of Econs, Humans do a lot of misbehaving, and that means that economic models make a lot of bad predictions, predictions that can have much more serious consequences than upsetting a group of students. Virtually no economists saw the financial crisis of 2007–08 coming,* and worse, many thought that both the crash and its aftermath were things that simply could not happen.

I have to smile when newspapers--so predictable in their attempt to explain the behaviour of those transgressing social norms or the workings of the deviant mind--speak of the 'double life' led by this furtive criminal or that. In fact the reverse is true. It is normal people who have a 'double life'. On the outside is your everyday life of going out to work and going on holiday. Then there is the life you wish you had--the life that keeps you awake at night with hope, ambition, plans, frustration, resentment, envy, regret. This is a more seething life of wants, driven by thoughts of possibility and potential. It is the life you can never have. Always changing, it is always out of reach. Would you like more money? Here, have more! An attractive sexual partner? No problem. Higher status? More intelligence? Whiter teeth? You are obsessed with what is just out of reach. It is the itch you cannot scratch. Tortured by the principle that the more you can't have something the more you desire it, you are never happy.

This clarification of the nature of intelligence predicts that there will be no relationship at all between personality and intelligence, but research in the last decade has shown that this is not quite true. There are no very strong relationships between personality and intelligence, but some relationships there are, though debate about their nature and significance goes on. Most strikingly, though, in a couple of studies where relationships between Conscientiousness and intelligence have been found, they are not, as you might imagine, positive, but weakly negative. The smarter people are, the less conscientious they are.13 The most likely explanation for this is that people who are very sharp soon learn that they can get away with not preparing things too much in advance, not being overly disciplined with their time, and so on, since their quick abilities will get them through whatever academic and professional challenges they meet. Conversely, people who are not quite so quick have to use organization and discipline to achieve what some others might achieve carelessly. Thus, a behavioural style is developed that compensates for the level of intelligence, and so ends up inversely related to it. This means that there is no intrinsic genetic connection between low Conscientiousness and high intelligence. Rather, the weak negative correlation is something that emerges through development.

Such threats and promises often succeed in creating stable human hierarchies and mass-cooperation networks, as long as people believe that they reflect the inevitable laws of nature or the divine commands of God, rather than just human whims. All large-scale human cooperation is ultimately based on our belief in imagined orders. These are sets of rules that, despite existing only in our imagination, we believe to be as real and inviolable as gravity. ‘If you sacrifice ten bulls to the sky god, the rain will come; if you honour your parents, you will go to heaven; and if you don’t believe what I am telling you – you’ll go to hell.’ As long as all Sapiens living in a particular locality believe in the same stories, they all follow the same rules, making it easy to predict the behaviour of strangers and to organise mass-cooperation networks. Sapiens often use visual marks such as a turban, a beard or a business suit to signal ‘you can trust me, I believe in the same story as you’. Our chimpanzee cousins cannot invent and spread such stories, which is why they cannot cooperate in large numbers.

The difficulties connected with my criterion of demarcation (D) are important, but must not be exaggerated. It is vague, since it is a methodological rule, and since the demarcation between science and nonscience is vague. But it is more than sharp enough to make a distinction between many physical theories on the one hand, and metaphysical theories, such as psychoanalysis, or Marxism (in its present form), on the other. This is, of course, one of my main theses; and nobody who has not understood it can be said to have understood my theory. The situation with Marxism is, incidentally, very different from that with psychoanalysis. Marxism was once a scientific theory: it predicted that capitalism would lead to increasing misery and, through a more or less mild revolution, to socialism; it predicted that this would happen first in the technically highest developed countries; and it predicted that the technical evolution of the 'means of production' would lead to social, political, and ideological developments, rather than the other way round. But the (so-called) socialist revolution came first in one of the technically backward countries. And instead of the means of production producing a new ideology, it was Lenin's and Stalin's ideology that Russia must push forward with its industrialization ('Socialism is dictatorship of the proletariat plus electrification') which promoted the new development of the means of production. Thus one might say that Marxism was once a science, but one which was refuted by some of the facts which happened to clash with its predictions (I have here mentioned just a few of these facts). However, Marxism is no longer a science; for it broke the methodological rule that we must accept falsification, and it immunized itself against the most blatant refutations of its predictions. Ever since then, it can be described only as nonscience—as a metaphysical dream, if you like, married to a cruel reality. Psychoanalysis is a very different case. It is an interesting psychological metaphysics (and no doubt there is some truth in it, as there is so often in metaphysical ideas), but it never was a science. There may be lots of people who are Freudian or Adlerian cases: Freud himself was clearly a Freudian case, and Adler an Adlerian case. But what prevents their theories from being scientific in the sense here described is, very simply, that they do not exclude any physically possible human behaviour. Whatever anybody may do is, in principle, explicable in Freudian or Adlerian terms. (Adler's break with Freud was more Adlerian than Freudian, but Freud never looked on it as a refutation of his theory.) The point is very clear. Neither Freud nor Adler excludes any particular person's acting in any particular way, whatever the outward circumstances. Whether a man sacrificed his life to rescue a drowning, child (a case of sublimation) or whether he murdered the child by drowning him (a case of repression) could not possibly be predicted or excluded by Freud's theory; the theory was compatible with everything that could happen—even without any special immunization treatment. Thus while Marxism became non-scientific by its adoption of an immunizing strategy, psychoanalysis was immune to start with, and remained so. In contrast, most physical theories are pretty free of immunizing tactics and highly falsifiable to start with. As a rule, they exclude an infinity of conceivable possibilities.

I could have gone on about faerie stories—I’ve written several articles on the subject—but I didn’t know how to talk to him about my scholarship, if what I said would be nonsense to his ears. The truth is that, for the Folk, stories are everything. Stories are part of them and their world in a fundamental way that mortals have difficulty grasping; a story may be a singular event from the past, but—crucially—it is also a pattern that shapes their behaviour and predicts future events. The Folk have no system of laws, and while I am not saying stories are as law to them, they are the closest thing their world has to some form of order.

Silar's problem is something I, as an author, am constantly faced with. I have to predict the actions of my characters as they enter different situations. But there's always that element of chaos when they lose their sanity or when the less-probable occurs, which works against whatever fate I have in store for them. Just to complicate things further, it's almost inexcusable for an author to have characters acting... um... out of character in a book unless it's warranted by some other event. Therefore, as reasonable readers and authors, we all have our own ideas of deterministic behaviour and frequently balk at actions/decisions that seem odd.

What’s the point of making predictions if they cannot change anything? Some complex systems, such as the weather, are oblivious to our predictions. The process of human development, in contrast, reacts to them. Indeed, the better our forecasts, the more reactions they engender. Hence paradoxically, as we accumulate more data and increase our computing power, events become wilder and more unexpected. The more we know, the less we can predict. Imagine, for example, that one day experts decipher the basic laws of the economy. Once this happens, banks, governments, investors and customers will begin to use this new knowledge to act in novel ways, and gain an edge over their competitors. For what is the use of new knowledge if it doesn’t lead to novel behaviours?

In Tom, it can be said, there is a tendency to appraise certain situations in such a way that a behavioural system is activated that results in his attacking his little sister and biting her. Further, the conditions that lead to this appraisal and so activate the system are specifiable, at least roughly. They comprise, perhaps, a combination on the one hand of a situation of mother attending to little sister and not to Tom and, on the other, of certain organismic states of Tom, themselves brought about by specifiable conditions, such, for example, as a rebuff from father, or fatigue, or hunger. Whenever certain combinations of these conditions obtain, it is predicted, a certain appraisal will be made, a certain behavioural system will be activated, and Tom will bite.

If two people with no symptoms in common can both receive the same diagnosis of schizophrenia, then what is the value of that label in describing their symptoms, deciding their treatment, or predicting their outcome, and would it not be more useful simply to describe their problems as they actually are? And if schizophrenia does not exist in nature, then how can researchers possibly find its cause or correlates? If psychiatric research has made so little progress in recent decades, it is in large part because everyone has been barking up the wrong tree. It is not a question of getting a bigger and better scanner, but of going right back to the drawing board. What’s more, medical-type labels can be as harmful as they are hollow. By reducing rich, varied, and complex human experiences to nothing more than a mental disorder, they not only sideline and trivialize those experiences but also imply an underlying defect that then serves as a pseudo-explanation for the person’s disturbed behaviour. This demeans and disempowers the person, who is deterred from identifying and addressing the important life problems that underlie his distress.

The Pathe & Mullen (1997) sample almost unanimously reported deterioration in mental and physical well-being as a consequence of the harassment. (..) These victims often described a preoccupation with their stalker, one commenting: "I think I’ve become as obsessed as the stalker himself". (..) Whenever stalking victims present it is essential to assess their suicide potential and continue to monitor this. (..) Victims of stalking often respond to cognitive-orientated psychological therapies because stalking breaches previously held assumptions about their safety. The belief of victims in their strength and resilience and their confidence in the reasonable and predictable nature of the world are frequently shattered, to be replaced with feelings of extreme vulnerability and an expectation of pervasive danger and unpredictable harm. Cognitive therapies attempt to restructure these morbid perceptions of the world that threaten the victim’s adaptation and functioning. (..) Avoidance can respond to behavioural therapies such as prolonged exposure and stress inoculation, which aim to assist victims to gradually resume abandoned activities and manage the associated anxiety.

One of my colleagues in Duke, Ralph Keeney, noted that America's top killer isn't cancer or heart disease, nor is it smoking or obesity. It's our inability to make smart choices and overcome our own self-destructive behaviours. Ralph estimates that about half of us will make a lifestyle decision that will ultimately lead us to an early grave. And as if this were not bad enough, it seems that the rate at which we make these deadly decisions is increasing at an alarming pace. I suspect that over the next few decades, real improvements in life expectancy and quality are less likely to be driven by medical technology than by improved decision making. Since focusing on long-term benefits is not our natural tendency, we need to more carefully examine the cases in which we repeatedly fail, and try to come up with some remedies for these situations. For an overweight movie loved, the key might be to enjoy watching a film while walking on the treadmill. The trick is to find the right behavioural antidote for each problem. By pairing something that we love with something that we dislike but that is good for us, we might be able to harness desire with outcome - and thus overcome some of the problems with self-control we face every day.

This is not a hypothetical example. In the middle of the nineteenth century Karl Marx reached brilliant economic insights. Based on these insights he predicted an increasingly violent conflict between the proletariat and the capitalists, ending with the inevitable victory of the former and the collapse of the capitalist system. Marx was certain that the revolution would start in countries that spearheaded the Industrial Revolution – such as Britain, France and the USA – and spread to the rest of the world. Marx forgot that capitalists know how to read. At first only a handful of disciples took Marx seriously and read his writings. But as these socialist firebrands gained adherents and power, the capitalists became alarmed. They too perused Das Kapital, adopting many of the tools and insights of Marxist analysis. In the twentieth century everybody from street urchins to presidents embraced a Marxist approach to economics and history. Even diehard capitalists who vehemently resisted the Marxist prognosis still made use of the Marxist diagnosis. When the CIA analysed the situation in Vietnam or Chile in the 1960s, it divided society into classes. When Nixon or Thatcher looked at the globe, they asked themselves who controls the vital means of production. From 1989 to 1991 George Bush oversaw the demise of the Evil Empire of communism, only to be defeated in the 1992 elections by Bill Clinton. Clinton’s winning campaign strategy was summarised in the motto: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ Marx could not have said it better. As people adopted the Marxist diagnosis, they changed their behaviour accordingly. Capitalists in countries such as Britain and France strove to better the lot of the workers, strengthen their national consciousness and integrate them into the political system. Consequently when workers began voting in elections and Labour gained power in one country after another, the capitalists could still sleep soundly in their beds. As a result, Marx’s predictions came to naught. Communist revolutions never engulfed the leading industrial powers such as Britain, France and the USA, and the dictatorship of the proletariat was consigned to the dustbin of history. This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

Accompanying this external style of functioning may be a propensity to be guided rather by strict rules, regulations and social conformity which provide existential anchoring via their predictable codes of behaviour, rather than by feelings which for the alexithymic individual provide no such security.

never try to predict or anticipate. I only try to react to what the market is telling me by its behaviour. I believe there are no good stocks or bad stocks; there are only money making stocks. So there is no good direction to trade, short or long; there is only the moneymaking way to trade. Greed, fear, impatience, and hope will all fight for mental dominance over the speculator.” — Jesse Livermore

Ladies and Gentlemen we have the chance to harness this unique technology to transform the world. For instance predictions of a violent criminal can be transformed and they can join the military and fight on the front line, a potential terrorist could become a security specialist and a promiscuous female a seductive spy.

But even as Nikki was saying it, she knew that wasn’t quite true. Ned was different this time. His anger less focused. His triggers less predictable. His patterns of behaviour, the swoop and swerve of his annoyances, far more erratic

We continue to swing like a pendulum, from good to evil. It's easy to predict human behaviours because we only have two options.

However, the observed orbit of Uranus consistently differed from what Newton’s theory predicted. This puzzle was solved in 1846 by two scientists, Adams in England and Leverrier in France, working independently. They suggested that there was another planet, as yet undiscovered, exerting an additional gravitational force on Uranus. Adams and Leverrier were able to calculate the mass and position that this planet would have to have, if its gravitational pull was indeed responsible for Uranus’ strange behaviour. Shortly afterwards the planet Neptune was discovered, almost exactly where Adams and Leverrier had predicted. Now

Risk isn’t about going headlong into situations where the outcome can’t be predicted. That’s just foolish behaviour. Risk means pushing the envelope when others want to take the safe route. Risk means caring more about potential rewards than possible losses. To separate yourself from the crowd, think through the worst-case scenarios as possibilities. If a worst-case scenario does become a reality, be just as willing to move on to bigger and better things.

However, in other circumstances, such as with PSR 1913 + 16, the situation is very different, and gravitational radiation from the system indeed has a significant role to play. Here, Einstein's theory provides a firm prediction of the detailed nature of the gravitational radiation that the system ought to be emitting, and of the energy that should be carried away. This loss of energy should result in a slow spiralling inwards of the two neutron stars, and a corresponding speeding up of their orbital rotation period. Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse first observed this binary pulsar at the enormous Aricebo radio telescope in Puerto Rico in 1974. Since that time, the rotation period has been closely monitored by Taylor and his colleagues, and the speed-up is in precise agreement with the expectations of general relativity (cf. Fig. 4.11). For this work, Hulse and Taylor were awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for Physics. In fact, as the years have rolled by, the accumulation of data from this system has provided a stronger and stronger confirmation of Einstein's theory. Indeed, if we now take the system as a whole and compare it with the behaviour that is computed from Einstein's theory as a whole-from the Newtonian aspects of the orbits, through the corrections to these orbits from standard general relativity effects, right up to the effects on the orbits due to loss of energy in gravitational radiation-we find that the theory is confirmed overall to an error of no more than about 10^-14. This makes Einstein's general relativity, in this particular sense, the most accurately tested theory known to science!

Well,” the voice said, seemingly oblivious, “one thing that does happen when you live a long time is that you start to realise the essential futility of so much that we do, especially when you see the same patterns of behaviour repeated by succeeding generations and across different species. You see the same dreams, the same hopes, the same ambitions and aspirations, reiterated, and the same actions, the same courses and tactics and strategies, regurgitated, to the same predictable and often lamentable effects, and you start to think, So? Does it really matter? Why really are you bothering with all this? Are these not just further doomed, asinine ways of attempting to fill your vacuous, pointless existence, wedged slivered as it is between the boundless infinitudes of dark oblivion book-ending its utter triviality?” “Uh-huh,

Determinism says that our behaviour is determined by two causes: our heredity and our environment. Heredity refers to the genes we inherit from our parents, while environment refers not only to our current environment but also to the environments we have experienced in the past—in effect, to all the experiences we have had from the time we were born. Determinism, in other words, says that our behaviour is entirely determined by our genes and experiences: if we knew every gene and every experience a person had, then, in principle, we could predict exactly what they would do at every moment in time. (p. 4) And now we may be on the brink of yet another revolution. It has been taking place largely out of public view, in psychology laboratories around the world. Its implications, however, are profound. It is telling us that just as we lost our belief that we are at the centre of the universe, we may also be losing our claim to stand aloof from the material world, to rise above the laws of physics and chemistry that bind other species. Our behaviour, it suggests, is just as lawful, just as determined, as that of every other living creature. (p. 6) Also, while determinism is clearly contrary to the religious doctrine of free will, it is important to note that it is not contrary to religion per se. Einstein famously said that ‘God does not play dice’ with nature. He believed in some form of creation, but he found it inconceivable that God would have left the running of this universe to chance. Determinism assumes that the universe is lawful, but it makes no assumptions about how this universe came into being. (p. 11) Another way in which parents influence their children’s behaviour is simply by being who they are. Children have a strong tendency to imitate adults, especially when the adult is important in their lives, and you can’t get much more important to a child than a parent. (p. 62) What children see does influence their understanding of how to get along in the world, of what is and isn’t acceptable. (p. 64) Our need to be liked, combined with our horror of being rejected or ostracized, can influence all of us. (p. 79) It is the brain which gives rise to thought: no brain activity, no thought. (p. 90) We’ve seen that everything we think, feel and do depends on the existence of an intact brain – (p. 92) …: that what remains in memory is not necessarily the precise details of an experience but our interpretation of that experience. (p. 140) According to determinism, it is your behaviour which is determined, not events. … The future is not preordained; if you change your behaviour, your future will also change. (p. 151) It is our brains that determine what we think and feel; if our brains don’t function properly, consciousness is disrupted. (p. 168) Given how much of our mental processing takes place in the unconscious, it is perhaps not surprising that we are often unaware of the factors that have guided our conscious thought. … …, but insofar as behaviour is determined by the environment, then by changing that environment we can change that behaviour. (p. 169)

It’s called metacognition, which is a fancy name for thoughts about your thoughts. We have this ability to think. But we also have the ability to think about what we are thinking. Metacognition is the process of stepping back from the thoughts and getting enough distance to allow us to see those thoughts for what they really are. When you do this, they lose some of their power over you and how you feel and behave. You get to choose how you respond to them rather than feeling controlled and driven by something. Metacognition sounds complicated but it is simply the process of noticing which thoughts pop into your head and observing how they make you feel. You can have a go by pausing for a few minutes and noticing where your mind wanders to. Notice how you can choose to focus in on a thought, like Stanley putting the mask over his face, or you can let it pass and wait for the next thought to arrive. The power of any thought is in how much we buy into it. How much we believe it to be true and meaningful. When we observe our own thought processes in this way, we start to see thoughts for what they are, and what they are not. Thoughts are not facts. They are a mix of opinions, judgements, stories, memories, theories, interpretations, and predictions about the future. They are ideas offered up by your brain about ways we could make sense of the world. But the brain has limited information to go on.

We cannot predict the behaviour of the whole, complex, connected system. We cannot know what will go wrong or right. However we can be absolutely certain that by reducing or destroying biodiversity, our world will be less able to adapt.

I described Cambridge Analytica’s tactics of voter manipulation – how the firm identified and targeted people with neurotic or conspiratorial predispositions, then disseminated propaganda designed to deepen and accentuate those traits. I explained how, after obtaining people’s data from Facebook, Cambridge Analytica could in some cases predict their behaviour better than their own spouses could, and how the firm was using that information to, in effect, radicalise people

If, as Hamilton’s theory suggests, helping blood relatives increases an individual’s inclusive fitness, then altruism toward kin should be particularly forthcoming from individuals in their postreproductive years. “The behaviour of a post-reproductive animal,” Hamilton argued, “may be expected to be entirely altruistic,”53 since aiding even distant relatives provides some inclusive benefits—the only fitness benefits postreproductive individuals can accrue. To test this idea, Hamilton turned to A. D. Blest’s work on saturnid moths. Blest had studied cryptic and aposematic coloration in moths. Cryptically colored species of moths use their coloration to blend into their environment and make themselves less obvious to predators. Moths that rely on aposematic coloration use their colors to warn predators that they contain noxious substances and hence would make for a bad meal. Hamilton argued that inclusive fitness thinking makes very different predictions with respect to the postreproductive behavior of individuals from cryptic versus aposematic species. In the case of cryptic coloration, if individuals live in the vicinity of kin, then, Hamilton argued, inclusive fitness theory predicts that “it is altruistic to die immediately after reproduction.”54 T o see why, imagine a postreproductive cryptic moth. If such an individual is spotted and eaten by a predator, that predator is more likely to learn what all cryptic moths look like and is then more likely to eat the nearby kin of the deceased. In such a case, the postreproductive moth’s inclusive fitness would have been higher if it had simply died after its last bout of reproduction, rather than lived and potentially drawn an experienced predator to the area containing its kin. In the case of aposematic species, intense coloration is almost always associated with a noxious taste, and so inclusive fitness thinking led Hamilton to a very different conclusion regarding postreproductive behavior. A predator who eats a postreproductive individual in an aposematic species will be less likely to eat the deceased individual’s relatives, since it will have learned that aposematically colored individuals taste terrible. A postreproductive individual in an aposematic species may raise its inclusive fitness by being eaten, and hence selection should favor life after reproduction. To Hamilton’s delight, the postreproductive life of cryptic and aposematic species matched that predicted by inclusive fitness models—with postreproductive life spans significantly shorter in cryptically colored moth species.

Despite all of the chatter, there is little to no indication that a psychiatric diagnosis has any predictive value when it comes to gun violence. Being diagnosed with illness [x] can give you information about what treatments might be appropriate, but it doesn’t tell you whether someone will engage in behaviour [y] six months from now.

I have to smile when newspapers – so predictable in their attempt to explain the behaviour of those transgressing social norms or the workings of the deviant mind – speak of ‘the double life’ led by this furtive criminal or that. In fact the reverse is true. It is normal people who have a ‘double life’. On the outside is your everyday life of going out to work and going on holiday. Then there is the life you wish you had – the life that keeps you awake at night with hope, ambition, plans, frustration, resentment, envy, regret. This is a more seething life of wants, driven by thoughts of possibility and potential. It is the life you can never have. Always changing, it is always out of reach. Would you like more money? Here, have more! An attractive sexual partner? No problem. Higher status? More intelligence? Whiter teeth? You are obsessed with what is just out of reach. It is the itch you cannot scratch. Tortured by the principle that the more you can’t have something the more you desire it, you are never happy.

This complex structure, in which people were required to predict the behaviour of others in social situations, is generally regarded as the mechanism by which consciousness evolved. In predicting the behaviour of others, an individual would have acquired a sense of self.

Predictability makes classrooms feel safe. Routines are central to this predictability.

Restorative work in schools is different. It is more of a parenting conversation – short, predictable and never overwhelming. It does not mirror the process used in custodial rehabilitation.

Before the Enlightenment, bad philosophy was the rule and good philosophy the rare exception. With the Enlightenment came much more good philosophy, but bad philosophy became much worse, with the descent from empiricism (merely false) to positivism, logical positivism, instrumentalism, Wittgenstein, linguistic philosophy, and the ‘postmodernist’ and related movements. In science, the main impact of bad philosophy has been through the idea of separating a scientific theory into (explanationless) predictions and (arbitrary) interpretation. This has helped to legitimize dehumanizing explanations of human thought and behaviour. In quantum theory, bad philosophy manifested itself mainly as the Copenhagen interpretation and its many variants, and as the ‘shut-up-and-calculate’ interpretation. These appealed to doctrines such as logical positivism to justify systematic equivocation and to immunize themselves from criticism.

There is a huge body of work that shows that the best way to set children up for a positive life is to raise them in family environments that are safe, predictable and warm. Being compassionate to the distress of one's child is at the core of parenting. One study I did found that parents with compassionate parenting goals were more likely to engage in warm and responsive parenting, while those focused on their own self-image (wanting to be seen as 'right' or the 'perfect' parent) were more likely to be controlling and critical of their children. Parenting styles are strong predictors of childhood social, emotional and behavioural outcomes, with facilitative (warm and responsive) parenting leading to better outcomes and controlling parenting being detrimental for children.

Given a sufficiently precise description of the initial state of any isolated physical system, it would in principle predict the future behaviour of the system. Where the exact behaviour of a system was intrinsically unpredictable, it would describe all possible behaviours and predict their probabilities. In practice, the initial states of interesting systems often cannot be ascertained very accurately, and in any case the calculation of the predictions would be too complicated to be carried out in all but the simplest cases.

And how could anyone who was not a god predict the future, shaped as it was by human psychology, human behaviour and pure chance?

Where did this infamous character come from? His most intimate early portrait was created by Adam Smith in two major works, his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments and his 1776 book known as The Wealth of Nations. Today Smith is best remembered for having noted the human propensity to ‘truck, barter and exchange’ and the role of self-interest in making markets work.2 But although he believed self-interest was ‘of all virtues that which is most helpful to the individual’, Smith also believed it was far from the most admirable of our traits, knocked off that top spot by our ‘humanity, justice, generosity and public spirit . . . the qualities most useful to others’. Did he consider humankind to be motivated by self-interest alone? Not at all. ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed,’ he wrote, ‘there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.’3 Furthermore, Smith believed that an individual’s self-interest and concern for others combined with their diverse talents, motivations and preferences to produce a complex moral character whose behaviour could not easily be predicted.

Physics is not just about making predictions. If one day we were to find a black box that always and accurately predicted the outcome of our particle physics experiments and our astronomical observations, the existence of the box would not bring inquiry in these fields to a close. There's a difference between making predictions and understanding them. The beauty of physics, its raison d'être, is that it offers insights into why things in the universe behave the way they do. The ability to predict behaviour is a big part of physics' power, but the heart of physics would be lost if it didn't give us a deep understanding of the hidden reality underlying what we observe.

For the prediction of football matches, it is possible to use Bet9ja vip, that is, to provide a data analysis program with as much information as possible and variables that allow a prediction to be made that is closest to the actual result. They are bookmakers, sports television channels, sports newspapers, sections of this area of printed and digital newspapers, and the same soccer teams, who make predictions of football matches and tournaments using Bet9ja vip and analytical programs, through the use of a predictive mathematics that is based on a very extensive menu of data that is processed once obtained. The data used are the variables that combine to define possible outcomes: team history, evaluation and soccer background of each player, statistics of wins and losses, results of teams as visitors and locals, technical, mental and emotional evaluation of each player, figures of results with teams that a team will face, strategies and tactics with which it has won and lost, climatic variables of the places where it is played, characteristics of each stadium including the behaviour of the people, political and economic variables of the countries where a team will play (in case of international games), among others. The combination of these variables makes it possible to predict football matches and tournaments, in particular of a football world cup where 32 teams face each other and where it is possible to apply the stated variables with a margin of error of approximately 20%; that is to say, that the use of Bet9ja vip to predict a Football Tournament has between 70% and 80% probability of hitting. All in all, the variables of a match and an international soccer tournament, the most important on the planet, that is, a World Cup, are so wide and diverse that we are only in conditions -from Bet9ja vip, analysis programs and even Machine Learning- to partially predict them. So to the question: is it possible to predict who will be the World Cup champion? we can answer that not absolutely and safely, and yes in a tendential and approximate manner; that is, if we use the Bet9ja vip correctly to predict each of the matches of the Tournament and predict who will be the champion of the same, we have between 70% and 80% margin to avoid mistakes. Therefore, when placing your bets, even when you rely on Bet9ja vip to perform them, bear in mind that there are variables that cannot be predicted, so there is no science that predicts with complete certainty their behaviour; finally human actions, in particular a game like soccer, are full of surprises and contingencies that we cannot control or predict yet.

There is no known way of summing up all of the infinitely many possible diagrams, to get an expression for the behaviour of a fully renormalized, physical electron. But by considering roughly the simplest hundred diagrams for certain processes, physicists have been able to predict one value (the so-called g-factor of the muon) to nine decimal places- correctly.

People like to know that they can trust you, and trust is predictable behaviour over time.

When people do not use their cognitive abilities to arrive at a personal decision (to resolve their own inner conflicts), they collapse into one of nine predictable patterns of Core Belief Profile behaviour.

But I have been stressing that there are other underlying species-regularities involved. First, that women leaders do not inspire ‘followership’ chiefly because they are women and not only because of the consequences of those factors noted above ; secondly, even if they want to, women cannot become political leaders because males are strongly predisposed to form and maintain all-male groups, particularly when matters of moment for the community are involved. The suggestion is that a combination of these two factors has been the basis for the hostility and difficulty those females have faced who have aspired to political leadership. This has been the basis of the tradition of female non-involvement in high politics, and not the tradition itself. Cultural forms originally express the underlying ‘genetically programmed behavioural propensities’. In their turn, such cultural forms maintain – as tradition – an enduring solution to the recurrent problem of assigning of leadership and followership roles. In this connection, Margaret Mead writes about ‘zoomorphizing Man’. ‘Culture in the sense of man's species-characteristic method of meeting problems of maintenance, transformation, and transcendance of the past is an abstraction from our observations on particular cultures.’? This is then another way of looking at how broad political patterns may predictably emerge from the more detailed and programmed patterns of different behaviour of males and females. Some females may indeed penetrate some high councils. They become ministers of governments, ambassadors, and so on. A few may receive assignments which are not ‘feminine’ in their implication, such as Golda Meir, former Israeli Foreign Minister, and Barbara Castle, U.K. Secretary of Productivity and Employment. It is important to know what happens to the ‘backroom boys’ under such circumstances. Do they retire to an even more secluded chamber? Does the lady become ‘one of the boys’?

Until the modern cry of “Give me television and hamburgers, but don’t bother me with the responsibilities of liberty” (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited) is replaced by the cry “Give me liberty, or give me death” (Patrick Henry), freedom will not prevail. Rather, so long as people trade their liberty for pleasures and comfort, the type of social conditioning Huxley warned of will only become more refined and effective as technologies advance and more insight is gained regarding how to predict and control human behaviour. Whether the majority of us will be able to resist this type of manipulation, or whether we will even want to, remains to be seen.

The fading relevance of the nature–nurture argument has recently been revived by the rise of evolutionary psychology. A more sophisticated understanding of Darwinian evolution (survival of the fittest) has led to theories about the possible evolutionary value of some psychiatric disorders. A simplistic view would predict that all mental illnesses with a genetic component should lower survival and ought to die out. ‘Inclusive fitness’, however, assesses the evolutionary value of a characteristic not simply on whether it helps that individual to survive but whether it makes it more likely that their offspring will survive. Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene gives convincing explanations of the evolutionary advantages of group support and altruism when individuals sacrifice themselves for others. A range of speculative hypotheses have since been proposed for the evolutionary advantage of various behaviour differences and mental illnesses. Many of these draw on ethological games-theory (i.e. the benefits of any behaviour can only be understood in the context of the behaviour of other members of the group). So depression might be seen as a safe response to ‘defeat’ in a hierarchical group because it makes the individual withdraw from conflict while they recover. Mania, conversely, with its expansiveness and increased sexual activity, is proposed as a response to success in a hierarchical tussle promoting the propagation of that individual’s genes. Changes in behaviour that look like depression and hypomania can be clearly seen in primates as they move up and down the pecking order that dominates their lives. The habitual isolation and limited need for social contact of individuals with schizophrenia has been rather imaginatively proposed as adaptive to remote habitats with low food supplies (and also a protection against the risk of infectious diseases and epidemics). Evolutionary psychology will undoubtedly increasingly influence psychiatric thinking – many of our disorders fit poorly into a classical ‘medical model’. Already it has helped establish a less either–or approach to the discussion. It is, however, a highly controversial area – not so much around mental disorders but in relation to social behaviour and particularly to gender specific behaviour. Here it is often interpreted as excusing a very male-orientated, exploitative worldview. Luckily that is someone else’s battle.

There's a lot of talk about hacking computers, emails and bank accounts. But we are entering an era of hacking humans. And I'd say the most important fact anybody who is alive today needs to know about the 21 century is that we are becoming hackable animals. It starts by having corporations and governments amass enormous amounts of data about where we go, what we search online and what we buy. But this is all surface information about our behaviour in the world. The big watershed will come once you can start monitoring and surveying what is happening inside your body and inside your brain. Then you can really hack human beings and we're very close to this. When you combine our increasing understanding of biology, especially brain science, with the enormous computing power that machine learning and AI is giving us, what you get from that combination is the ability to hack humans, which means to predict their choices, to understand their feelings, to manipulate them and also to replace them.

Adults who manage the behaviour of angry children brilliantly understand that the first principle is to manage their own response so it is predictable, consistent and empathetic.

In fact, a 2015 study by Youyou, Kosinski and Stillwell showed that, using Facebook likes, a computer model reigned supreme in predicting human behaviour. With ten likes, the model predicted a person’s behaviour more accurately than one of their co-workers. With 150 likes, better than a family member. And with 300 likes, the model knew the person better than their own spouse.

Predictability is the essence of leadership. Unpredictable behaviour can impact the expectations on a leader.

It is very difficult to predict what other humans will do, and considerably more difficult to anticipate the behaviour of aliens.

Let me illustrate this with an example. For someone who works in a busy office, there could be twenty instances a day of needing something that a colleague is using. For any single one of these instances, being low on the personality trait of Agreeableness might make, say, only a 10 per cent difference to the probability of snapping irritably at that colleague. For predicting snapping in any single episode, then, the power of the personality variable is quite weak. However, aggregated across all instances, low Agreeableness will mean an average of one extra bout of irritable behaviour per day, or five per week, or more than two hundred per year. This is a hugely important difference that is bound to have an impact on a person’s life, and yet it stems from what, in the single shot, is only a very slightly raised probability of annoyance. The more we aggregate behaviours across multiple instances, the more important personality as a predictor becomes.

In the course of this book I will be setting out a case, developed from my experience as a manager and consultant, that many of the management approaches that are taken for granted in organisations, and which are taught on management courses and replicated by management consultants, actually get in the way of doing good work and hinder rather than help. They promise what they cannot deliver because they are predicated on ideas of predictability and control and imply powers of intervention on the part of managers and consultants which they cannot possess. People in organisations do not fit into two-by-two grids, and are not parts of wholes. The interweaving of intentions, hopes, aspirations and behaviour of people who are both inside and outside organisations, who behave both rationally and irrationally, will bring about outcomes which no one has predicted and which no one has planned.

I owe Kent Joosten of the Johnson Space Center, NASA, even more gratitude than usual for his contribution to the cephalopod sections. Thanks also to Eric Brown and Simon Bradshaw for reading manuscript drafts. • The idea that squid and other cephalopods may be intelligent is real. A recent reference is New Scientist of 7 June 1997; Cephalopod Behaviour by R. T. Hanlon and J. B. Messenger (Cambridge University Press, 1996) was a valuable source. • The riches available to us from the asteroids and other extraterrestrial resources, and plans to exploit those riches, are real. A good recent survey is Mining the Sky by John S. Lewis (Addison Wesley, 1996). • The probabilistic doomsday prediction called here the “Carter catastrophe” is real. It has been well expressed by John Leslie in The End of the World (Routledge, 1996). • The “Feynman radio” idea of using advanced electromagnetic waves to pick up messages from the future is real. This has actually been attempted, for example by I. Schmidt and R. Newman (Bulletin of the American Physical Society, vol. 25, p. 581, 1979). And the extension of the idea to quantum mechanics (the “transactional interpretation”) is real. See John Cramer, Reviews of Modern Physics, vol. 58, p. 647, 1986. • Cruithne, Earth’s “second Moon,” is real. Its peculiar properties were reported in Nature, vol. 387, p. 685, 1997. • The “quark-nugget” idea of collapsed matter, with its potentially disastrous implications, is real. It was proposed by E. Witten in “Cosmic Separation of Phases,” Physical Review D, vol. 30, p. 272, 1984. • The physics of the possible far future drawn here is real. A classic reference is “Time without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe,” F. Dyson, Review of Modern Physics, vol. 51, p. 447, 1979. • The idea that our universe is one of an evolutionary family is real. A recent variant of the theory has been developed by L. Smolin in his book The Life of the Cosmos (Oxford University Press, 1997). • The notion of vacuum decay is real. It was explored by P. Hut and M. Rees in “How Stable Is Our Vacuum?” Nature, vol. 302, p. 508, 1983. The rest is fiction.