FBXL Social

It's funny -- that "past performance is not indicative of future returns" is a common bit of legalese used to say "hey don't just assume because something went up yesterday it'll go up today", but in reality we've based our entire modernist epistemology on the idea that past performance is in fact indicative of future returns. That's the fundamental concept behind science and technology. The idea that you can measure a thing, build a model, then use the model to predict the future specifically enough to design stuff that's super complicated but not only works on paper but in the real world (like the CPUs we're all using that perform billions of instructions every second of every minute of every hour of every day) is not the way previous humans thought.

It's a revolutionary idea and it's right -- but not entirely. We know that even scientifically we have to set within our models the reality that we can't predict things perfectly, and often we can't even measure things perfectly or they get predictably unpredictable. Which shows that modernist rationalism and empiricism is just one superposed truth among many.