Reality is created out of confusion and contradiction

H/T Althouse

From Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami.

Reality is created out of confusion and contradiction, and if you exclude those elements, you’re no longer talking about reality. You might think that—by following language and a logic that appears consistent—you’re able to exclude that aspect of reality, but it will always be lying in wait for you, ready to take its revenge.

Appeals to me. I am doing a fair amount of work right now around the theory and practice of forecasting. One of the key issues is handling the implications of probabilistic events that are known will happen but in an unknowable time frame or in a time frame much longer than can be normally accommodated.

You can model and you can be logical and consistent but reality is always lying in wait to subvert the forecast. Confusion and contradiction always our clean, sterile and unreal modeled assumptions.