Events are probabilistic. According to one tradition, events in the world were seen to be deterministic, in the sense that if we had complete information about all the variables in the present system state then we would be able to predict the future exactly. Now it is widely recognized that there is an irreducible randomness about events; even if knowledge were perfect still randomness would kick in, and we would be surprised; our predictions would be unfounded. Experts, who might be researchers, business or economic forecasters, psephologists predicting elections, physicists the position and momentum of particles, marketers predicting demand for their products, or medical researchers predicting the success of certain drugs or surgical procedures, assign probabilities to possible futures, using bell shaped (normal or Gaussian) distributions, not to make exact predictions, but to predict a range of possibilities, often accurately and sometimes not. The point to remember is that great statistical accuracy can be attached to events in aggregate, but not to individual events. Events in aggregate may fall within very specific range but individual events may fall anywhere within the range. Figure 3 Slide 4 talks about evolution and change. Evolution is different from change in the sense that evolution depends on the process of natural selection (Darwinian natural selection) plus random mutations. Those are the primary sources of evolution, randomness mutations and natural selection. The idea of natural selection has been carried over I think falsely, into social systems. Figure 4 Natural selection didn’t mean survival of the fittest when Darwin talked about it. Natural selection led to more successful production by species that were fitted to the environment than those species that were not fitted to the environment. And this idea of survival of the fittest which I think is a false idea, has been carried over to the idea that competition in itself make things better and the idea that should pursue competitive advantage. People seem to take that for granted in business courses. Change simply means that one system state is different from another and also I outlined in Slide 4 is different types of systems.
Events are probabilistic. According to one tradition, events in the world were seen to be deterministic, in the sense that if we had complete information about all the variables in the present system state then we would be able to predict the future exactly. Now it is widely recognized that there is an irreducible randomness about events; even if knowledge were perfect still randomness would kick in, and we would be surprised; our predictions would be unfounded. Experts, who might be researchers, business or economic forecasters, psephologists predicting elections, physicists the position and momentum of particles, marketers predicting demand for their products, or medical researchers predicting the success of certain drugs or surgical procedures, assign probabilities to possible futures, using bell shaped (normal or Gaussian) distributions, not to make exact predictions, but to predict a range of possibilities, often accurately and sometimes not. The point to remember is that great statistical accuracy can be attached to events in aggregate, but not to individual events. Events in aggregate may fall within very specific range but individual events may fall anywhere within the range. Figure 3 Slide 4 talks about evolution and change. Evolution is different from change in the sense that evolution depends on the process of natural selection (Darwinian natural selection) plus random mutations. Those are the primary sources of evolution, randomness mutations and natural selection. The idea of natural selection has been carried over I think falsely, into social systems. Figure 4 Natural selection didn’t mean survival of the fittest when Darwin talked about it. Natural selection led to more successful production by species that were fitted to the environment than those species that were not fitted to the environment. And this idea of survival of the fittest which I think is a false idea, has been carried over to the idea that competition in itself make things better and the idea that should pursue competitive advantage. People seem to take that for granted in business courses. Change simply means that one system state is different from another and also I outlined in Slide 4 is different types of systems.
original_notes%20for%20project%20managers%20revisedl%20dec%202017.docx