Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

by Brian Klaas

Overview

This “captivating illustration of the follies of trying to model and forecast the unpredictable world” (Financial Times) is both “empowering” (The New Statesman, UK) and “compelling” (New Scientist) as it challenges our most fundamental assumptions—by social scientist and Atlantic writer Brian Klaas.

If you could rewind your life to the very beginning and then press play, would everything turn out the same? Or could making an accidental phone call or missing an exit off the highway change not just your life, but history itself?

In Fluke, myth-shattering social scientist Brian Klaas takes a deep-dive into the phenomenon of random chance and the chaos it can sow, taking aim at most people’s neat and tidy version of reality. The book’s argument is that we willfully ignore a bewildering truth: but for a few small changes, our lives—and our societies—could be radically different.

Offering an entirely new lens, Fluke explores how our world really works, driven by strange interactions and apparently random events. How did one couple’s vacation cause 100,000 people to die? Does our decision to hit the snooze button in the morning radically alter the trajectory of our lives? And has the evolution of humans been inevitable, or are we simply the product of a series of freak accidents?

Drawing on social science, chaos theory, history, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, Klaas provides a brilliantly fresh look at why things happen—all while providing mind-bending lessons on how we can live smarter, be happier, and lead more fulfilling lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668006528
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	01/23/2024
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	9,129
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Brian Klaas grew up in Minnesota, earned his DPhil at Oxford, and is now a professor of global politics at University College London. He is a contributing writer for The Atlantic, host of the award-winning Power Corrupts podcast, and frequent guest on national television. Klaas has conducted field research across the globe and advised major politicians and organizations including NATO and the European Union. You can find him at BrianPKlaas.com and on X @BrianKlaas.

Editorial Reviews

In this philosophical but accessible audiobook, social scientist Brian Klass explains how individual actions fit into the chaotic chain of events that determine what happens in the world. He narrates with pitch and phrasing variations that make these arresting ideas fun to hear. He says the random incidents that can cause world wars or lead to huge life changes are interconnected--but not in the way we think. With our minds wired to think that large events have simple causes, we overlook the cumulative force of numerous random events and the power of the daily decisions we make. This riveting audiobook will make listeners think more realistically about their day-to-day actions and their inescapable place in the web of causes that make the world what it is. T.W. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

MAY 2024 - AudioFile

2023-12-28
In which the course of life becomes a series of dice rolls, each of no small consequence.

The history of humankind, writes Atlantic contributor Klaas, “is just an endless, but futile, struggle to impose order, certainty, and rationality onto a world defined by disorder, chance, and chaos.” Furthermore, our actions have consequences that can’t always be foreseen. The author begins with the example of American statesman Henry Stimson, who stayed in a posh hotel in Kyoto, Japan, in the mid-1920s and 20 years later ordered that the city be spared from an atomic bombing, leaving Hiroshima and Nagasaki to take the blow. What might have happened had Stimson not stayed there? The world, he writes, “seems to seesaw between contingency and convergence.” It is an infinite improbability that we are alive today, and yet here we are, thanks to an asteroid impact (and/or volcano eruptions) that incinerated the dinosaurs and ended the age of reptiles. Against all this, one should never be surprised when Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s black swans come home to roost. “Our lives are frequently disrupted by large social shocks such as financial crises, pandemics, and wars,” Klaas notes, and whenever we try to control the complex systems that drive them, we usually wind up on the losing side of the enterprise. Contingency rules, and, as the author sagely notes, we should congratulate ourselves less heartily for success and kick ourselves less savagely for failure. Yet in a world of chance, we still have an effect: “What you do matters. But it also matters that it’s you, and not somebody else, who’s doing it.” The book can provoke existential unease, but it also helps explain the cockamamie nature of the way things are, and it’s an always-interesting read.

A handy user’s manual to a surprising, improbable, “infinitely complex” world.

Kirkus Reviews

“Fluke is full of examples of mind-boggling randomness...There’s something empowering about feeling every moment of your life could change the world.”
—The New Statesman

“Fluke is provocative and compelling, bringing the complex relationship between order and chaos vividly alive. There is every chance you will love it.”
—New Scientist

“Klaas poses the question, ‘If you could rewind your life to the very beginning and then press play, would everything turn out the same?’....He finds his answers in a multi-disciplinary survey of political science, philosophy, economics, evolutionary biology, geology and more, synthesizing and juxtaposing winningly...Fluke is engagingly written and Klaas has a nice way of broadening out anecdotes to make wider points....Some of these stories are quite gripping.”
—The Arts Desk

“The book can provoke existential unease, but it also helps explain the cockamamie nature of the way things are, and it’s an always-interesting read. A handy user’s manual to a surprising, improbable, ‘infinitely complex’ world.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“At this book’s fascinating core is the idea that all of our actions count because of the web of connectivity that envelops us. Brian Klaas is masterful in surfacing stories of history upended on a whim.”
—Jonah Berger, New York Times bestselling author of Contagious

“Fluke is the intellectual equivalent of a slap across the face...Klaas’s beautifully written application of chaos theory to human experience won’t just shift your paradigm, it’ll detonate it.”
—Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“Klaas explores how seemingly inconsequential actions have life-changing consequences. This utterly captivating book will make you rethink everything you have ever done.”
—Sabine Hossenfelder, physicist and New York Times bestselling author of Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions

“A brilliant meditation on the eternal clash between chaos and order, and determinism and freedom. Klaas grapples with some of the most difficult, mind-bending questions of our time—or any time—[and] makes these heady topics a blast to read.”
—Scott Patterson, New York Times bestselling author of Chaos Kings and The Quants

“Consistently gripping—dazzling in its sweep and thrillingly brain-twisting in its arguments.”
—Tom Holland, author of Rubicon and Persian Fire

“Klaas calls attention to the way chance redirects our lives and spins us into new orbits, showing how we can be energized by all of the jostling....A must read!”
—Maya Shankar, founder of the White House Social and Behavior Sciences Team and creator of the podcast, A Slight Change of Plans

From the Publisher