Some wonder, how can people like Donald Trump be elected? Others wonder how can Hillary Clinton or Bush be elected? How can black swans just 'happen'? How can collapses happen, and economic miracles as it were? How can so much, that we take for granted, as simply "unpredictable", even happen at all, when some outcomes seem so certain and others, seem so unlikely? I have a hypothesis: Slow-wave hysteresis. Hysteresis may be described as: A system rapidly switching. The problem with this notion is that what is 'rapid' at one time scale, is slow at another. In studies of economics, one of the driving factors that made british imperialism successful was rapid industrialization. For other nations it was the switch from coal to oil. A big part of this is the realization that macro-variables had more affect on success than strategy or tactics. Others have said it, and it appears true, that one of the reasons the axis lost in ww2 was simply because it had lower production than the allies. The idea that ultimately raw numbers play a bigger role in directing major events, than even carefully laid out strategy, is actually an important one to note. Because if this is true it suggests that most strategy, on a large scale, is only a marginal advantage over the space of *any other strategies at all*. If we track for example, a nations economic policies, what this would look like, is a meandering path of policy decisions, that look informed from the outside, but who's originator's reasons are mostly post-facto justifications. All things being equal, these decisions even out, into a grey warm cloud of entropy, leading in the short span, somewhere, but in the long run nowhere. So if explicit policies aren't what is driving the whole system, leading to specific events in history, what is? The macro variables I mentioned. They can be anything. GDP. Population growth. Farmland percentage. We can even 'zoom in' to finer grained variables, like the profit growth year-over-year of major weapons manufacturers, their percentage of their labor pool that are union, vs the "fractionation" of their workforce. Fractionation is how evenly the demographic groups of a workforce are represented. One example is amazon using racial quotas to to reduce the risk of labor movements forming by promoting divisions along racial lines. By ignoring *events*, we remove them as binary variables that require sub-analysis and repeated looping breakdowns of scenarios, anticipation models, and scenarios and modes deriving from *those*, ad infinitum. Instead we treat events as *probabilities* flowing from the environment of macro variables. This is kinda hand wavy and seems overly jargon prone. Unfortunately I have more jargon for you. Whats hysteresis have to do with any of it though? Decisions, be they at the individual level, or all the way up to the national level are in consideration here. If most of these decisions 'even out the potential effects and outcome' over time, then all that leaves is the influence of the macro variables. But how exactly do they lead to major, specific events and outcomes? The theory goes that most specific decisions by individuals, organizations, and nations, are made in an environment with higher uncertainty than certainty. The fact we're not oracles, almost guarantees this. In the information environment to make good decisions, there is a *far vaster sea* of unknowns, than explicit knowns. So the biases in the collection methods, how we *get* our information and put it in context, have a *multiplying* effect on coefficients that act a dampeners of outcome *scale*, relative to others in the information market of society. In short, most strategies are bad because they don't know what macro variables to focus on, and there are far more macro variables than there is the means to analyze them or strategize them. Most decisions are marginal, because the information we have and the ability to prioritize it isn't there. Most goals and outcomes are poorly defined relative to how things will change in the future. The number of *possible* actions we can take at any moment are comparatively finite to the number of resources and variables we can focus on. The bottleneck is the transition between the known environment variables and how they'll change in the future. Modelling attempts to tell us this, but because we model in relation to decisions, and we have no good way to really tell if the decision and policies available have a high correlation to the variables we're trying toaeffect, the result is that most decisions "do this/don't do this", "select A/select B" are *themselves* marginal *from the outset*, regardless of which of the two or limited choices is selected. Selecting strategic focus from the *apparent* available decisions/actions, is putting the map before the exploration (I didn't care to employ overused cart-horse memes here). Decisions-as-driver are like a local maxima in effectiveness. Famously, despite my general disgust for him, Stalin once said "quantity has a quality all its own", and he was correct. Macro variables matter more than minutiae. But this doesn't answer the question of how these drive events? All things being equal, if the unknowns and uncertainty in a system cause *virtually all* decisions to be marginal, then over the coarse of an individual's, organization's, or nation's lifespan, these decisions will 'even out' the possible outcomes, leaving what? The major variables of the entity being analyzed. Typically when doing analysis, we look at the events, hard real and *known* scenarios, factors and variables that we can get an *actual* handle on, and discard the what-ifs until we have a good approximation of what *is* known. Only then do we extrapolate. In this way it is very much a manner of taking a single entity and zooming-in on the immediate local factors that affect them. But like our sub-optimal decisions trap, this is extrapolating from the unknown, first principles which are not guaranteed or certain. In short, it is again assuming decisions drive macro variables, and not the other way around. HOW EVENTS ARE DRIVEN BY LARGE SCALE VARIABLES *relative to complex systems with many factors*. When we track a variable, ultimately what we are really asking is a set of simple questions: 1. whats its quantity now? 2. what was its quantity in the past? 3. what will it be in the future? Typically the past and the present tell us something about the future, the general direction or trend, but this is by no means a guarantee. Vulgar reality and individual events seem to have outsized affect on all sorts of variables we're interested in, from risk of war, to economic output, to the value of a barrel of oil. And from this perspective, nothing appears predictable in a *reliable* manner. After years of looking, the best analysts I've found, rarely break even on their predictions. The best of them are only occasionally beating a coin flip. Another way to say it is, half the time, they're dead wrong. Simultaneously, I have found the **truly great** analysts over the years don't predict specific events (unless they're *experts* in the given field). No. What I have found for predicting sets of *plausible* and *possible* scenarios, has always derived from analysts who focus on *the variables* and macrotrends. The generalists are better oracles than the specialists. OK, BUT WHY? If we track these macro variables, you will notice a picture forms: All of them follow cycles that go up and down in value, like a wave. Some of them will look regular, like declines and increases in average daily temperatures, others will be like tsunamis, increasing far faster than they decrease, like bitcoin's price. While others, only show their scale and speed when looked at on a large scale, like the population explosion that has happened since the 1800s. This is what is truly meant by "hysteresis". If you were an immortal, as ridiculous as the premise is, having lived 10 million years, the population change from the year 1800 to the year 2022, would be merely a curious blip of an unknown phenomenon, compared to some of the other events and even disasters you had lived through and witnessed. It might be a footnote in the history books of a god. "Here was for an instant in time, a race of bipedal creatures who built odd assortments of concrete and glass mountains. Their biomass dominated half the planet before they left." Supposing you didn't blink, and miss it. The importance of it would be irrelevant. On the otherhand, on human timescales, a guy wonders if his paycheck will come in time to pay his heating bill. ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING, WHAT? In electrical engineering, when a switch switches, it's actually not a discrete event. If measured by an oscilloscope, the current will show you a "rising" or "falling" edge on the scope, depending on whether or not the device is switching 'on' or 'off'. This can also be applied to macro variables, like population, price action, if a group of people are sufficiently motivated to go out to vote, etc. If we tracked any of this data in real time, sufficiently fine-grained, we would see what? A rising or falling edge on the graph. Congratulations, for whatever data we keep track of, this is the most basic changes possible in it. It is the "quantum" of action that is actually measurable without uncertainty. If we could *measure uncertainty*, then we could increase the frequency of our data samples/collection, to see a finer-grained, shorter-time-line of changes in any variable. But many variables affect many other variables, and the future is by definition uncertain. The result then is that measuring the *chance* of a change at this level, is going to continence the possibility that the outcome is wrong. COHERENCE You ever watch a pebble fall in a pond in slow motion? Or zoom in from a monthly stock chart to a daily stock chart? You'll immediately see that there are many waves at many different scales, cycles within cycles. Trends within trends. Suppose that macro variables inform the ultimate outcome or *significant bulk* of *most* decisions in any given environment (regardless of the strategy or decisions in question). If this is true, then I propose, that the leading and falling edges of these variables, *when they align*, works not simply to bias the outcomes of the decision environment further, but to *massively amplify* those outcomes, greatly shrinking the ratio of the possible outcome space to the possible decision space. In short, the circumstances we live in, dictate what is even practically possible. Fortune rules the world. And when the leading and falling edges of these supercycles cohere close enough, the only question is, not what can we do, but what will be the outcome, almost every time, *regardless* of what we do? This is the realm of the black swans, events huge, important, unpredictable, seemingly certain, and usually negative in impact to a great number of people. But critically, that this does not just apply to coherent trends, or supercycles--no. Instead that this effect applies to supercycles AND to microcycles. Our decision making, and our belief in the impact of our decisions, is then put in the backseat, compared to the influence of our environment. All policy, all decision, becomes retrospective, and backsplaination, to accept the options we are handed as a species. Everything is reduced to rationalization for choices that don't matter in the "grand scheme of things." If this hypothesis has any predictive power, then it should mean policies and strategies that directly affect macro variables, should have the biggest impact on large scale risk, and trends. But theres another darker conclusion here: It implies there are limits to our ability to respond to danger and large scale risk, both in the long-term and in the short term (black swans)--the ability to respond at all. That like a bird being eaten by a boa, some circumstances are so restrictive, so inevitable, that the outcome is guaranteed despite any efforts to change them, or change the macro and micro trends. For example, the heat death of the universe. A 20 mile comet we discover three days before it hits because it happens to come from the near-side of the sun where we'd never see it coming until it was too late. The occasional spill of hot coffee on our laps while driving to work. Some things are impossible to predict or stop. Here be dragons, the dead ends of business ventures, industry, lives, nations, species, and good pairs of pants. PREDICTING THE UNFORESEEN With this, we can start to focus on macros instead of analysis where we focus on specific known entities, and scenarios, and try to plot plausible routes from one to another. Analysis then boils down to *what is possible within their environment*. If all macros point to an environment where aggression *must* increase, and deescalation becomes improbable, that aggression as one such macro, represented by a set of options, *see the total option and decision space SHRINK**, whether those policy decisions are drastic (world war) or moderate (proxy fighting). We can say with some certainty "xyz WONT happen". There will be no peace in ukraine. That is a general statement, that typically wouldn't be informative, or very helpful, accept in regular analysis. But by going by the macros, we can actually verify the truth of the more general statement without taking an otherwise expensive deep dive into scenario planning and constraint dynamics of political leadership or economic factions. The trends simply make it a foregone conclusion. From there we can take what were otherwise squabbling sets of experts, bitterly divided on some issue, all of which have **very good reasons** for why they believe their own conclusions, and we can decide whether "threats of world war 3 aren't a legitimate concern" and say *which* side of these experts are likely correct PRECISELY because we have now entered the realm, not of what is *probable*, but what is *possible* in terms of the *set of outcomes* given the *circumstances*, what is *probable* as *trends* (e.x. more international hostility) given the driving variables. Better still (or worse depending on how you see it), from this vantage, the awareness of options, and their interaction with macro variables, are a self-reinforcing loop, interacting to assure x leads to y, and y leads to x. The result is a great reduction of the scenarios and entities and factors we need to consider. It is sufficient to say "what can people do (options) in these circumstances (macro variables)? What context or trends are the dominating factor in this environment?" Because ultimately that is what is gonna decide what strategies are going to be most effective, rather than marginal and reactionary and justified after-the-fact, or waffled and meandered through to some marginal success short term. As zero hedge likes to say, on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. While I don't know if that is an absolute prognosis, like a law of nature, on the short term, it is for that very reason every would-be oracle parenthetically hedges their bets with visions of some distant future, and for the most part, no serious date. The future we seek to obtain or avoid exists at a year, month, or day, whose numbers are unknown. Like putting "tomorrow" in quotes, we can't know the future, but we can come to know 'the shape of things to come.'