"Our minds are not quite designed to understand how the world works, but, rather, to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny."

I'm in the middle of reading the book Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I like him. He's a curmudgeonly writer with some interesting takes on modern life as seen through the eyes of an options trader.

One of the good points that he makes is that certain successes (by people in business) are seen as talent or skill when really they're just in the middle of a hot business cycle (like a lot of the 90's start-ups and people who bought IPOs at that time). That apparently successful person may be broke the next year or at the bottom of the cycle. So what I like is the point that you always have to look at long cycles.

What I disagree with is his theory that it's all random. As a person who has studied various systems of divination, especially astrology, I don't think anything is random. The law of karma is the opposite of randomness.

"A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point."

I like the quote from his book above. Astrologers as well as the mainstream media do a lot of looking at issues in hindsight and extrapolating that the correct answer surely should have been known from the information at hand when, in truth, we have a lot more information in the present about a situation than in the past. The other side of the discussion, which is my point of view, is that we do have a good deal of information (i.e. astrology, tarot and other means of divination) that are not valued by many and therefore ignored.