PDQ Mobile wrote:We are a little less difficult than deliberately influencing the weather or ocean currents methinks!
I'd say the opposite - the weather and ocean currents are bound by mechanical laws, although the operation of those laws is so complex as to be practically impossible to predict sufficiently well to manipulate. People, however, are capable of making quite unpredictable decisions and so their actions are even more difficult to forecast.
So a random choice gives a divided result? I guess so.
Necessarily. If there really are only two possible outcomes and the process is random, over a large enough number of events the numbers of each outcome will approach 50/50. E.g. tossing a coin many times will generate approx 50% heads and 50% tails.
In elections, votes guided by ideology, sectional interests or clear benefits will be non-random. However where a voter is trying to assess the relative benefits of two possible courses where the factors involved become too complex to realistically make a judgement (such as complex technicalities of economic policy) I suspect the outcomes do approach being random.
In elections there are of course actually at least three options - to vote either way if two candidates/choices, and to not vote.
However the choice does become random if it is not well understood or is too complex, time consuming and confusing to understand?
Exactly. A society with fewer ideological divisions (due to a strong social consensus) and less sectarianism (again, strong consensus) is more likely to be left with such problems.
"Too complex to be calculable" Or perhaps better said; made too complex to be calculable.
Just by their nature too complex. E.g. the possible repercussions of the UK leaving or remaining in the EU are extremely wide-ranging, not because anyone made them so on purpose but because it could potentially affect a lot of things.
The people who write alternative history have great fun suggesting all sorts of wide-reaching possible outcomes had various events gone differently. I read one speculating what might have happened if the upper Thames had not cut through the chalk at Goring but formed a lake to the south-west of Oxford and then joined the upper reaches of the Ouse, leaving a much smaller river, really a continuation of the Kennet, flowing roughly where the lower Thames does and forming a much smaller estuary. Would London still have developed, on a smaller river less passable to shipping? Would the capital being located in York or Winchester have led to various wars having different outcomes?
