The Norm Chronicles Read Free

of the queue for the ice cream, which in turn depends on everyone in it, or it might depend on every one of those things – in all, an infinitely intricate and improbable spaghetti of causes, events and people. You, reading this word in this book at whatever time and place you happen to be, took an absurd quantity of cause and effect – rightback to the beginning of everything, if you must. Which is another way of saying that no one knows the future. Life is too complicated.
    And yet you might not be all that surprised if a crash like that really happened – if not to you, then to someone. We know for sure that countless things – unlikely or not – will happen somewhere to someone, as they must. More than that, we know that they will often happen in strange and predictable patterns. Fatal falls from ladders among the approximately 21 million men in England and Wales in the five years to 2010 were uncannily consistent, numbering 42, 54, 56, 53 and 47. For all the chance particulars that apply to any individual among 21 million individuals, the numbers are amazingly, fiendishly stable – unlike the ladders. 3 Some calculating God, painting fate by numbers up in the clouds, orders another splash of red: ‘Hey, you in the dungarees, we’re short this month.’
    We know there will be accidents and incidents, and we often know what kind and how many – to the extent that we can predict pretty well how many people will be murdered in London by 28 July next year, and even how many murders there are likely to be on one day (which we did – in Chapter 22 , on crime). Up close, life can appear chaotic. Every murder is unique and unpredictable, every fall and crash laced with infinite chance. Seen from above, people often move in patterns with spooky regularity.
    This is the great puzzle about danger: that a million stories describe it, feelings inform it, and a million occasions conspire for or against every incident – and yet there are a relatively consistent number. Every cancer begins with a freak cellular mutation, and yet a fairly steady one-third of people will get one. * It is one of life’s odder facts, this order amid disorder, the natural and spontaneous emergence of shape – persistent and predictable – even as everyone does their own thing.
    So, from above, the course of human destiny is often clear. Toindividuals below, it is a maze of stories. It is as if there are two forces at the same time: one at the big scale pulling towards certainty, the other pushing individuals towards uncertainty. There’s a word to describe this balance between the patterns of populations and the stumbling of a single soul, a word first used in its modern sense only a few hundred years ago: probability.
    Probability – at least one version – begins with counting past events, such as ‘20 per cent of men who died in recent years, died from heart disease’. It then uses this to predict a pattern. ‘About 20 per cent will die from heart disease in future.’ But then it goes a step further: from that general prediction it gives odds for what will happen to individuals. ‘The risk or chance that the average person will eventually die from heart disease is therefore also 20 per cent, or one in five for a man, about 14 per cent or one in seven for a woman.’ Thus it moves from past to future, from the mass to the individual.
    Probability is magical, a brilliant concept. It yokes together our two world-views, the two faces of risk: the orderly view of whole populations seen in numbers from above and the sometimes lonely view in the maze of stories below. It embraces all of us individuals in aggregated data. Today people use probability to help make decisions about everything from the weather to money or the chance of being burgled, the risks from mobile phones, sausages or tsunamis. It touches our hopes and fears at every turn. The news is full of it, and no wonder – it seems to offer a hold on the future. Which is why it is