A few tweets on why nothing lasts forever and why it's important to be prepared for emergencies of the worst kind...

If you did study Maths in classes XI and XIIth (ISc, Junior College etc.), you must have studied the principle of induction. If you did, good. If you didn't, I will explain it in the next few tweets.

But before I do that let me talk about this book I read a few years back and loved. It's clled. Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly. This is an Irish crime fiction book written by @adrianmckinty . The lead character in this book is named Detective Sean Duffy.

Sean Duffy says: “I went out to the BMW and checked underneath it for bombs. No bombs but I’d always keep checking. As a student I’d listened to an aged Bertrand Russell’s thoughts on the fate of turkeys being fattened for Christmas...

...the turkeys subscribed to the philosophy of inductivist reasoning and didn’t see doomsday coming. I will.”

What is this turkey business? I will come to that.
But before that let's define inductivist reasoning. For this I refer to a book titled Everything and More-A Compact History of Infinity by the legendary American writer David Foster Wallace.

Wallace discusses the principle of induction: “The principle of induction states that if something x has happened in certain particular circumstances n times in the past, we are justified in believing that the same circumstances will produce x on the (n+1)th occasion.”

In simple English, if something has happened for a while, we keep assuming it will keep happening in the days to come. The future will be like the present is the assumption.

Wallace then goes on to say that the principle of induction is merely an abstraction from experience. He then goes on to give the example of Mr Chicken (you can replace it with Mr Turkey and come up with what Inspector Duffy was talking about).

As Wallace writes: “There were four chickens in a wire coop of the garage, the brightest of whom was called Mr Chicken. Every morning, the farm’s hired man’s appearance in the coop area with a certain burlap sack caused Mr Chicken to get excited and start doing warmup-pecks...

...at the ground, because he knew it was feeding time. It was always around the same time t every morning, and Mr Chicken had figured out, (man + sack) = food, and thus was confidently doing his warmup-pecks on that last Sunday morning...

... when the hired man suddenly reached out and grabbed Mr Chicken and in one smooth motion wrung his neck and put him in the burlap sack and bore him off to the kitchen.”

So, what happened here? The chickens in the coop received food at a certain point of time every day. This led them to believe that the future will continue to be like the past and every day they will continue to receive food.

As Wallace puts it: “The conclusion, abstract as it is, seems inescapable: what justifies our confidence in the Principle of Induction is that it has always worked so well in the past, at least up to now.”

This is a concept that Nassim Nicholas Taleb also explains his book Anti Fragile: “A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys “with increased statistical confidence.”...

....The butcher will keep feeding the turkey until a few days before thanksgiving. Then comes that day when it is really not a very good idea to be a turkey. So, with the butcher surprising it, the turkey will have a revision of belief-right when its confidence in the statement..

...that the butcher loves turkeys is maximal … the key here is such a surprise will be a Black Swan event; but just for the turkey, not for the butcher.”

In that sense, we are all chickens or turkeys in the journey of life, who like to assume that if things are good, they will continue to be good.
And then something happens and everything starts to go haywire and we aren't prepared for it. That's life. And it's never fair.