Essay 6: Prediction Addiction
This is the second essay in our “artifact series” examining how modernity managed to domesticate everyday life. In this project, we’re exploring the limits of contemporary fundraising and what it will take to recover the power of wild generosity. To learn more about the project, visit here.
In our previous essay, we remembered Truman Burbank, a man living inside a system so well-designed that the possibility of captivity never occurred to him. His world promised safety in exchange for action. It was legible, managed, and contained. And it worked remarkably well, precisely because it eliminated the conditions that would have required him to act.
But Truman’s world did not build itself. It required specific innovations in how humans understood themselves, related to one another, and managed uncertainty. These innovations are what we’re calling artifacts: formative expressions of the modern social imaginary that, in the real world, organize our daily lives. They sit upstream of the default settings we examined in the first series. These artifacts help to explain why legibility feels responsible, why management feels necessary, and why containment feels prudent. They are the machinery that makes domestication feel like care.
The first artifact we will consider is Laplace’s demon.
The Thought Experiment
In 1814, Pierre-Simon Laplace, the French mathematician and physicist sometimes called the father of scientific determinism, offered what became the most influential image of the mechanistic worldview. Laplace imagined an intelligence vast enough to know the position and momentum of every particle in the universe at a single moment. For such a mind, he argued, nothing would remain uncertain. The future could be calculated with perfect precision. The universe would reveal itself not as mystery but as equation.
This was not simply a thought experiment about physics. It was a claim about the nature of reality itself. If the universe operated according to strict mechanical laws, if every effect had a calculable cause, then uncertainty was not a permanent feature of the world but a temporary problem of incomplete information.
Before Laplace’s demon was imaginable, the world had been understood differently. Nature acted, resisted, surprised. Rivers flooded without warning. Weather shifted unpredictably. Bodies healed or failed in ways that defied explanation. Life required interpretation, judgment, and response. Forecasting existed, but it was always provisional and always carried risk. The world could act back.
The thought experiment promised something different: a world rendered passive; a universe that did not initiate; a reality that simply unfolded according to principles that could, in theory, be fully known.
Laplace’s demon did not need to be real to be powerful. It only needed to be imaginable. Once people could conceive of a universe where everything was knowable in principle, that possibility quietly became a moral expectation. If perfect knowledge was possible, then responsible people would pursue it. If uncertainty could be reduced, then leaving it unaddressed was negligence. Acting without sufficient data began to look not courageous but careless.
Scientific determinism did not remain confined to laboratories. It migrated into governance, medicine, finance, and management. Institutions began to assume that, with enough information, outcomes should be predictable. Leaders were judged by their foresight; systems evaluated by their ability to eliminate surprise.
In this way, Laplace’s demon became common sense. Acting without predictive justification looked primitive. Exposure to uncertainty looked avoidable. The aspiration to control did not feel oppressive; it felt responsible.
Modernity did not wake up one morning and declare war on uncertainty. It adopted an image of the world that made uncertainty look temporary, nothing more than an impediment to be overcome with the help of more data. Laplace’s demon was not a tyrant; it was a tutor. It taught us to see unpredictability not as a feature of being alive but as evidence that we did not have enough information. And, once that belief settled into common sense, all our systems began to organize around it. We built institutions that assume predictability is achievable, and we began to measure progress by proximity to such an ideal.
The Subtraction Story
Laplace’s thought experiment tells a subtraction story — what some have referred to as the story of predict and control. The story is simple: uncertainty is not a permanent feature of human life but a temporary problem. With enough data, enough expertise, enough planning, the future can be known. What we cannot predict, we simply do not yet understand. Surprise is not inevitable; it is a failure of preparation.
The story claims that we have subtracted what earlier people endured unnecessarily: superstition, fate, disorder, the unpredictable behavior of nature and other humans. What remains, we are told, is a clearer, safer, more rational world where fewer people need to act without guarantees and fewer decisions require exposure.
But what gets subtracted is not simply uncertainty. What gets subtracted is the expectation that humans will sometimes need to act without knowing how things will end — the burden of initiative, the willingness to begin something that cannot be justified in advance, the capacity to stand exposed.
And what gets installed in its place are systems designed to absorb that burden upstream: forecasting models, risk assessments, planning processes, expert consultations, data requirements. These are not neutral tools. They are infrastructures that relocate responsibility away from persons and into procedures. Instead of learning to live with the state of not-knowing, we build processes designed to eliminate it. Instead of bearing the risk of being wrong in public, we transfer that risk to systems that promise predictive cover.
When predict and control becomes the standard of responsibility, uncertainty stops being a condition of what it means to be alive and becomes a defect to correct. Acting without guarantees stops looking courageous and starts looking irresponsible. Foresight becomes the measure of competence. When predict and control becomes the measure of responsibility, acting without guarantees doesn’t look like courage; it looks like negligence.
When this logic settles in, the burden of acting shifts. The weight of what we don’t know shifts from persons to systems. And, because these systems promise protection, exposure itself begins to feel avoidable, not as a permanent feature of acting in the presence of others, but as a design flaw that better planning could have prevented.
Once that shift occurs, entire sectors can remain active, productive, and morally serious while quietly losing the capacity that once made them human.
The Addiction
Margaret Heffernan shows us what happens when the thought experiment’s promise outlives its usefulness. In Uncharted, she argues that our capacity to predict has plateaued. We have reached the limits of what forecasting can deliver. Yet institutions have doubled down on it anyway. Not because it works better, but because it comforts more.
Heffernan names this condition plainly: prediction addiction. We cling to forecasts not because they deliver accuracy but because they offer reassurance. They create the appearance of competence, allow leaders to seem decisive without exposing themselves to unmodeled risk, and turn not-knowing into a data problem rather than a human condition. The more uncertain the environment becomes, the more desperately we reach for predictive tools not because they are effective, but because they are familiar.
Heffernan identifies three chronic problems built into forecasting. Forecasts are incomplete because reality exceeds any model; no matter how sophisticated our tools become, complex systems generate outcomes that models cannot anticipate. Forecasts are ideological because they encode assumptions about what matters and what futures are worth considering; they determine in advance which variables count as risk and which possibilities deserve attention. And forecasts are self-interested because entire industries profit from selling certainty to people desperate to buy it; consultants, software vendors, and experts build careers on the promise that better data will finally deliver the illusion Laplace’s demon promised.
But the deeper issue is not their inaccuracy. It is their function. Forecasts relocate responsibility. When a plan fails, no person acted wrongly; the data changed — the model was insufficient. This offers procedural innocence, shielding individuals from the consequences of standing behind a decision when outcomes cannot be secured. The addiction persists not because prediction works, but because it distributes exposure.
The cost is significant. We do not eliminate uncertainty. We eliminate our tolerance for it. We build systems optimized for control that become brittle when conditions shift. We train people to wait for clarity that will not arrive, to defer action until prediction provides cover. Over time, organizations lose familiarity with acting when outcomes cannot be guaranteed. The capacity atrophies — not the capacity to work hard or gather information, but the capacity to begin when the ground is uncertain and to take responsibility for initiating rather than implementing.
Heffernan shows that predict and control persists because it serves interests that have nothing to do with accuracy. It serves industries built on selling illusions. It serves leaders who need to appear decisive without deciding. It serves professionals who can point to process when outcomes fail. And, in serving these interests, it trains entire organizations out of the capacity to act when forecasting proves impossible.
What Is Lost
Laplace’s demon does not eliminate activity and the busyness of everyday life. It eliminates the need to act, to take initiative, to risk being wrong.
When outcomes must be justified by data before decisions can be made, action becomes suspect. The thought experiment’s promise is that, with enough information, no one should have to begin something whose consequences cannot be modeled. Initiative without predictive cover stops looking like courage and starts looking like negligence.
When exposure disappears, so does a certain kind of presence. Acting under uncertainty requires attention, responsiveness, relational sensitivity. It demands that we notice others and allow ourselves to be affected by them. The demon’s logic encourages distance, training us to trust models more than encounters, and probabilities more than persons.
Our addiction does not prohibit action. It makes it feel unnecessary. Why take a chance if the model is incomplete? Why risk it if the forecast isn’t accurate? Safety becomes indistinguishable from paralysis.
Laplace’s demon promised a world without risk. And, in that world, avoiding exposure feels not just safe but responsible. This is the deeper subtraction: not uncertainty itself, which never disappears. What disappears is the willingness to bear it personally. Why take a chance?
- Jason Lewis, Partner & Chief Innovation Officer at Seed
Taming the Gift is a collaboration with Seed, born of a shared commitment to understanding the limits of contemporary fundraising and to reimagining practices that activate cultures of wild generosity.