TITLE: Strange Symmetry
SUBTITLE: Do not miss the ouroboros for its teeth.
AUTHOR: Peter Banks
DATE: 2025-03-29
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/strange-symmetry
SOURCE: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/strange-symmetry

Throughout Frank Herbert's "Dune" series, the theme of prediction is central. The very fabric of the civilization he presents is built on "prescience." Strange, monstrous beings known as Guild Navigators guide humanity's ships through the void of space, using their ability to predict the future to shape it into something else. The central characters, Paul and Leto, are both extremely gifted oracles, cursed with the knowledge of the future and burdened with helping Humanity escape the tyranny of prediction.

I doubt that Frank Herbert knew how powerful the allegory he created was. But we ourselves inhabit a universe where prescience defines our lives. Our ability to predict the future is both one of our most powerful and misunderstood abilities. Much of what we have—and may have—is predicated on it, and most of our predictions say more about us than about reality.

I'm going to drop the punchline right here: understanding and prediction have a strange symmetry. Recognizing this allows you to see more clearly that the whole purpose of understanding is prediction. 

If you are a young man between the ages of 16 and 35, there's a strong chance you've been exposed to some version of the alternative history space. It encompasses a huge collection of YouTubers—from AlternateHistoryHub to WhatIfAltHist1—all of whom craft narratives around a relatively basic premise: choose an event in history, alter that event, and describe a new history with that change. Not uncommonly, something as simple as a single person dying or a war being won will butterfly chaotically into a new world where France is now the master of the 19th century and England is nothing but a second-rate power. 

They are essentially benign entertainment, one of countless activities we Zoomers use to fill the screaming void of silence which is our minds. But I want to invite you to engage in this task with me and imagine your own alternative history scenario.

Suppose that on a dark and stormy night somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, by chance, a lightning bolt struck the Santa Maria in 1492, sinking Columbus and forcing La Niña and La Pinta to turn back. How would history have changed?

To those brave few with the fortitude to face your thoughts, take a moment to collect the scraps into something concrete. I will hazard some predictions about your own scenarios. Some of you no doubt thought that nothing would change—perhaps because you are dogmatically deterministic or because you believe that European military and immunological superiority (à la Jared Diamond) made the individual essentially irrelevant. No number of freak accidents would stop some European from eventually landing in the Americas, at which point state and population pressures made their conquest a fait accompli.

Others perhaps allowed their imaginations to flower more chaotically, imagining a future where, instead of European colonial states, an indigenous society remained—perhaps technologically advanced, perhaps not.

I predict, though, that for all of you, the "Human" element was absent. Your predictions were, at their core, predictions of systems—of impersonal forces like capitalism and state power—not human ones like love or despair. History was to you almost a huge machine composed of interlocking gears2. This isn't a failure of imagination; it's the product of a good prediction. Because to predict what would have happened without Columbus, a person, you must see how the machine changes when that part is removed and, more importantly, what remains untouched.

For example, it would be tenuous to argue that Columbus's death would have unleashed demons from the literal bowels of hell, or that volcanoes would have erupted simultaneously across the earth, dooming Humanity to extinction. Thus, our prediction already has guardrails created from our understanding of causality. Just as we cannot imagine a world in which the death of Columbus fundamentally reshapes the relationship between new mother and young child—not for some Humans but for all Humans—it is equally absurd to predict that his death would have unleashed the holy fury of Mother Gaia. It's possible, of course, that a volcano could have erupted at the exact moment the ship sank, but that would be a different event, exogenous to the change I presented. To predict, we must have some model of the thing we are predicting—how its components interact and what can be safely ignored.

But how do we know what to ignore? I would be skeptical if anyone claimed they had, in those seconds, interrogated each component of their internal model. Instead, we look around us; we see what in the modern world seems unshakable—what things we can more easily picture an apocalypse than history without. To some, this might be greed; for others, reproductive pressure. But we take this intuition and interact it as it spirals out until finally, we arrive at something that resembles the only data point we have: today, the end of history.

This is what I refer to as narrative gravity—the idea that any set of theories used in a prediction must lead to a world that, at least in some deep emotional way, resembles our own, or it is a priori implausible. Because prediction is, at its core, a validation of what we already believe about right now. It's a claim to understanding of the universe and how the gears of human society grind.

I hope you can see how no coherent alternative history prediction can exist without a related claim to understanding. But of course, this dynamic flows both ways: no understanding can exist without an associated claim to prediction. Consider an economist who is interested in studying the relationship between minimum wage and employment. Suppose they conduct a scientific examination of counties on either side of a state border that appear to differ only in terms of their exposure to a state minimum wage law. To supplement this empirical result, they also develop a model. What is this for, if not prediction? Is it just to show that there is a difference in both the unemployment rate and minimum wage between two arbitrary political units? Or is it more believably a claim to causality and thus prediction— or that their model and results speak to the general case? Thus, if a politician changes the minimum wage, it will impact employment—not arbitrarily, but in the way the economist has predicted. Prediction is the flower; it's why you grew the plant to begin with.

Beyond the social sciences, this relationship is even stronger. In fact, this symmetry is so strong I would argue identifying it walks the fine line of necessity and uselessness. Consider the laws of Newtonian physics in their closed-form simplicity

The gravitational force between two objects is equal to some constant multiplied by the product of two masses and divided by the square of the distance between them.

If you will concede that this is a claim to understanding the universe—something I believe Newton would have believed—then its relationship to prediction should fall directly out of the screen and onto your head, like a metaphorical apple. Given any set of values for these variables, it would be trivial to predict the gravitational force between two objects. All possible predictions from this formula exist already within its neatness. Through knowing Newtonian physics, you can make all possible predictions about a world that obeys those laws.

Once you see this symmetry, it is impossible to miss in everything—even in our daily lives. We constantly exploit the symmetry between understanding and prediction to navigate our lives. I know that turning the faucet on will produce water, not because it has every time, but because I have some model of how it works. And so, if water does not emerge, I am not left destitute without explanation but instead can venture forth in search of a solution. Of course, that model need not be correct to allow me to make predictions—even accurate ones. In fact, a correct model, one that truly represented all physical and Human interactions, would be remarkably cumbersome. The model need only be correct in the narrow sense of generating predictions that match reality. Newtonian physics is not a complete understanding of reality, meaning its predictions are all wrong in important ways, large or small. But using it alone, I could navigate to the moon and back.

As an absurd example of something being incorrect by design, consider an airport walkway. If you were to examine the speed you were going, it would not be V₀ + V₁—or the speed of your walk and the speed of the walkway—instead, there would be a relativistic correction term. However, it would be so tiny on the scale we operate that it is better to simply ignore the truth in favor of simplicity.

Every day, we are saddled with countless incorrect theories. They both cloud our minds and allow us to function at all. What matters is less the existence of a mistake but the problems it creates. In fact, many of us hold contradictory understandings with zero tension because, perhaps without ever vocalizing it, we know they are both wrong in a general sense but useful or true in their own domain. If one day you are presented with this apparent contradiction, do not take it as a reason to abandon the understanding you have, but instead as the opportunity that it is—a chance to create a new, better understanding and thus better predictions.

Having an incorrect—or incomplete—theory is beyond okay. It's what I believe makes us as Humans such powerful creatures. We are capable of living within paradox, making predictions and behaving as if we have full certainty in them while knowing that they are, in some deep sense, untrue. I would go so far as to argue that relaxing this tension and beginning to believe that any explanation you have is a true reflection of reality is the only dangerous path.

This brings me all the way back to the beginning and why I wanted to talk about this subject. We do not have prescience; we do not have God-Emperors who can see the future and guide us down a "Golden Path." But I believe we each carry a small element of this within ourselves. That naturally gives us a deeper responsibility than I think is publicly acknowledged. Because of the strange symmetry that exists between knowing and predicting, we should be careful to do either without acknowledging how it will shape our minds by implicitly doing the other. We must see it for what it is: an ouroboros. It is not a mouth or a tail; it is both in infinite reflection.

When you accept an understanding that claims to be removed from prediction, know it for what it is—an incomplete picture of itself. If you walk away with anything today, walk away with this: an axiomatic system can be used to do anything. Its logical consistency is a product of its very construction. What matters are the a priori assumptions about reality. Thus, just because something is internally consistent does not make it true. Only if its predictions are validated in reality can we, with humility, say it isn't wrong. Always judge any claim to understanding not by its internal structure or even by the intuitive truth of its axioms but instead by its predictions. And symmetrically, judge a prediction not by how right it feels but by how reasonable the axioms it is predicated on are. Do not miss the ouroboros for its teeth.

1tragically he has moved onto Skitzo posting

2To some, these gears are racism; to others, population pressure.
