Heuristics

Uniformitarianism: The most important item on my list is the idea that things are going exactly the way they should, whether we like it or not.

I and many people I know feel we are living in an increasingly alien and hostile country. Although this is extremely unpleasant, there are thousands of reasons things are as they are. One election, or even two or three elections, didn't make things the way they are. It took much more than that. For example, as I wrote in a few pieces, we must consider how the Constitutional allocation of electoral and Congressional votes for the last 200+ years put conservative extremists in power.

I learned the notion that things are going as planned from my work, programming computers This is not a principle, or a law or even a rule. It is a heuristic. It's frustrating and "angrifying" when things don't go our way, but the facts are things are usually going exactly how they were set up (programmed) to go. It's a rare day when the computer - the mechanism of the thing - is actually broken. It just that the program is wrong; it's our program that did it.

One gets to a solution faster when we realize that the apparent absurdity of the result is our own doing. It doesn't help to blame anyone. It's just the way it is.

Chaos: Bodies in motion stay in motion, bodies at rest stay put. Until you hit the cue ball, that is. Then everything scatters randomly.

In the steady state, uniformitarian, world, things happen in a regular manner. There are causes and effects. But, push things around fast enough and stuff jumps the track. After that, who knows what happens?
 

Chaotic systems are both regular and random. When the components are not highly energetic, they settle into patterns. One can - in principle - compute the trajectories of all the billiard balls after the break. (This is called a metastable state.) Hit the cue ball hard enough, however, and there's a risk some of the balls will jump off the table. When that happens, their trajectories are no longer predictable by the billiard-table computer. Complex factors like spin, gravity, dirt, table height, air flow, etc, etc now affect where the fast-moving balls go.
 

The player who hits the ball out of the park is gifted or crazy, depending on whether he knows the consequences. Maybe the ball just lands in a ditch, or does a little damage to someone's windshield, or maybe it lands on someone's head and kills him.
 

Our government is in the hands of the Bandit, who is unlikely to be gifted. Therefore, it is very probable no one knows the eventual results of his activities. (I know I don't.)
 

Sorcerer's Apprentice: Knowing a little is dangerous, especially when you don't know what you don't know, or even that you don't know.

Surely we have all seen the Mickey Mouse version of the story, played to the Dukas' piece, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." Mickey conjures water from the well, but doesn't know how to turn it off. Everything he does makes matters worse.
 

Mickey is saved by The Wizard, who returns in time to set things right.
 

If you don't know who or where is The Wizard, stop the apprentice from doing anything.

Of course, if you know how everything works, and you know how it is going to turn out, and you know how to prevent any of those billiard balls from jumping off the table, then be my guest after you let me out of the playing room.