NYT: "Ian Hacking [described something] called “the probabilistic revolution,” the slow displacement of determinism and strict causality with a new mode of thinking rooted in uncertainty and statistical inference. This style of reasoning understands the world in terms of distributions rather than particularities; its laws are observed relations rather than causal accounts. 'Chance,' it suggests, isn’t a function of human ignorance but a property that could be measured, governed and put to profitable use."
Example: "Venture capital, the investment philosophy that built Silicon Valley, is a method less for picking companies than for constructing exposure to a distribution: If most investments go to zero, and your returns are concentrated in enormous outliers, the smart move is to construct broad exposure, rather than to try to determine winners in advance."