Chaos theory is an explanation, but it almost seems cheap by comparison. Stanislaw Lem in I think Futurological Congress mentioned the role of cataclysms in disrupting gradual evolution and such. Chaos is the small details below your abstraction level, cataclysms are the large scale shocks you didn't anticipate and which mean the adaptive may not survive and the maladaptive survive through luck or rule-changes.
And then there's the point buried in _Psychohistorical Crisis_, or in the Turing Halting problem, of predicting a system that you're in, or that responds to predictions. As Kingsbury put in in Crisis. a simple predictive loop is "make prediction, if bad prevent it, if good accept it". Predictions don't come true because they're really "if things continue, this will happen" but having made the prediction, people can try to falsify it.
Invoking chaos theory seems not quite right except as metaphor. It deals with how even very simple systems can have regions of parameter space over which any tiny deviation explodes, so the system is unpredictable in detail on sufficiently long time scales even if the number of parameters is small and you have excellent data.
Here, we're dealing with human society, which is an extremely messy system with billions of elements and poorly characterized data. You can get lost trying to predict such a system even if it's not strictly chaotic.
Also, chaos theory isn't an assertion that we're unable to predict anything; often statistical predictions of aggregate quantities are possible.
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And then there's the point buried in _Psychohistorical Crisis_, or in the Turing Halting problem, of predicting a system that you're in, or that responds to predictions. As Kingsbury put in in Crisis. a simple predictive loop is "make prediction, if bad prevent it, if good accept it". Predictions don't come true because they're really "if things continue, this will happen" but having made the prediction, people can try to falsify it.
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Here, we're dealing with human society, which is an extremely messy system with billions of elements and poorly characterized data. You can get lost trying to predict such a system even if it's not strictly chaotic.
Also, chaos theory isn't an assertion that we're unable to predict anything; often statistical predictions of aggregate quantities are possible.
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