convictions about how this whole crazy world works

Well, that's the rub, innit? You build a perfectly good set of convictions and the world still acts crazy. So either your convictions aren't a model of reality or they leave something major out which is skewing the phenomena compared to the model OR there's a HUGE Authoritarian Boss just shoving things around willie-nillie playing Department Head with the universe.

I submit that if your convictions don't include an understanding of the wildness of the wildcards, the model is not complete. So you keep on looking some more.

A