Quotes About Randomness

Life plays no favorites.

Darwin- I think the theory is: out of 'chaos' arises something that resembles 'design'. But it's all random.

Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.

I'm sorry for the randomness of what I wrote, Mr. Oswald. There's been a lot to absorb.' Without looking up, he says, 'Never apologize for writing your truth, Mr. Fink. There are no right or wrong answers.

Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong.

The hot hand is a massive and widespread cognitive illusion.

And the more luck was involved, the less there is to be learned.

In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.

We do not expect to see regularity produced by a random process, and when we detect what appears to be a rule, we quickly reject the idea that the process is truly random. Random processes produce many sequences that convince people that the process is not random after all.

The widespread misunderstanding of randomness sometimes has significant consequences.

To the untrained eye," Feller remarks, "randomness appears as regularity or tendency to cluster.

The hot hand is entirely in the eye of the beholders, who are consistently too quick to perceive order and causality in randomness.

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight.

The comparison of firms that have been more or less successful is to a significant extent a comparison between firms that have been more or less lucky.

Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.

I smiled and said nothing. But I thought, "Well, I took it away from you this morning. If your success was due mostly to chance, how much credit are you entitled to take for it?

Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events.

The associative machinery seeks causes. The difficulty we have with statistical regularities is that they call for a different approach. Instead of focusing on how the event at hand came to be, the statistical view relates it to what could have happened instead. Nothing in particular caused it to be what it is—chance selected it from among its alternatives. Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events.

if you follow your intuition, you will more often than not err by misclassifying a random event as systematic. We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

Seltsam sei es und ungerecht, sagte Gauß, so recht ein Beispiel für die erbärmliche Zufälligkeit der Existenz, dass man in einer bestimmten Zeit geboren und ihr verhaftet sei, ob man wolle oder nicht. Es verschaffe einem einen unziemlichen Vorteil vor der Vergangenheit und mache einen zum Clown der Zukunft.

C'est l'affreuse loterie de la vie

How results that are not indicative of anything can be produced by pure chance—given a small enough number of cases—is something you can test for yourself at small cost. Just start tossing a penny. How often will it come up heads? Half the time of course. Everyone knows that. Well, let's check that and see…. I have just tried ten tosses and got heads eight times, which proves that pennies come up heads eighty percent of the time.

Where had they all gone to, he often pondered; those threads he had once held together, how far had they scattered, some to break, others to weave into unknown patterns? The strange randomness of the world beguiled him, that randomness which never would, so long as the world lasted, give meaning to those choruses again.

A universe without coincidence would be an exceedingly strange place xxx