Quotes About Randomness

When it comes to deep work, in other words, consider the use of collaboration when appropriate, as it can push your results to a new level. At the same time, don't lionize this quest for interaction and positive randomness to the point where it crowds out the unbroken concentration ultimately required to wring something useful out of the swirl of ideas all around us.

Chance is unceasingly at work in our lives," Churchill would write years later, thinking back on Grenfell and the fate that might have been his, "but we cannot always see its workings sharply and clearly defined.

There's only one thing I know about life. I know some things happen by chance, And some things happen because we make them happen.

Random search can be more efficient than nonrandom search—something that Good and Turing had discovered at Bletchley Park. A random network, whether of neurons, computers, words, or ideas, contains solutions, waiting to be discovered, to problems that need not be explicitly defined.

One must constantly meditate upon the absurdities of chance, a subject even more edifying than the subject of death.

Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know - it's everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again, you could be.

Lady Luck is indifferent. She smiles sometimes, and she frowns sometimes.

No matter how good you are, there's a lot of luck involved.

Your luck goes up and down like swings and roundabouts

Of course it's all luck.

It's luck that one thing works out and one doesn't, it's sort of happenstance.

When you leave it to chance, then all of a sudden you don't have any more luck.

Luck implies an absolute absence of any principle.

So much of life, so much of work, is luck.

I love to think about chance - about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe.

Much of what we do in life has a huge component of luck.

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.

No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word.

The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions.

Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.

We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness.

Luck is the grand equalizer.

It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life— with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.

This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing—and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.