Quotes About Randomness

Don, a CPA, kept a log of the first 100 horses that had been touted by insiders as ready to win and absolutely good things. Exactly six had won. We could have done as well by consulting a table of random numbers.

I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life – whatever else it is – is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway:

Her faculty for hitting the right nail on the head is almost miraculous – especially as all her blows have the air of being delivered at random. Housekeeping!

The light works, he said, indicating the window, the gravity works, he said, dropping a pencil on the floor. Anything else we have to take our chances with.

The trouble with trying to make the right accident happen is that it won't. That is not what accident means.

You know, I really think that when God puts together families, he sticks his finger into the white pages and selects a group of people at random and then says to them all, 'Hey! You're going to spend the next seventy years together, even though you have nothing in common and don't even like each other. And, should you not feel yourself caring about any of this group of strangers, even for a second, you will just feel dreadful

Când un bobârnac aleatoriu face s? se n?ruie castelul din c?r?i de joc, care s-ar fi putut surpa mult mai devreme sau mult mai târziu, descoperim peisajul postcomunist: mafio?i ?i semivagabonzi care nu mai au energie nici m?car s?-?i aminteasc?.

En cualquier caso, permítame indicarle que se olvida usted del principio entrópico: no hay destino prefijado, sino un mono aporreando las teclas de una máquina de escribir.

We understand tornadoes scientifically, but it still feels supernatural. The randomness makes it feel supernatural.

Chance is just a word expressing ignorance

My main reason for scepticism about the Huxley/Sagan theory is that the human brain is demonstrably eager to see faces in random patterns, as we know from scientific evidence, on top of the numerous legends about faces of Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, or Mother Teresa, being seen on slices of toast, or pizzas, or patches of damp on a wall. This eagerness is enhanced if the pattern departs from randomness in the specific direction of being symmetrical.

One way to express the answer is that it might happen by 'chance'. But 'chance' is just a word expressing ignorance. It means 'determined by some as yet unknown, or unspecified, means'.

Turns' and 'fairness' simply don't come into it. We may care about fairness and unfairness, but coins don't give a toss!

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.

The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less we can believe it just happened by blind chance...the obvious alternative to chance is an Intelligent Designer.

If I asked you "What is life?", you would probably reply, in so many words, that it is all just a coincidence

Volgens de wet van de grote getallen slaat het bizarre altijd wel een keer toe, als de steekproef maar groot genoeg is.

Was there a kind of lottery (Reggie imagined a raffle) where God picked out your chosen method of going—"Heart attack for him, cancer for her, let's see, have we had a terrible car crash yet this month?

That power Which erring men call Chance.

Chances rule men and not men chances.

Chance makes a plaything of a man's life.

Nothing in nature is by chance... Something appears to be chance only because of our lack of knowledge.

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.

Shuffling is the only thing which Nature cannot undo.