Quotes About Randomness

Second Law of thermodynamics is not an equality, but an inequality, asserting merely that a certain quantity referred to as the entropy of an isolated system—which is a measure of the system's disorder, or 'randomness'—is greater (or at least not smaller) at later times than it was at earlier times.

Reacher thought, damn. The vagaries of chance.

Make it all a little unpredictable. How about

A real coin flipped by a real human trended closer to 51-49 in favor of whichever side was uppermost at the outset.

Einstein had, for the first time connected new and measurable consequences to statistical physics. That might sound like a largely technical achievement, but on the contrary, it represented the triumph of a great principle: that much of the order we percieve in nature belies an invisible underlying disorder and hence can be understood only through the rules of randomness.

true randomness sometimes produces repetition

if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness.

We miss the effects of randomness in life because when we assess the world, we tend to see what we expect to see. We in effect define degree of talent by degree of success and then reinforce our feelings of causality by noting the correlation. That's why although there is sometimes little difference in ability between a wildly successful person and one who is not as successful, there is usually a big difference in how they are viewed.

The answer lies in a phenomenon called regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one.

theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.

There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness.

Or as the Nobel laureate Max Born wrote, "Chance is a more fundamental conception than causality."3

other words, the movement of the dye molecule was virtually impossible to predict before the fact even though it was relatively easy to understand afterward.

This again is a probabilistic process whose future is difficult to predict but whose past is easy to understand.

when chance is involved, people's thought processes are often seriously flawed.

Over the hundreds of at bats he has each year, those random factors usually average out and result in some typical home run production that increases as the player becomes more skillful and then eventually decreases owing to the same process

Random events often look like nonrandom events, and in interpreting human affairs we must take care not to confuse the two.

The Drunkard's walk: how randomness rules our lives / Leonard Mlodinow.

the same mathematics that describes drawing pebbles from an urn can be employed to describe any series of trials in which each trial has two possible outcomes, as long as those outcomes are random and the trials are independent of each other.

regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one.

The idea that the odds of an event with a fixed probability increase or decrease depending on recent occurrences of the event is called the gambler's fallacy.

We cannot know whether our single observation represents the mean or an outlier, an event to bet on or a rare happening that is not likely to be reproduced.

Em vez de convencer as pessoas, os dados apenas polarizaram o grupo. Assim, até mesmo padrões aleatórios podem ser interpretados como evidências convincentes quando se relacionam a noções preconcebidas.

complex systems (among which I count our lives) we should expect that minor factors we can usually ignore will by chance sometimes cause major incidents.8