Thursday, May 31, 2012

There is randomness

Defining the law as of randomness by Charles Seife in Edge.org 2011 question is good food for thought.

The First Law of Randomness: There is such a thing as randomness.

We are not able to predict everything. We may look for patterns as part of being human but sometimes there just is not a pattern. Randomness exists.

The Second Law of Randomness: Some events are impossible to predict.

we can try to handicap an event, but there are events that are difficult to predict and there are events that are almost impossible to predict. There are unknown unknowns. The only thing we can do is try and protect enough to make sure that some unpredictable event cannot lead to ruin.

The Third Law of Randomness: Random events behave predictably in aggregate even if they're not predictable individually

 The law of large numbers will always work. If we have enough events, we can make predictions in the aggregate but not about a specific event. I can predict the likelihood of an event like the roll of a dice, but not the actual number of the next roll.

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