Randomness Quotes - page 2

In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd... It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow. (Stefan Zweig)
These houses had been plunked down with an alarming randomness -- unevenly spaced, on crooked lines, like whoever had designed the place had said, "We'll just follow this cat, and wherever he sits down, we'll build something. View quote
Maureen Johnson
We create order out of chaos, beauty and meaning out of ugly randomness. View quote
Rick Riordan
Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness. View quote
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
What people fear most about tragedy is its randomness - a taxi cab jumps the curb and hits a pedestrian, a gun misfires and kills a bystander. Better to have some rational cause and effect between incident and injury. And if cause and effect aren't possible, better that there at least be some reward for all the suffering. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
The threads of circumstance that lead to tomorrow are so tenuous that all the fussing and worrying about decisions is futile compared to the pure randomness of existence. View quote
Nick Bantock
Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all. View quote
Wally Lamb
Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace. View quote
James Gleick
Perhaps our thinking exemplifies a selective system. First lots of random scattered ideas compete for survival. Then comes the selection for what works best -one idea dominates, and this is followed by its amplification. Perhaps the moral [...] is that you never learn anything unless you are willing to take a risk and tolerate a little randomness in your life. View quote
Heinz Pagels
There's a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make. View quote
Daniel Kahneman
Randomness scares people. Religion is a way to explain randomness. (Fran Lebowitz)
Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Perfect order is boring, perfect randomness is boring, but complex systems are interesting. View quote
David Orrell
The social world is not driven by natural laws and randomness alone, as the physical world is, but also by human wills. View quote
Ivar Ekeland
Quantum physicists today are reconciled to randomness at the individual event level, but to expect causality to underlie statistical quantum phenomena is reasonable. Suppose a person shakes an ink pen such that ink spots are formed on a white wall, in what appears for all intents and purposes, randomly. Let us further suppose the random ink spots accumulate to form precise pictures of different known persons' faces every time. We will not regard the overall result to be a happenchance; we are apt to suspect there must be a "method" to the person who is shaking the ink pen. View quote
Ravi Gomatam
Two features of QT are commonly taken to be fundamentally non-classical: the absolute randomness of single events in the atomic regime, and the need for a permanent record of the experiment obtained using a macroscopic experimental arrangement...QT can also be applied to the larger system consisting of the original atomic system plus the macroscopic experimental arrangement. In this case, however, the larger system needs to interact with another stage of macroscopic recording. Since this procedure can continue ad infinitum, and is decisively terminated only when the result of an experiment is interpreted by a conscious observer, some noted quantum theorists have promoted the view that the quantum theory has some nexus with the consciousness of the observer... View quote
Ravi Gomatam
The Trickster represents the quality of randomness and chance in the universe, without which there could be no freedom. In the Craft the Goddess is not omnipotent. The cosmos is interesting rather than perfect, and everything is not part of some greater plan, nor is all necessarily under control. Understanding this keeps us humble, able to admit that we cannot know or control or define everything. View quote
Starhawk
[T]hey share the traits of the acute successful randomness fool who, in addition, operates in the most random of environments. ...[T]heir bosses and employers shared the same trait. They, too, are permanently out of the market. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What is easier to remember, a collection of facts glued together, or a story, something that offers a series of logical links? Causality is easier to commit to memory. ...What is induction exactly? ...It is very handy, as the general takes much less room in onel's memory than a collection of particulars. The effect of such compression is the reduction in the degree of detected randomness. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb