I claim that patternless randomness, the kind generated by coins, dice, cards, and cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generators, has no precedent in the natural world. In this essay I will
Whoops, I didn’t mean to start a new paragraph there, that’s weird. In this essay I will argue the very mechanisms that made humans unreasonably effective at shaping the world to our liking also make it really counterintuitive to work with the kind of patternless randomness we often encounter today. You can clearly develop intuitions around randomness, but it’s a skill we have to deliberately practice, where untrained people will confidently make really bad predictions.
My core argument is that in nature, for every random-seeming event, there are always actually patterns behind it that you can identify and exploit. Were you just attacked by a bear? That’s a random freak occurrence! But over generations of people getting attacked by bears, they can work out that bears are more likely to live in and therefore be encountered in particular environments, tend to be more aggressive when you exhibit certain behaviors and odors, can be warned of in advance by droppings and tree markings, don’t show up at all in the winter for some reason, and so on.
In other words, every event that seems totally random is actually part of a pattern that you can learn. In a state of nature, you should always assume that every event has legible, understandable causes. Lightning is more likely to strike tall trees standing alone. The air feels different before it rains. Cooking food over a fire makes it taste better most of the time, and here’s what to do with the exceptions. Learning the pattern behind these patterns rewards you a with better chance of survival. If they learn to trust the expertise of people like you, the tribe you find yourself in has a correspondingly better chance of flourishing. For millennia, survival of the fittest has selected for minds and societies that see patterns in everything.
What biases might you expect to see in organisms that have evolved to recognize patterns? If you look at misconceptions most people have about randomness, a common theme is that they expect random samples to not be independent. The gambler’s fallacy is expecting an outcome, like red, that hasn’t come up recently to be more likely because it’s “due”. The opposite expectation can be seen in sports: the belief that if a player’s made a few shots in a row, they’re on a hot streak and more likely to make the next one. It feels like knowing past results should somehow influence your predictions of future results.
Sometimes people get mad about video games. One thing they might get mad about is if something that has a 50% chance of success fails five times in a row. This is clearly unfair and rigged. Sitting back here in our armchairs, we can dispassionately calculate the odds of this at 1/32, or 3% for every distinct set of five flips, and see that we should expect outcomes like this pretty often if you’re flipping that coin 500 times. So one thing games often implement to bring randomness more in alignment with expectations is a streakbreaker that nudges the odds in the player’s favor on repeated failures. A streakbreaker for successes is never considered, because knowing of its mere existence would cause players to claim the RNG is clearly unfair and rigged, and people don’t tend to notice anything strange if they succeed at five 50% flips in a row.
In conclusion, I think there’s a huge untapped market opportunity in certifiably organic random number generators. Just imagine, an octopus that predicts—