Ergodicity can be explained very simply. If you've heard of Murphy's Law, you probably already understand the principle behind ergodicity. "If there's more th

Ergodicity can be explained very simply. If you've heard of Murphy's Law, you probably already understand the principle behind ergodicity. "If there's more than one way to do a job and one of those ways will end in disaster, then somebody will do it that way." When you increase the number of people doing something, the number of opportunities for that somebody to do it the wrong way goes up. These are the outliers versus the normal state of affairs. These don't have to be positive or even negative, simply improbable. Given enough players for a lottery, there will be a winner, but there will also be people that randomly get linear sequences of numbers, all primes, etc. Why this is coming from a throwaway is that this occurs for everything in life, including, for example, schools and police shootings. These are extremely outlying events when given the absolute number of interactions between students and police. The ergodic space allows for these to occur, and so they do, eventually. The problem is when people start taking infrequent outlying events as the norm rather than outlying properties of the system itself. If you give 800,000 cops guns and send them out to interact with the public tens of times per day, they will eventually shoot someone they shouldn't have. This is a normal part of the space but isn't probabilistically normal. The normal state of affairs is that they don't shoot anyone. In the rare case that they do shoot someone, it's generally because they are being shot at. Equally, if 100 million citizens have guns, eventually one will end up in the hand of one of approximately 7.5 million (probabalistically) male high school students that is willing to use it against other students. This too is part of the ergodic space, but isn't probablistically normal. The normal state of affairs is that school shootings don't happen. The normal state of affairs is that bullied and/or mentally ill students don't seek violent retribution against their classmates. These are simultaneously improbable and probable events. We know that they occur, but we know that they occur infrequently. Inevitably, given enough rolls of the dice, circumstances conspire to enable extremely improbable events to occur, but these should always be seen as the opposite of the norm.