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Nothing is random enough for an arbitrary audience. There's always the possibility that some alien spaceship will land and some creature will emerge, take a gl
by __MatrixMan__ 5mo ago
Nothing is random enough for an arbitrary audience. There's always the possibility that some alien spaceship will land and some creature will emerge, take a glance at your RNG, and say: "next one's 6598489811, try it" and they'll be right.
We can only say that something is random enough given a certain audience's beliefs about what kind of predictions are possible. If it takes lava lamps to convince that audience, well then ok.
- NuclearPM 5mo agoWhy would beliefs matter?
- mock-possum 5mo agoBecause the judgment of what counts as ‘enough’ is tied to beliefs
- __MatrixMan__ 5mo agoBeliefs drive our actions, even when they're about unknowable things. Whether or not something is random is unknowable, so belief is all we have. We may discover tomorrow that events which we previously thought were random, like the timing of a single atom's radioactive decay, are actually perfectly predictable. If we believe that such a discovery is unlikely then we might trust radioactive decay as an entropy source, and if we believe its very likely then we probably won't.