If life is random, does that make it meaningless?

[BradStevens]

Interesting discussion here:

If Life Is Random, Is It Meaningless? (with Brian Klaas) - Econlib

How did a husband-and-wife vacation end up saving a city from the atomic bomb while destroying another? And how did a century-old murder of one family bring another into existence? Easily, explains political scientist Brian Klaas of University College London, who points out that history is...

www.econtalk.org

A lot of this is devoted to why the prevalence of randomness makes it important to limit our hubris about predictions from our social science and long-term forecasting models of inherently random events. It's important background information when we discuss COVID protocols, long term economic forecasting, and how much leniency to give experts on certain subjects, all things we've discussed a lot here.

But it also touches on the fundamental randomness that determines so much in our own lives. We bombed Hiroshima, instead of Kyoto, with the first A-bomb because a couple took a vacation to Kyoto in the '20s and fell in love with the city. The husband ended up being our Sec. of War overseeing the Targeting Committee for the bomb, and convinced the administration to bypass Kyoto.

I thought it would be interesting for posters to describe how randomness might have affected their own lives, too. For me, the first thing that comes to mind is this: freshman year at IU I had a seminar where we read the Great Books. It was one of my favorite classes in college. I became friends with a pretty blonde girl from Texas. She was unlike any other girl I had ever met--she had 22 credits already from AP courses (my high school didn't even have one) and had her life planned out--graduate IU in 3 years, go to law school at Univ. of Texas, and then on to DC to work for a Senator and into politics. I asked her why UT, and not Harvard, if she was shooting so high? She said UT had just as good a faculty, was much cheaper, and a better base for political work in Texas. Wow, OK. Fast forward 3 years, and I decided to go to law school and applied to UT because of her. Never would have considered it if she hadn't talked it up so much. And so I move to Austin, lived in Texas for 6 years, met my eventual wife there, have many of my best friends still there, etc. My entire life would, no doubt, be different had I not randomly had this class with this girl (and she wasn't as pretty or as cool as she was).

How has randomness affected your life?

 

[Spartans9312]

Interesting discussion here:

If Life Is Random, Is It Meaningless? (with Brian Klaas) - Econlib

How did a husband-and-wife vacation end up saving a city from the atomic bomb while destroying another? And how did a century-old murder of one family bring another into existence? Easily, explains political scientist Brian Klaas of University College London, who points out that history is...

www.econtalk.org

A lot of this is devoted to why the prevalence of randomness makes it important to limit our hubris about predictions from our social science and long-term forecasting models of inherently random events. It's important background information when we discuss COVID protocols, long term economic forecasting, and how much leniency to give experts on certain subjects, all things we've discussed a lot here.

But it also touches on the fundamental randomness that determines so much in our own lives. We bombed Hiroshima, instead of Kyoto, with the first A-bomb because a couple took a vacation to Kyoto in the '20s and fell in love with the city. The husband ended up being our Sec. of War overseeing the Targeting Committee for the bomb, and convinced the administration to bypass Kyoto.

I thought it would be interesting for posters to describe how randomness might have affected their own lives, too. For me, the first thing that comes to mind is this: freshman year at IU I had a seminar where we read the Great Books. It was one of my favorite classes in college. I became friends with a pretty blonde girl from Texas. She was unlike any other girl I had ever met--she had 22 credits already from AP courses (my high school didn't even have one) and had her life planned out--graduate IU in 3 years, go to law school at Univ. of Texas, and then on to DC to work for a Senator and into politics. I asked her why UT, and not Harvard, if she was shooting so high? She said UT had just as good a faculty, was much cheaper, and a better base for political work in Texas. Wow, OK. Fast forward 3 years, and I decided to go to law school and applied to UT because of her. Never would have considered it if she hadn't talked it up so much. And so I move to Austin, lived in Texas for 6 years, met my eventual wife there, have many of my best friends still there, etc. My entire life would, no doubt, be different had I not randomly had this class with this girl (and she wasn't as pretty or as cool as she was).

How has randomness affected your life?

Cue McM

 

[mcmurtry66]

How has randomness affected your life?

Unfairly

 

[Bowlmania]

But who can be sure that these things are "random?"

 

[Standard Issue]

Interesting discussion here:

If Life Is Random, Is It Meaningless? (with Brian Klaas) - Econlib

How did a husband-and-wife vacation end up saving a city from the atomic bomb while destroying another? And how did a century-old murder of one family bring another into existence? Easily, explains political scientist Brian Klaas of University College London, who points out that history is...

www.econtalk.org

A lot of this is devoted to why the prevalence of randomness makes it important to limit our hubris about predictions from our social science and long-term forecasting models of inherently random events. It's important background information when we discuss COVID protocols, long term economic forecasting, and how much leniency to give experts on certain subjects, all things we've discussed a lot here.

But it also touches on the fundamental randomness that determines so much in our own lives. We bombed Hiroshima, instead of Kyoto, with the first A-bomb because a couple took a vacation to Kyoto in the '20s and fell in love with the city. The husband ended up being our Sec. of War overseeing the Targeting Committee for the bomb, and convinced the administration to bypass Kyoto.

I thought it would be interesting for posters to describe how randomness might have affected their own lives, too. For me, the first thing that comes to mind is this: freshman year at IU I had a seminar where we read the Great Books. It was one of my favorite classes in college. I became friends with a pretty blonde girl from Texas. She was unlike any other girl I had ever met--she had 22 credits already from AP courses (my high school didn't even have one) and had her life planned out--graduate IU in 3 years, go to law school at Univ. of Texas, and then on to DC to work for a Senator and into politics. I asked her why UT, and not Harvard, if she was shooting so high? She said UT had just as good a faculty, was much cheaper, and a better base for political work in Texas. Wow, OK. Fast forward 3 years, and I decided to go to law school and applied to UT because of her. Never would have considered it if she hadn't talked it up so much. And so I move to Austin, lived in Texas for 6 years, met my eventual wife there, have many of my best friends still there, etc. My entire life would, no doubt, be different had I not randomly had this class with this girl (and she wasn't as pretty or as cool as she was).

How has randomness affected your life?

Everything in life is random.

Graduated highschool and was going to be a farmer.

Went to school in Chicago instead of Purdue or OSU.

Met and married my wife

Economy doesn't tank and I'm a farmer in Indiana and I don't meet my wife.

Pick a different place for school and I don't meet my wife.

And any number of decisions could have changed my life and where I'm at today.

 

[BadWakeboarder]

Interesting discussion here:

If Life Is Random, Is It Meaningless? (with Brian Klaas) - Econlib

How did a husband-and-wife vacation end up saving a city from the atomic bomb while destroying another? And how did a century-old murder of one family bring another into existence? Easily, explains political scientist Brian Klaas of University College London, who points out that history is...

www.econtalk.org

A lot of this is devoted to why the prevalence of randomness makes it important to limit our hubris about predictions from our social science and long-term forecasting models of inherently random events. It's important background information when we discuss COVID protocols, long term economic forecasting, and how much leniency to give experts on certain subjects, all things we've discussed a lot here.

But it also touches on the fundamental randomness that determines so much in our own lives. We bombed Hiroshima, instead of Kyoto, with the first A-bomb because a couple took a vacation to Kyoto in the '20s and fell in love with the city. The husband ended up being our Sec. of War overseeing the Targeting Committee for the bomb, and convinced the administration to bypass Kyoto.

I thought it would be interesting for posters to describe how randomness might have affected their own lives, too. For me, the first thing that comes to mind is this: freshman year at IU I had a seminar where we read the Great Books. It was one of my favorite classes in college. I became friends with a pretty blonde girl from Texas. She was unlike any other girl I had ever met--she had 22 credits already from AP courses (my high school didn't even have one) and had her life planned out--graduate IU in 3 years, go to law school at Univ. of Texas, and then on to DC to work for a Senator and into politics. I asked her why UT, and not Harvard, if she was shooting so high? She said UT had just as good a faculty, was much cheaper, and a better base for political work in Texas. Wow, OK. Fast forward 3 years, and I decided to go to law school and applied to UT because of her. Never would have considered it if she hadn't talked it up so much. And so I move to Austin, lived in Texas for 6 years, met my eventual wife there, have many of my best friends still there, etc. My entire life would, no doubt, be different had I not randomly had this class with this girl (and she wasn't as pretty or as cool as she was).

How has randomness affected your life?

A super overrated country singer who was partly responsible for bubble gum country once wisely sang:

“It’s my life, it’s better left to chance. I could’ve missed the pain - but I’d have had to miss The Dance.”

 

[T.M.P.]

Interesting discussion here:

If Life Is Random, Is It Meaningless? (with Brian Klaas) - Econlib

How did a husband-and-wife vacation end up saving a city from the atomic bomb while destroying another? And how did a century-old murder of one family bring another into existence? Easily, explains political scientist Brian Klaas of University College London, who points out that history is...

www.econtalk.org

A lot of this is devoted to why the prevalence of randomness makes it important to limit our hubris about predictions from our social science and long-term forecasting models of inherently random events. It's important background information when we discuss COVID protocols, long term economic forecasting, and how much leniency to give experts on certain subjects, all things we've discussed a lot here.

But it also touches on the fundamental randomness that determines so much in our own lives. We bombed Hiroshima, instead of Kyoto, with the first A-bomb because a couple took a vacation to Kyoto in the '20s and fell in love with the city. The husband ended up being our Sec. of War overseeing the Targeting Committee for the bomb, and convinced the administration to bypass Kyoto.

I thought it would be interesting for posters to describe how randomness might have affected their own lives, too. For me, the first thing that comes to mind is this: freshman year at IU I had a seminar where we read the Great Books. It was one of my favorite classes in college. I became friends with a pretty blonde girl from Texas. She was unlike any other girl I had ever met--she had 22 credits already from AP courses (my high school didn't even have one) and had her life planned out--graduate IU in 3 years, go to law school at Univ. of Texas, and then on to DC to work for a Senator and into politics. I asked her why UT, and not Harvard, if she was shooting so high? She said UT had just as good a faculty, was much cheaper, and a better base for political work in Texas. Wow, OK. Fast forward 3 years, and I decided to go to law school and applied to UT because of her. Never would have considered it if she hadn't talked it up so much. And so I move to Austin, lived in Texas for 6 years, met my eventual wife there, have many of my best friends still there, etc. My entire life would, no doubt, be different had I not randomly had this class with this girl (and she wasn't as pretty or as cool as she was).

How has randomness affected your life?

Not only because he loved it. Kyoto was spared from the nuke and bombing in general throughout the war because it was full of ancient temples. It's a religious center. That made it an easy argument.

 

[CO. Hoosier]

Interesting discussion here:

If Life Is Random, Is It Meaningless? (with Brian Klaas) - Econlib

How did a husband-and-wife vacation end up saving a city from the atomic bomb while destroying another? And how did a century-old murder of one family bring another into existence? Easily, explains political scientist Brian Klaas of University College London, who points out that history is...

www.econtalk.org

A lot of this is devoted to why the prevalence of randomness makes it important to limit our hubris about predictions from our social science and long-term forecasting models of inherently random events. It's important background information when we discuss COVID protocols, long term economic forecasting, and how much leniency to give experts on certain subjects, all things we've discussed a lot here.

But it also touches on the fundamental randomness that determines so much in our own lives. We bombed Hiroshima, instead of Kyoto, with the first A-bomb because a couple took a vacation to Kyoto in the '20s and fell in love with the city. The husband ended up being our Sec. of War overseeing the Targeting Committee for the bomb, and convinced the administration to bypass Kyoto.

I thought it would be interesting for posters to describe how randomness might have affected their own lives, too. For me, the first thing that comes to mind is this: freshman year at IU I had a seminar where we read the Great Books. It was one of my favorite classes in college. I became friends with a pretty blonde girl from Texas. She was unlike any other girl I had ever met--she had 22 credits already from AP courses (my high school didn't even have one) and had her life planned out--graduate IU in 3 years, go to law school at Univ. of Texas, and then on to DC to work for a Senator and into politics. I asked her why UT, and not Harvard, if she was shooting so high? She said UT had just as good a faculty, was much cheaper, and a better base for political work in Texas. Wow, OK. Fast forward 3 years, and I decided to go to law school and applied to UT because of her. Never would have considered it if she hadn't talked it up so much. And so I move to Austin, lived in Texas for 6 years, met my eventual wife there, have many of my best friends still there, etc. My entire life would, no doubt, be different had I not randomly had this class with this girl (and she wasn't as pretty or as cool as she was).

How has randomness affected your life?

My stoker was in my German class at IU. Totally random class assignment.. 62 years later she’s sitting next to me on the couch while I write this.

A law firm in Fort Collins lost a partner a few days before my resume showed up In the mail. They needed an attorney. I retired as head attorney of that firm.

Both started out as totally random events. Both endured for other reasons.

 

[NPT]

I moved to IN in 1969 and started going to Butler University. This guy would drive in and park beside me a lot of times when I was sitting in the car waiting before I went into class. What was kinda funny is that he had an old Covair car and in the winter I would see him roll the window down and reach out with an ice scraper to scrape so he could see so I knew that old Covair didn't have much of a heater. He was in my class but I'd never met him but one day he parked beside me and he looked my way and I motioned him to come over and sit in my warm car. 55 years later we are still best friends.

 

[Univee2]

I moved to IN in 1969 and started going to Butler University. This guy would drive in and park beside me a lot of times when I was sitting in the car waiting before I went into class. What was kinda funny is that he had an old Covair car and in the winter I would see him roll the window down and reach out with an ice scraper to scrape so he could see so I knew that old Covair didn't have much of a heater. He was in my class but I'd never met him but one day he parked beside me and he looked my way and I motioned him to come over and sit in my warm car. 55 years later we are still best friends.

Some friend you are. Did you convince him to get rid of what was one of the worst cars (Corvair, btw. Even your spell check is afraid of the name.) ever?

 

[Marvin the Martian]

In high school I worked as a dishwasher. One of the waitresses was a girl I knew (a little) from Jr High, but we had gone to different high schools. She was extremely smart, attractive, and very nice (had to be to talk to me even a little in junior high). We dishwashers found it incredible she was dating the guy she was, he would come pick her up. I don't think I ever said a word to him, but clearly he wasn't in her league. Go forward a few years, I left IU and went back. My second go around at IU has him being on the same dorm floor as me. We became great friends. He was a total computer geek, he had a TRS 80 loaded from cassette. Yep, it could take 90 minutes to load a game. He had a part-time job a few years later, they needed someone immediately to do data entry and dbase III+ coding. He told them I could do it, I was laid off over the summer from the IRS. Thus began my life in IT. When he left, they took the data entry from me and I did coding and computer repair.

He was on the dorm's Little 5 team, one of his teammates became a friend and housemate. That friend was one who had a whole lot of dates, completely the opposite of me. One woman he broke up with is my wife.

So the world is both random and deterministic, incredible.

I think we discount the randomness, one of the reasons I like Taleb. I never would have gotten into IT without that luck. In reality "I lived in a house with three complete computer geeks" even in the early-mid 80s wasn't a great endorsement. But at that single moment in time, it worked. We had a thread like this back in the "you didn't build that by yourself" controversy. I've always been very aware that I have a good job because I was lucky, so that didn't offend me like some.

Of course, of the other three, one retired at 50 from P&G, one retired from Google (and worked for Jobs at Next before that), and one still is at Lilly simply because he set a goal to retire with maximum points. So being a real computer geek had its advantages over an ersatz one.

 

[All4You]

1980's as a teen hanging out with some buddies when we see these two gals walking down the way. They stopped to see what we were doing. At that time I'd normally never be able to muster the courage to talk to some random pretty girl, but seeing that tall redhead with big 1980's hair, built like a brick s***house and dressed like she just walked off the set of a music video...well I took a shot.

Turns out the redhead's family was just visiting from a few towns over to help the other gal's family move into their new house. 3 days later she and I went on our first date and have been together for 4 decades now. I'm glad I did something that was normally out of character for me, as I don't think our paths would've crossed again.

Life being random, risky and sometimes left to chance doesn't make it meaningless...it gives it meaning.

 

[DANC]

Interesting discussion here:

If Life Is Random, Is It Meaningless? (with Brian Klaas) - Econlib

How did a husband-and-wife vacation end up saving a city from the atomic bomb while destroying another? And how did a century-old murder of one family bring another into existence? Easily, explains political scientist Brian Klaas of University College London, who points out that history is...

www.econtalk.org

A lot of this is devoted to why the prevalence of randomness makes it important to limit our hubris about predictions from our social science and long-term forecasting models of inherently random events. It's important background information when we discuss COVID protocols, long term economic forecasting, and how much leniency to give experts on certain subjects, all things we've discussed a lot here.

But it also touches on the fundamental randomness that determines so much in our own lives. We bombed Hiroshima, instead of Kyoto, with the first A-bomb because a couple took a vacation to Kyoto in the '20s and fell in love with the city. The husband ended up being our Sec. of War overseeing the Targeting Committee for the bomb, and convinced the administration to bypass Kyoto.

I thought it would be interesting for posters to describe how randomness might have affected their own lives, too. For me, the first thing that comes to mind is this: freshman year at IU I had a seminar where we read the Great Books. It was one of my favorite classes in college. I became friends with a pretty blonde girl from Texas. She was unlike any other girl I had ever met--she had 22 credits already from AP courses (my high school didn't even have one) and had her life planned out--graduate IU in 3 years, go to law school at Univ. of Texas, and then on to DC to work for a Senator and into politics. I asked her why UT, and not Harvard, if she was shooting so high? She said UT had just as good a faculty, was much cheaper, and a better base for political work in Texas. Wow, OK. Fast forward 3 years, and I decided to go to law school and applied to UT because of her. Never would have considered it if she hadn't talked it up so much. And so I move to Austin, lived in Texas for 6 years, met my eventual wife there, have many of my best friends still there, etc. My entire life would, no doubt, be different had I not randomly had this class with this girl (and she wasn't as pretty or as cool as she was).

How has randomness affected your life?

I have many, but the one I find fascinating (not about me) is that when IU fired Wilson and hired Allen, Allen brought in Deboard as OC and let our then-OC, Kevin Johns, go.

Allen brings in his friend, Kane Wommak, as LB coach and moves him to DC the next year.

Allen recruits Michael Penix, who can't stay healthy at IU, but is a recognized talent.

Debord is 'retired' as OC and Kalen Deboer is hired as OC. Michael Penix is impressive under him when he's healthy.

Deboer leaves to be HC at Fresno State. The next year Wommack leaves to be HC at S. Alabama.

Deboer gets the UW job, Penix transfers and UW plays for the national championship and Penix finished 2nd in the Heisman race.

Allen is fired.

Within a couple weeks, Deboer is HC and Wommack is DC at Alabama. And Allen is DC at Penn State.

All after IU has 3 disastrous football seasons.

If Johns stays as OC, we'd probably never had hired Deboer and Allen might still be coach. And Deboer wouldn't have had Penix and known Wommack.

Talk about random acts coming together.

 

[Bowlmania]

If Johns stays as OC, we'd probably never had hired Deboer and Allen might still be coach.

IU's offense fell off during Johns' last season in 2016. And if Allen had never hired DeBoer, he (Allen) would have been gone a long time ago.