Monday, 28 August 2017

Different levels of randomness


In the real life, we often face some random events and I think these events have different levels of randomness. The simplest and most common random event is flipping a coin, the probability of having a tail or a head is roughly 50%; however, the majority of the random events have multiple layers of randomness. Usually events with more layers of randomness are more difficult to estimate their probabilities of different states.

I think that the reason that we are unable to accurately estimate the probabilities of the majority of the events in our real life is based on our limitation of observations. If we assume everything can interact with each other to some degree, then any event is caused by a series of  factors that are also interacting and influencing with each other. From this point, we can imagine there is a series of events, and we only observe a part in this series. At least some of the events that we consider as completely random and black swan events are caused by our limitation on observation that we are only able to observe a tiny part of the series of its causes.

However, there are some completely random events. I think these random events generally take place independently, which means other events will not influence their probabilities of taking place, but they can influence the probabilities for other events to take place. They can be the fundamental causes for the existence of randomness in our real world.

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