Bob Schwartz

“I am going to build a church someday. It will have a holy of holies and a holy of holy of holies, and in that ultimate box will be a random number table.”
Gregory Bateson

Randomness rules. Our attempts at order and control, intelligent or less so, benign or malignant, only go so far. Then randomness intervenes.

Good or bad, there it is. Which makes it worth contemplating, because maybe surprisingly, it turns out to be worth thinking about.

More and more, science has been humbled, realizing that any of its constructs don’t account for more and more observations. Order will only get you so far. Scientists didn’t need to apply all their hard-won expertise to realize that. As human beings they—we—already knew that, if we paid attention.

Please continue to do your best for the best by bringing some version of order to chaos. But be humble about it, not only aware of the limitations, but living in the limitations. Walk into Bateson’s church, into the holy of holies of holies of holies, and read that random number table. There you are.

Note: Randomness has plenty of practical applications. Lotteries can be found in the Bible. The I Ching has been reading random throws for millennia. If you are interested in exploring the practice of randomness, the options are many. Dice rolls, coin flips, etc. In digital times, a number of programs have been developed to generate as-close-to-true random numbers as possible. We can also turn to AI models to generate randomness, though they will tell you that for truer randomness, hardware-based applications come closer.