POLI 380 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Randomness
Document Summary
Things happen and caused by two kind of things: systematic, predictable forces or actions, a collection of random forces (plural). A prediction of the future and interpretation of the past is fundamentally about separating predictable forces from random forces. Smoking is a systematic cause of lung cancer: smoking is not a deterministic cause of lung cancer, people can smoke and not have a lung cancer and vice versa, genetic and environmental factors could cause lung cancer. Why do things happen: systematic factor, unknown systematic factor (air freshener might cause lung cancer, maybe. , truly random forces (tossing a coin). Individual cases are just cases; patterns emerge when we look at many cases. Our belief about the role of systematic causes and random processes can depend on whether we look at individual cases or a whole large set of cases. One way to understand randomness is through probability: we should see the distribution of the ways it turns out.
