As I occasionally pick up Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow,[1] which is always within reach, I often discover something or other that appears to be worthy of a closer look. More often than not, though, I am disappointed by what I find. But his view of randomness in life does attract me no end. In fact, it fascinates me. And there is a sentence in the book that I regularly rediscover, as if it were planted there just to grab my attention over and over again: “We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.”[2] In other words, randomness is not our thing. Eager to discover patterns, we are too clever by half. I remember being fascinated with statistics as a graduate student at Harvard, for I had a feeling that it offered the only way out of our proclivity to see patterns all around us. Later on I even taught statistics, but to no avail. Randomness still escapes me, and ever more as I get longer in the tooth. But I bet the same holds for Kahneman, as well. His convoluted sentence about our blindness to randomness is the proof.

Footnotes

1. New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011.

2. Op. cit., p. 117.