Perry Marshall: What is Random?

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I’ve been lurking on this discussion, not sure where to jump in (or too busy to). A few observations:

  1. Whatever sort of randomness we are talking about, there should be a Probability Density Function (PDF, or PMF). We have some empirical knowledge of this PDF, and from what I can tell, it is a mixture distribution of different types of events. Identifying those different event types would seem to be necessary before making claims about the mixture.

  2. Algorithmic randomness deals with sequences and compression. Randomness is this sense doesn’t apply to individual mutations, and would seem to be difficult to apply to sequences with mutations without a very high level of knowledge of biology. Any single event (or short series of events) will appear algorithmically random even if it deterministic.

  3. I’m not sure where this fits in, but censoring of various sorts is often present in biological data. The events we observe are often a biased sample, as some events may be unobserved for cause. Natural selection is a good example; if a creature fails to reproduce, we may never observe the mutation* responsible for the failure.

* assuming mutations are involved for this discussion.

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