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Randomness doesn’t mean equal distribution
This quote came up in my notes a few days ago, and it felt similar to a post I had recently written about how infinite numbers don’t include everything.
If you have a system that generates random output, there is no guarantee that the results will be perfectly distributed. If you output something random 1,000,000 times, things should end up pretty close but you never know for sure.
In the early days of the iPod, many users were convinced that the “shuffle” feature wasn’t really shuffling properly because certain songs would come up multiple times when others hadn’t been played once yet. The New York Times ran an excellent article about it, and Seth Godin summarized it in “ All Marketers are Liars “ like this:
The article was about people who were convinced that they shuffle feature on their iPods was broken. They were certain their iPods favored some songs over others. But randomness doesn’t necessarily dictate that the songs be distributed evenly.
In a way, this links back to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, which ties into why people think that Facebook and Google are listening to them. They’re not, but when “random” ads seem to show a close resemblance to something you recently said out loud, it sure feels like they were listening.
