🎲 Rumblism

WORK IN PROGRESS

Stuck on a flat Earth in a sealed box, our brightest minds set out to find the source of The Rumblings, a mystery as old as time. And so they took the reasonable approach of measuring and modelling them.

notes

Up+, down-, top heavy, bottom light, strange unexpected, charmed solution.

shitpost

Say you live in a box and are perplexed by rumbling sounds that happen periodically. You measure the incident times, which are totally unpredictable with the information you have (being stuck in a box) but they follow an interesting pattern. You create a probability function that fits the measurements perfectly. The result is that you can predict these rumblings on average with remarkable accuracy, other people in your box are impressed. Is it fair to assume that the rumblings are actually random in nature?

Does this apparent randomness prove that randomness underpins the nature of reality? Is the mystery of the rumblings actually solved? Well it turns out the rumbling sounds are actually buses driving past outside. What you have made is a model, a busfunction that’s a conjugation of the bus timetable and average deviations from it due to variations in local traffic. But you don’t know a road is because you live in a box. There’s no way out of the box, no way to learn what a road even is and so the mystery of the rumbling sounds is actually completely unknowable in your universe. But the fact that you modelled it as a probability function led you to believe that buses themselves were random, and this in turn led you to believe in randomness itself. That is faulty reasoning regardless. The problem is, we fundamentally cant tell the difference between something that’s unpredictable and something that’s random. Whether I have a bus timetable or not doesn’t change that.