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Looking For Info On Randomness

Queen of Pentacles

Fresh Blood
Joined
Jun 26, 2019
Messages
8
Hello, All.

I am a writer -- and no, you've never heard of me or read any of my work because I am relatively unknown. I focus on fringe science, but treat it in a respectful manner.

I am researching on the subject of introducing randomness and how it impacts our lives, specifically creativity. I am wondering if anyone here has personal anecdotes about the subject? Like do you ever go the wrong way home on a whim, or call someone you haven't spoken to on the fly? What are the results? Do you find things change in your life?
 
Do you mean mathematical randomness? There's some interesting stuff about that and of course it affects all our lives ...
 
Minor point, but being somewhat linguistically focused, I do take pleasure in the idea of a likely 'original utterance': an intelligible phrase, thought or sentence that despite the billions of people who have lived and died on Earth has likely never been thought or spoken aloud before.

Superstitiously, the pleasure only exists when these phrases are unpremeditated and arise organically.

For example, while helping a colleague in the office the other day I called out (something like): "Banana number four and the monkeys on the rocket won't copy properly because we're out of yellow ink" (I was photocopying). I then stopped for a moment to reflect on what an odd thing I'd just said.

And given that utterance is born of thought, and thoughts usually stem from states of affairs in the world, what I really relish is the fact that despite the endless repetitions of life and the cosmos over fourteen billion years, the twisted chains of causality still throw up the most unlikely situations with likely unique constructions arising from us to reflect them.

Whether this is 'random' enough for your taste really depends, I suppose, on whether you believe the universe that is unfolding to be preordained and our lives to be running on rails that were laid down in the big bang, or whether the chain of causality to be genuinely susceptible to chance and the nudges of consciousness.

Sorry to take your topic sideways at the first step.
 
Minor point, but being somewhat linguistically focused, I do take pleasure in the idea of a likely 'original utterance': an intelligible phrase, thought or sentence that despite the billions of people who have lived and died on Earth has likely never been thought or spoke aloud before.

Superstitiously, the pleasure only exists when these phrases are unpremeditated and arise organically.

For example, while helping a colleague in the office the other day I called out (something like): "Banana number four and the monkeys on the rocket won't copy properly because we're out of yellow ink" (I was photocopying). I then stopped for a moment to reflect on what an odd thing I'd just said.

And given that utterance is born of thought, and thoughts usually stem from states of affairs in the world, what I really relish is the fact that despite the endless repetitions of life and the cosmos over fourteen billion years, the twisted chains of causality still throw up the most unlikely situations with likely unique constructions arising from us to reflect them.

Whether this is 'random' enough for your taste really depends, I suppose, on whether you believe the universe that is unfolding to be preordained and our lives to be running on rails that were laid down in the big bang or susceptible to chance and the nudges of consciousness.

Sorry to take your topic sideways at the first step.

Not sure if it does, because I am in the very early stages of research. I could go into a long-winded discussion, but at this point it is becoming a book.

The crux of it is how introducing randomness into our lives fosters creativity and changes us or our reality.

For instance, say you participate in an experiment to make an item of clothing from the next item that is handed you and share it with the world. Someone gives you a box of paperclips. You put them together and make a necktie, and you publish a picture on Instagram. People love it, want one and pretty soon you have a business making art that is an indictment of the corporate world. This is something you would never considered because you have never been exposed to creating art, much less considered you could make a living doing so.

I am wondering how introducing randomness might change our lives.

In your example above, you may never considered how truly novel language might be imbued with magical powers. Maybe now you are more aware of that or even just bananas. Did this lead to any new approaches in life?

See where I am going? Randomness may have enormous power to change our way of thinking and by extension, our lives.
 
Have you read The Dice Man? Very fashionable book in the 1970s where randomness powers the plot (all directed by the throw of the dice), and supposedly based on a true story. Could be a good case study, though I'm not sure how seriously to take it.
 
Have you read The Dice Man? Very fashionable book in the 1970s where randomness powers the plot (all directed by the throw of the dice), and supposedly based on a true story. Could be a good case study, though I'm not sure how seriously to take it.
I will take a look.
 
White noise (which is the level a desired signal must rise above) is simple the Random occurrence of all frequencies occurring simultaneously. A thought on randomness and how it effects all with a radar or radio of any kind.
 
I'm not confident that what you're addressing is "randomness" in the strict sense of (more or less) being absolutely incapable of being predicted or foreseen relative to any and all other possibilities within a set constrained only by one's imagination - i.e., "random" with respect to the most generally conceivable context. Here's why I say this ...

I have a half-century of experience in, and a consistent reputation for, novelty / innovation / "creativity" in (e.g.) graphic arts, music, writing, analysis, theory formulation, and design. In each of these areas I've sometimes found myself bogged down or stalled - even at the very beginning of whatever is being undertaken. This has happened to me in both solo and collective (e.g., team) endeavors.

I've often overcome such impasses by "jumping sideways" in terms of conceptualization, activity, or the perspective taken on the subject matter. Newcomers often see my tangents as mad, but longer-term colleagues have learned there's a method of sorts in play.

Such lateral exploratory movement isn't usually done by being utterly "random" in the strict sense mentioned above. Such absolute "randomness" implies an unconstrained space of possible actions. In the course of pursuing some outcome or goal (be it composing / arranging a song, searching for a metaphor, designing a decision making environment, etc.) I'm always operating within a subset of the conceivable possibilities - i.e., a more constrained set that is to some extent "anchored" (with regard to the matter at hand) and "bounded" (in terms of what's possible at that point in my progress or given prior steps).

In other words, when I jump sideways I'm always doing so with the present scenario / situation / position as my starting point. At the extreme, I can jump sideways back the way I'd come and start all over again, or even jump to a reasonably sound vision of the final outcome and work my way back. More often than not, I'm simply stepping out for a spacewalk from wherever I am at the moment.

My point is that in practice the terrain or space for maneuvering is always given to some extent, and my lateral moves aren't so much "random" in the strictest sense as "unexpected" or "anomalous" movements orthogonal to the place where I / we sit stalled and / or the course being taken at the point I / we stalled.

Sure, I may invoke strict randomness (e.g., rolling dice) at the outset or at some juncture in the sideways maneuver for the sake of instantaneous direction-setting, but the overall maneuver itself is never completely "random" in that same idealized sense. If it were, I might never come back and abandon the creative / design task entirely. Abandoning the creative path is admittedly a valid option, but it negates the possibility of the spacewalk contributing to the objective or outcome pursued.

No such spacewalk is constructive unless it ends with your returning to and re-occupying your vehicle, then moving on in some direction which may or may not be the heading followed at the point you stalled.
 
Perhaps "novel" would be a better term. I am not sure where I am going with this, I am hoping hearing from others sparks something.

My working hypothesis is that when we introduce novelty, we open up to new possibilities. It may be a mind change or it may be getting us out of a rut. I am not sure about this.
 
Queen of Pentacles, have you read the short, sci-fi story, "RUM-titty-titty-tum-TAH-tee"?
 
Another literary allusion - this one from vintage mysteries. Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op (often cited as the original prototype for the hard-boiled detective) was ruthless in getting to the bottom of things. Whenever he couldn't solve a problem or resolve a situation he would simply "shake things up" to see what happened. He'd lie, manipulate, etc., to induce stress among the parties of interest and then sit back to see who did what in response.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Continental_Op

More generally stated ... The Continental Op deliberately injected chaos into the system / scenario to force a sort of stress test hoped to result in a breakdown leading to a breakthrough.

Chaos can be construed as an instrument of uncertainty akin to, but a bit less open-ended and a lot less pleasant than, ultimate "randomness" (in the formal sense). The Op's tactic of proactively shaking things up for a reason isn't the same as passively casting one's lot with any of innumerable options just to browse possibilities. His approach is more along the lines of invoking "randomness" with malice aforethought.

Here's a hopefully illustrative example ...

In high school I was one of the founding members of the new chess club. I was a casual / gonzo player who simply liked playing the game. Serious study of the game took all the fun out of it, so I never tried to become an expert. An older nerd / geek friend (Don) and I were among the early favorites to win the club's inaugural tournament. Don was serious about his chess. He'd delved into the game's formal intricacies (knew all the classic gambits by name, etc., etc.). On a more personal level, Don was a relatively highly-strung and twitchy guy who was easily agitated.

Don and I met in one of the semi-final matches, and all the others gathered round to watch. Don quickly gained the upper hand via name-brand gambits, and he was so obviously closing in for the kill he was getting twitchy with confidence rather than the usual fretfulness.

I knew the game was lost as I considered my nth move with no attractive options. In effect, and out of desperation, I channeled the Op.

Don was actively discussing my (not his) possible options and their inevitable futility out loud as I studied the board. After giving him enough time to explain how screwed I was, I made my move ...

I castled (swapped king and rook in my rearmost rank). It was a completely useless and unexpected move.

Don started to make his pretty obvious next move, then grimaced in confusion and sat back. He repeatedly examined the board, looked at me, and shook his head. In a matter of only a couple of minutes he was twitching uncomfortably, muttering about WTF I thought I was doing, and breaking out in a sweat. The twitching got worse and worse until he gave up trying to figure out what I was doing and made a conservative move as if he were the doomed one on the defensive.

His confusion over that one cryptic move and what it might mean continued to grow until he fell apart. Meanwhile, I slowly undermined and negated his advantage on the way to finally getting the checkmate and the match.

Don immediately made a scene of it. He interrogated me about the pivotal castling maneuver, demanding to know what arcane variation of a canonical gambit I'd used to blind-side him. He wouldn't / couldn't accept the truth - I'd quit strategizing on the chessboard and switched to attacking his psychological equipoise. It would take another year or so and multiple such interrogations before he'd admit I'd played him and it had worked.
 
Queen: I suggest that you delve into Twentieth Century Modern Art.

The post-First World War European anti-art art movement lead by Tristan Tsara called Dadaism introduced the use of chance and randomness into art works. Arists were encouraged to incorporate `found objects into their creations and some abstract compositions were made by, for example, dropping coloured squares onto a space and letting their chance arrangement be the final work. Not all fellow avant-gardists accepted this embrace of `chaos` - which was very controversial at the time (when the `artist`, no matter how subconciously motivated, was always seen as the sole originator of their work) -but the allowance of a degree of chance has since become mainstream in many conceptual art projects.

Yes, and Luke Rheinhart's Diceman books (there were two, I think) - although I found the first one impossible to get through (claustraphobically self-absorbed and very very American seventies).

So far, Poldark hasn’t featured ONE Cornish Pasty.

I wonder if the training needed to become a certified plumber in Mongolia is more, or less, stringent than would be the case in Western Europe?

(This suggests a new thread!)
 
Perhaps "novel" would be a better term. I am not sure where I am going with this, I am hoping hearing from others sparks something.

My working hypothesis is that when we introduce novelty, we open up to new possibilities. It may be a mind change or it may be getting us out of a rut. I am not sure about this.

I seem to recall something...it might be from my old Casteneda days, but I think there's something to do with intentionally altering the regular paths that you walk everyday. In doing so, you might "alter reality" if I'm remembering the wording right. Something about reality expecting you to do a thing you regularly do, so doing something different opens up odd pathways and such.
 
I seem to recall something...it might be from my old Casteneda days, but I think there's something to do with intentionally altering the regular paths that you walk everyday. In doing so, you might "alter reality" if I'm remembering the wording right. Something about reality expecting you to do a thing you regularly do, so doing something different opens up odd pathways and such.

I recall that, too. However, I don't recall it in any more detail than your expressed.
 
Another literary allusion for the "start small; let change occur" theme would be Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber series. The adepts moved via manipulating "shadows" - essentially side-slipping through realities / possible worlds until reaching their intended destination. It always started with shifting something small, then moved through changing bigger and bigger "chunks".
 
It's "novelty" rather than "randomness", but ...

An impasse-breaking meta-tactic I've often used over the decades isn't so much shaking things up as inverting things. For example:

- When a team is at loggerheads with well-defined opposing opinions, force them to each and / or collectively swap sides and argue the other position. Particularly among team members with different specialties or approaches, this can lead to surfacing flaws or things overlooked. If nothing else, it helps everyone better understand the opposing position / opinion.

- If stalled on a problem involving a particular relationship or connection (e.g., "X leads to Y"), force brainstorming on the reverse (e.g., "If Y, then X - really?"; "If Y - then what else besides X?"). This sometimes results in directly or indirectly recognizing flaws or deficiencies in understanding the relationship / connection as originally framed.

- If stalled on how to reach outcome X (e.g., X = improve process efficiency), force brainstorming on the diametrically opposed goal (e.g., how to degrade process efficiency). Sometimes the clues for improvement fall out of the knowledge for making things worse.
 
William Burroughs used his "cut-up" technique to write his books, where he would arrange words and phrases randomly to create his stories. David Bowie adopted it to write songs, too.
 
William Burroughs used his "cut-up" technique to write his books, where he would arrange words and phrases randomly to create his stories. David Bowie adopted it to write songs, too.
I think Bowie got these ideas from Eno.
 
You're thinking of those randomness cards for creativity Eno devised; I think Bowie was using cut-ups before he met Eno (though I'm willing to be proven wrong).
They were doing these things around the same time. Bowie was doing cut-up in the 1970s.

Eno's Oblique Strategies, invented 1975:
They were most famously used by Eno during the recording of David Bowie's Berlin triptych of albums (Low, "Heroes", Lodger). Stories suggest they were used during the recording of instrumentals on "Heroes" such as "Sense of Doubt" and were used more extensively on Lodger ("Fantastic Voyage", "Boys Keep Swinging", "Red Money"). They were used again on Bowie's 1995 album Outside, which Eno was involved with as a writer, producer and musician. Carlos Alomar, who worked with Eno and Bowie on all these albums, was a fan of using the cards, later saying "at the Center for Performing Arts at the Stevens Institute of Technology, where I teach, on the wall are Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards. And when my students get a mental block, I immediately direct them to that wall."

I guess Bowie used both?
 
I must say, I loved EnolaGaia’s take on creativity. Far from trying to catch lightning in a bottle, there’s techniques to be used in being ‘spontaneous’.
Try as much as you like, it’s really hard to be creative on cue unless you’ve a fairly practiced random series of responses you have in the bank beforehand.
This bank isn’t something you can borrow from another source though. It’s something you personally have to work on yourself on a trial and error basis.
I did advertising with deadlines. Try as I might, the answer to a problem remained elusive until I stopped thinking about it and then, on monday mornng on the train, an answer would often just pop into my head when I wasn’t thinking about it.
I then took up art as a means of paying the bills. I had to learn a new technique which was to keep a piece of paper to one side of the artwork and start doodling and loosening up on that before starting to move the hand to the actual job itself.

In digital art, we set concept speedpainting challenges on random subjects.

If I was approaching a block on creative writing, I’d probably choose a route of writing down a few numbers at random.
3, 6, 145, 4.

Book, Third shelf down. Sixth from the left. Page 145. 4th paragraph. I’d take that as a random and work out how I’d rewrite it. As a loosener.
 
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