Unpredictable patterns #101: Make 2025 more random

On the practical uses of chance

Dear reader,

The beginning of each new year provides us with a - curiously random - point to re-examine old approaches, ideas and habits. Our New Year’s resolutions provide a chance to remake ourselves, but we often find this terribly hard as we regress to the mean. So how can we really change? One answer to that question is that we can draw on chance. (An earlier exploration of this theme is found in #47 - but here we will focus on the practical uses of randomness in personal change¹).

Learning from evolution

Let’s start with looking at how nature uses randomness. Evolution injects randomness in its process and draws on it to craft adaptive strategies in a number of different ways:

First, random mutations provide the raw material for evolution, generating genetic diversity upon which natural selection acts. Mutations occur due to errors in DNA replication, exposure to environmental factors, or spontaneous chemical changes in genetic material. While most mutations are neutral or deleterious, some lead to beneficial traits that enhance an organism’s fitness. The neutral theory of molecular evolution, proposed by Motoo Kimura, emphasizes that much of this genetic variation is neutral, yet it forms a reservoir of diversity from which advantageous mutations can occasionally emerge when environmental conditions change (Kimura, 1968).² In this way, evolution “uses” randomness to create a spectrum of potential adaptations, ensuring that populations have latent genetic tools to adapt to unforeseen challenges.

Second, sexual reproduction further structures randomness through genetic recombination, which shuffles alleles during the formation of gametes. This process, studied extensively by John Maynard Smith (1978), increases genetic diversity by combining genes from two parents into new configurations.³ Recombination allows populations to explore a wider range of the fitness landscape without relying solely on mutation. By maintaining beneficial gene combinations while testing novel ones, evolution accelerates the rate at which advantageous adaptations can emerge. Recombination is particularly critical in dynamic environments, where populations must adapt to shifting selective pressures by rapidly generating new phenotypic combinations.

Third, in addition to mutation and recombination, random genetic drift—changes in allele frequencies due to pure chance—plays a significant role, especially in small populations. Drift introduces stochastic fluctuations that allow populations to occasionally “jump” across adaptive valleys in the fitness landscape, potentially escaping local optima and discovering higher peaks (Wright, 1932).⁴ For instance, Sewall Wright’s shifting balance theory illustrates how small, isolated populations subject to drift can explore new evolutionary pathways, which can later spread to the broader population through gene flow. This interplay between randomness and selection creates a dynamic balance where chance events catalyze long-term adaptive strategies, demonstrating how evolution leverages stochasticity as a creative force.

So, is selection or randomness the real driving force in evolution? This question has been the subject of heated debate in the biology community, and the role of drift and randomness is still under scrutiny. What we can say, though, is that it may well be that both play an important role, but under different environmental circumstances.

In stable environments the careful selection of qualities that have clear adaptive value works better. In unstable environments with high uncertainty, randomness - especially if it is compartmentalized in different clades - provides the more robust exploration of the adaptive horizon .

If we extend this in analogy to our own personal decision making we can ask ourselves this: what kind of year is it? A selection year or a drift year? We should have a little of both, and far too often our age’s incessant focus on individual decision making and control undervalues the importance of personal drift as opposed to personal choice.

Limits

Let’s say we want to increase randomness in our lives, then. How should we start? What kinds of randomness do we want to introduce, and how can we use different tools to do so?⁵

First, let’s admit that there will be limits to how much randomness and drift we want. Some kind of balance between choice and drift is important to maintain. The kind of fatalism inherent in giving one’s own life up entirely to randomness is hardly attractive.

We can find an example of this in Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man (1971) - a story built on the strange allure that giving everything over to chance has (there is a tempting lack of accountability in allowing randomness to take the reins of our lives).

In the book Rhinehart gives over his life’s decision to the throw of the dice, and we follow how his life unravels and how a small cult following emerges around his decision. The book, interestingly, sold badly in the US (where personal choice is heavily valued over personal drift) - but was a best seller in Sweden and Denmark.

If we adopt a pure random strategy in our lives, we also dissolve ourselves: accountability requires that we make some choices, and own them. The purely random player cannot enter into any relationships, cannot make any promises or engage in any long term projects.⁶

Rhinehart, then, provides us with one limit on how much randomness we want. What is the other limit? When do we plan too much? That seems harder to define: no matter how hard we plan some degree of randomness will seep into what we do, right?

One way to determine the lower limit of randomness we allow in our lives is to look at how predictable we have become. Are we set in our ways? Look back at a journal entry a year ago - or your social media memory prompts: were you doing the same a a year ago as you are doing now? If so that might be an indication that you have too little randomness in your life.

More than anything, you will feel if you are stuck in a rut. We have an acute sense of stagnation - of when things disappear into routine. Time seems to disappear and days melt into one another. The experience of time is an interesting thing, and a good diagnostic tool — the timescapes we create and inhabit deserve closer attention.⁷

So, you will know it when you feel it.

Habits of randomness - and the tools that let us try them

Ok, as with any New Year’s resolution we should expect that there are tools, apps and other ways to try to stick to or explore the resolution, and this is true also for injecting randomness.

One of the simplest and perhaps most interesting ways of injecting randomness in your life is to turn to ancient fortune telling devices like the Tarot and the I Ching.

By using these to explore decisions, problems and projects you will force yourself to see the world in a new way. The advantage of this is also that these tools have evolved over time to represent a structured spectrum of random inputs to human decision making: really good fortune telling devices must have had some adaptive fit with how we explore the world and examine our own decisions - and when we should draw on those strengths.

The oldest fortune telling techniques are, at their heart, artificial cognitive strategies for exploring issues and questions more deeply and if we use them regularly they will broaden our ability.

If fortune telling feels to radical, there are other, more modest modifications to our lives that could be interesting to explore.

• Try a random book generator (like this or this) to find books that you would otherwise not read. Commit to reading one random book every month or so. If you want to range more widely try a random ISBN-number generator.

• Shift up your run, walk to the office or bike tour with a tool like Route Shuffle.

• Use apps like Random Questions to explore things you would not ask yourself.

• Practice stichomancy by randomly taking a book and looking at a page. Works best, I find, with poetry.

Becoming more random is, in fact, not that hard!

And then?

Resolving to become more random is perhaps more of a fun thing for most of us - but there are deeper questions about randomness, its role in our lives and societies and how we should think about randomness overall. We will come back to this - but to conclude we should just note that there are a lot of areas where a little randomness might make us much stronger.

One example of this is democracy. It has been suggested that democracies should incorporate election by lot - as was the case in many older societies - and so perhaps 1/3 of a parliament should be elected randomly to ensure that we have better representation. These randomly selected parliamentarians should then not be eligible for re-election, but serve their time as they saw best - and then leave public life.

In looking at different reforms for democracy, this stands out to me as one that would be worthwhile trying.

Understanding the true, deeper nature of randomness might also allow us to understand more about intelligence - and how it has evolved in an uncertain world. Randomness - like the randomness of forgetting - plays an intricate role in crafting our individual selves and our consciousness.

A respect for randomness is also a good starting point to really savour our one and only life.

Thanks for reading,

Nicklas

P.S There are now other sections on the website as well — one on essays where I posted a short draft essay on ”The End of the Model” and one for coming book chapters where there is a first chapter from a book on foresight and futures in draft. Do let me know if you want to be included in these sections of the newsletter.

1. I prefer the term ”personal change” to ”personal development”, since I am not sure we ever really develop in a linear fashion. People morph, change, evolve and become different - but not necessary more mature, better or wiser.

2. See Kimura, M. (1968). Evolutionary rate at the molecular level. Nature, 217(5129), pp.624-626.

3. See Maynard Smith, J. (1978). The Evolution of Sex. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

4. See Wright, S. (1932). The roles of mutation, inbreeding, crossbreeding, and selection in evolution. Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress on Genetics, 1(6), pp.356-366.

5. There is a surprising market for randomness out there, with a lot of interesting services of different kinds.

6. Interestingly there is a follow up book - In Search of the Dice Man (2015) - in which Rhinehart is confronted by his son, Larry, over exactly this.

7. See for a fascinating discussion about timescapes in prison: Wahidin, A. (2006). Time and the prison experience. Sociological Research Online, 11(1). Available at: https://www.socresonline.org.uk/11/1/wahidin.html [Accessed 12 January 2025].