Random people will make the next big thing
People who have a sense of randomness are the ones who come up with the good ideas.
Randomness is defined as “the quality or state of lacking a pattern or principle of organization; unpredictability.”
In humans, this sort of characteristic is thought to be linked to creativity and cognitive complexity.
In the Journal of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, researchers published results based on creativity output and the ability to generate randomness. Individuals with the capacity to generate randomness in selecting items are more original and have greater creative achievements.
Around age 25, the researchers determined, people are best able to produce a random result.
Traditionally, computational tools for studying random behaviour have been limited, according to Assistant Professor Hector Zenil, an author of the study, published in Plos Computational Biology, and a co-leader of the Algorithmic Dynamics Lab at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.
You can take random test he used here which is a compilation of five tasks of randomness. These include mimicking a series of random coin flips or dice rolls where you guess which card appears when selected from a randomly shuffled deck, or arrange a grid of black and white boxes to look random.
Measuring how participants performed against several factors, including age, sex and educational background, the researchers found a strong trend only with age.
On average, performance improved from childhood to the mid-20s. It then stayed relatively high until the 60s, after which it began to decline.
For those older than 60, though, there was no need to fret. Not only was the difference between participants aged 25 and those aged 60 relatively small, but there are probably other trade-offs influencing creative capacity, Prof Zenil said.
For instance, “you may be less able to produce randomness but have much more experience to draw from”, he said.
In Woody Allen’s “Irrational Man”, Abe, played by Joaquin Phoenix, overhears an injustice in a conversation and uses it as a seed for a randomness which results in an act of violence.
Kids should be random.
So what about that childhood to 25 bit, are kids random in their behavior? I think we should consider that a playtime is a kids canvas for expressing randomness.
Parents and teachers cutting back on children’s playtime aren’t doing it to be mean, they believe that in an increasingly competitive world, there’s less time for a kid to be a kid; that is, free, unstructured play doesn’t have the payoff that another lesson or test-prep class would.
They’re restricting playtime because they want their children to thrive. And evolutionary biologists might have once backed them up. Play is, by definition, an activity that has little clear immediate function. That’s what separates it from work or education.
The apparent randomness of play may be its secret genius. Part of what sets humans apart from other animals is the range of creativity, flexibility and adaptation.
That’s precisely what free play — play without the encircling structure of adults — helps promote. Children who can entertain themselves, or play with one another, are unconsciously learning how to adapt themselves to challenges they’ll face further down the road.
This is especially true of the pretend play that is most characteristic of human children. (Rats, as far as we know, do not have imaginary friends.) Play, in this way, can be thought of as education by another name — which is another reason we should be concerned that free playtime is now being taken up by structured activities or screen time.
A randomness App
And then what do we do from 25 on, there has gotta be an app for introducing randomness in our life.
So thought Max Hawkins who was a programmer at Google with what some would consider a perfect life; he woke to artisanal coffee, biked to work along the beautiful Embarcadero waterfront roadway, lunched on Google’s famed free food and got invited to many happy hours.
“I just started thinking about these loops that we get into,” he says. “And about how the structure of your life … completely determines what happens in it.” A bubble of experience.
As any computer developer would do, Max turned to technology to craft his way out — a series of randomization applications.
He built one app that used a Facebook search function for public events to find ones near him. Then the app would randomly choose which event Max would attend.
At first, he was nervous: What if people wouldn’t let him in? But once Max explained how and why he had arrived at these events, hosts usually welcomed him, often with only a few questions asked. Most of the time, people were taken by the idea of Max expanding his bubble.
One night, he got to drink white Russians with some Russians. Another, he attended acroyoga (as in, acrobatics + yoga). A community center pancake breakfast. A networking event for young professionals. The algorithm chose; Max attended.
Most of these events were something that the nonrandomized Max would never have thought to try. Nor would you. The computer was breaking him out of a life driven by his own preferences. He was suddenly seeing the world in a whole new way, and he really liked it.
Check out his Facebook group that encourages people to attend strangers’ publicly listed events and offers tips and tricks for doing so. He shares updates on his projects on his website.
Need some more random thoughts.
Hunter-gatherers did not evolve in a world of 200 types of gelato, 25-row grocery stores, and 70-aisle superstores. Throughout most of human history, we ate what we could find. We did what we could do to survive on a daily basis. Which means most days we didn’t know what our lives were going to look like at the beginning of the day. We didn’t have an alarm clock and calendar guiding us on rigorous, inflexible routines.
Over-optimizing our lives is an inherently unnatural process. We’re meant to experience randomness, variation, excess, and scarcity.
You can figure out how to introduce randomness into your life. There will be more apps and chatbots dedicated to bubble bursting. The exact degree it might be helpful to you probably depends on the specifics of your personality and circumstances. But I’d encourage anyone who has made it thus far to give it a shot, even if it’s just in a few small things. If you work as a creative or innovator I would say that it should be considered a tool of the trade.
Here, start by listening to a random unheard song. If you feel really random, try Max’s random event app.
