[extropy-chat] Note on "Random (effects without a cause)" comment

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Jeff Medina <analyticphilosophy at gmail.com> wrote:
> I come across a lot of people equivocating randomness in a colloquial
> sense of "random mutations" with indeterminism or acausality (i.e.,
> they take "a random effect" to mean "an effect without a cause"). If
> this is purely linguistic, feel free to ignore this message, with the
> minor request that we make an effort to stop using these terms
> interchangeably; it promotes public confusion about various areas of
> science, like evolution.
> 
> In case it's conceptual, please note that no "random mutation" in
> evolution is acausal or "an effect without a cause." They are
> mutations *without a known cause* (in most cases) and *without a goal
> or purpose*.

This spreads to the generic use of "random", and indeed to the very
concept of that which is known.  Many people think that reality
consists only of exactly what we know (like established science), and
of that which we can never know (like, as many of them would phrase it,
God's mind).  This attitude is of course trivial to prove false - any
new discovery suffices, and we're making new discoveries all the time
these days - but it persists.

In the mean time, of course anything that anyone says is always only
ever to the best of their knowledge (unless they're deliberately being
less than fully truthful, but that's another story).  No one can be
reasonably expected to know things that they don't know.  All facts
about the real world are conditional upon new evidence proving them
wrong (save for purely logical proofs that don't rely at some level on
any observations of the real world - but those are therefore not "facts
about the real world").  It is natural to strip away unnecessary words,
so "to the best of my knowledge" is usually reserved for when it needs
to be stressed more than usual, despite the fact that it almost always
applies.

Not sure what the best solution is to this here.  But always saying "to
the best of my knowledge" would, to the best of my knowledge, quickly
become tiresome and an impediment to communication.  To the best of my
knowledge, it is usually better to avoid such impediments.