[roenxi]

Nice article, there is an even easier interpretation though:

The mathematics of probability defines a bunch of objects that do not exist, anywhere. Random variables, expectations, probabilities, maybe a few others. Then there are situations in the real world that look a lot like those objects from certain perspectives.

It is a bit like Escher's Ascending and Descending - sometimes people make things in the real world that look like the infinite staircase when viewed from the right spot. Similarly, sometimes we find things that look probabilistic (dice rolls, coin flips) when viewed in ignorance of the sum totality of the entire universe. That is why there are a bunch of statistical tests that determine if outcomes are distinguishable from a hypothetical process generating that outcome.

tl; dr; I like the article, but it seems to answer it's own headline with "yes" and it is much easier to answer it with "no". There is, philosophically speaking, nothing that we can guarantee looks random from all perspectives.

[analog31]

Perhaps the most useful connection is that statistics lets us study what kind of math we can do, when we know something about a set, but not everything about it. And our experience with the world is like that too.

[burrows]

> There is, philosophically speaking, nothing that we can guarantee looks random from all perspectives.

Does this imply that the universe is deterministic?

I believe it is false to claim “Humans have knowledge that the universe is deterministic.”

[thisiszilff]

I think this is related to the bayesian/frequentist approach to statistics. Bayesian statistics revolves around incorporating knowledge to update beliefs and probabilities express degrees of belief. IE, bayesian probability is the logic of uncertainty and how we should reason with imperfect information.

The most famous example of this is the "draw a ball from an urn" example, and how we frequently day we "shake" the urn after we add the balls to "randomize" it. There is a lot of wordplay going on in stats to effectively forget certain information so that the problem I'd workable

[roenxi]

It means we can't be certain. Whether the universe is random or deterministic is, ironically, a matter of probabilities.