Random Chance

I feel like if you've spent a little time studying Statistics (or maybe even if you haven't) it's difficult not to become a bit fascinated with the concept of random chance. In the classroom, of course, randomness is an academic concept that must be defined and implemented as you examine data; it's a bit difficult to wrap your mind around, since our minds are not random instruments but tools that we use to sort out the world into series of discernible patterns.

If you pay attention, though, you can see random chance as more of a metaphysical force in the world. I was reading a book on airline incidents and policy called The Plane Truth by Roger Cobb and David Primo (Yes, an offshoot of my obsession with airplanes is a corresponding morbid interest in plane crashes). The authors, in their introduction to the issue, exorcised our general need to know the "cause" of a plane crash. Knowing the cause, we feel, means that future incidents will be prevented and we as a traveling public will be made safer on the whole.

Cobb and Primo, however, offer a single explainable cause for every air disaster: random chance. Of course, there could be mechanical issues or pilot error, but the possibility of preventing every last one of these misfortunes is non-existent. Aircraft are incredibly complicated pieces of equipment, and a series of concurrent failures will abruptly end a flight in an unpleasant way. When this happens, we search to connect these combined failures in a way that makes sense out of them. Cobb and Primo explain:

"[The public] perceive links between rare events that occur close in time, even if none exists, so they can avoid accepting that randomness is to blame." (Page 10)

Denying random chance inside the aircraft is a helpful way of keeping people flying. It's difficult enough to cede control over your safety to a team you've never met--pilots, flight attendants, ATC, etc.--without having to cede control over your safety to randomness.

On our street right now is a rather striking reminder that it's not just inside the aircraft cabin that your life is subject to the harrowing nature of random chance. A few weeks ago, we were hit with a short but ferocious thunderstorm. During the storm, Holly heard an odd sound outside, which we quickly discovered had been one of our neighbor's trees falling into the street on top of a car. From our perspective, is seemed like an impressive but innocuous scene out in the street.

The next morning, however, we saw differently. The tree had not just fallen over a car, it had basically obliterated it.

Random chance at work on East Cummings Ave.

We later learned from our neighbors that the driver of the car had been sitting in it just moments before the fall. He had waited for a "lull" in the rains before running into the house and had done so a few heartbeats before his car became a carefully crafted paper weight.

The car is still sitting in the road, giving our street a bit of a war-zone feeling to it. I don't consider it an eye-sore, but an ode to the random nature of life. How many times have we heard that inside a car is a "safe place" during a thunderstorm? Yes, safe from lightning, but not from the ton of wood that could be waiting to pounce on your chassis.

The natural human response, as Cobb and Primo note, is to take this as a lesson: "Okay, if I'm in my car during a violent storm, I'll just make sure I'm not under a big tree." This is a valuable bit of strategy, but misses the point of the discussion. There are so many variables that control where, when and how that tree fell that the odds of it falling on top of a sitting car are infintessimal. Being caught by such an event would make you a dazzlingly tragic victim of a magically random event.

Don't get depressed though, because sometimes random chance makes really good things happen. Oh, and keep flying: based upon current FAA safety statistics you'd have to take a flight every single day for 35,000 YEARS before you could expect to be involved in a major incident. You'll be fine.