Determinism

When I first started out programming computers, they were deterministic ... meaning a set of operations would always produce the same result. Somewhere along the way, I think when timesharing computers were introduced, they became stochastic ... meaning an element of randomness was introduced. (The technical reason was that processes became interrupt driven.)  Now, working on this IPad, I can perform the exact same action twice and get different results. This is maddening. We humans desire predictability. We want to know that pushing this button makes the doorbell ring and not just sometimes ... while at others, it turns on the window fan.

So, recognizing what is deterministic and what is stochastic is important in life. Controlling a nuclear reactor with a computer that was not deterministic would be quite dangerous. While saying that weather ... or climate .... was deterministic would be foolish ... there is too much randomness involved ... much more so with climate than with weather.

However, human nature being what it is, we dislike a stochastic future. So we invent soothsayers and palm readers and oracles ... and economists. We allow some charlatan like Al Gore to assure us as to what the unmeasurable global temperature will be in ten years and give him and his acolytes trillions of dollars to fix things. Of course their predictions were well off the mark ... and they are not going to give us our money back. "It's the next ten years!"

So kind readers, today's lesson is to learn to distinguish between deterministic and stochastic processes. And if someone tries to tell you that a stochastic process is deterministic, keep your hand on your wallet.