To swim against the current of human intuition is a difficult task. . . . The human mind is built to identify for each event a definite cause and can therefore have a hard time accepting the influence of unrelated or random factors. And so the first step is to realize that success or failure sometimes arises neither from great skill nor from great incompetence but from, as the economist Armen Alchian wrote, “fortuitous circumstances.” Random processes are fundamental in nature and are ubiquitous in our everyday lives, yet most people do not understand them or think much about them.
