A statistical ensemble of people acting randomly often display behavior as consistent and predictable as a group of people pursuing conscious goals.
Each, according to his own inclination follows his own purpose, often in opposition to others; yet each individual and people, as if following some guiding thread, go toward a natural but to each of them unknown goal; all work toward furthering it, even if they would set little store by it if they did know it. (Immanuel Kant, quoted in Theodore Porter, the rise of Statistical Thinking: 1820-1900 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988).p.15)Mlodinow, Leonard. The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008. p 147
We associate randomness with disorder. Yet although the lives of 200 million drivers vary unforseeably, in the aggregate their behavior could hardly have proved more orderly. Analogous regularities can be found if we examine how people vote, buy stocks, marry, are told to get lost, misaddress letters, or sit in traffic on their way to a meeting they didn't want to go to in the first place - or if we measure the length of their legs, the size of their feet, the width of their buttocks, or the breadth of their beer bellies. As 19th-century scientists dug into the newly available social data, whenever they looked, the chaos of life seemed to produce quantifiable and predictable patterns.
Mlodinow, Leonard. The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008. p 148
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