> stochastic system

Every day when you lower your butt onto your chair, you trust a stochastic system enough to assume you'll rest on the chair safely and not spontaneously phase through, which would lead to rather gory and painful terminal experience.

Physics at macro scale is stochastic, which is a good reminder that stochastic != uniformly random. Expected distributions matter.

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ben_w an hour ago | parent [-]

While strictly true, QM has such small standard deviations as to be irrelevant on the macro for things like bums and chairs.

IMO a better example would be the stochastic nature of quality control in manufacturing.

	▲	TeMPOraL 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> QM has such small standard deviations as to be irrelevant on the macro for things like bums and chairs I was going to segue into thermodynamics as a backup example, but you made me think of something better. > IMO a better example would be the stochastic nature of quality control in manufacturing. How about, more specifically, food manufacturing? Or maybe, let's talk about cooking? Cooking is as stochastic as it gets, and we handle it fine. It could be better - the better version is called "chemical process engineering", it's what cooking looks like when you care about quality and consistency of output, and can afford the equipment and process actually necessary for it. Regular people don't (i.e. neither care, nor can afford) - we call this cooking. It's an art, not a science, and people not only do it, but love it, and tie their identities to it, and build businesses around it, and a culture that embraces all the compromises (and calls the more serious approach "unhealthy").