Embracing Noise and Error

In his article “Embracing Noise and Error”, Bálint L. Bálint argues that human society is going through a profound change as mathematical models are used to predict human behavior both on a personal level and on the level of the entire society. An inherent component of mathematical models is the concept of error or noise, which describes the level of unpredictability of a system by the specific mathematical model. The author reveals the educational origin of the abstract world that can be described by pure mathematics and can be considered an ideal world without errors. While the human perception of the world is different from the abstractions we were taught, the mathematical models need to integrate the error factor to deal with the unpredictability of reality. While scientific thinking developed the statistic-probabilistic model to define the limits of predictability, here we present that in a flow of time driven by entropy, stochastic variability is an in-built characteristic of the material world and represents ultimately the singularity of each individual moment in time and the chance for our freedom of choice.