Rich Daley (Pedantic git) commented on twitter that the BettaKultcha Random Slide Challenge was a misnomer and it should be re-branded the Mystery Slide Challenge.
Admitting it wasn’t quite as catchy, it was, he continued, a more accurate description of the process.
His premise was that, as the BettaKultcha team (or whoever puts the slides together) is choosing the slides, then there is nothing random about the process; the slides are researched and selected (unless of course, we have a pool of pre-selected slides and we randomly pull them out of a hat).
But couldn’t the same argument apply to the mystery selection description? Whoever is selecting the slides is familiar with them and therefore the slides cannot be said to be mysterious in any way.
If he is arguing that we take the viewpoint from the final consumer of the slides—the volunteer at one of the BettaKultcha events who is trying to make a story out of them—then to them, the slides are indeed random as there appears to be no obvious link from one to the other. It could not really be said that the slides are mysterious to the presenter (unless they were so unusual that the presenter did not know what they were meant to represent) as they would recognise what is being displayed.
I therefore contend that ‘Random Slide Challenge’ is an accurate description.
As you can see, very little has happened today and I am able to distract myself with such important considerations…
I always took the ‘random’ bit to mean that whatever the people putting the slides together thought it was about, presenters inevitably do something else with it. So the random act is how unpredictable the outcome is. ‘Mysterious’ doesn’t quite capture the act of being panic-stricken and making up a load of old cobblers on the spot perhaps?
It’s a great invention by the way
Thanks Ali. I must confess, that particular interpretation of ‘random’ is new to me, so thank you for adding another dimension to the debate. I also have to confess, that it’s a particularly good one and if Rich had argued for an ‘Unpredictable Slide Challenge’ I might have been hard pressed to nit pick.
It all seems to come down to whose point of view the ‘random’ is being applied to.
The only person who they’re not random to is me. And anyone who knows me will know that my mind is pretty random. Nothing is ever truly random even a software solution would have to be given parameters to calculate a selection to be random with.
Apologies for the delay in the reply.
“Random” has a very specific meaning in standard English, which is that the *decision* is made by chance.
If I shuffle a deck of cards and take one off the top, that is random because the decision was made by chance.
If I hand you a deck of cards and ask you to pick one, from your perspective it may be *arbitrary* (because you don’t care which one you pick) and from my perspective it may be a *mystery* (because I don’t know which one you’ve picked) but it is never random because the decision was not made by chance.
The only way the slide challenge would be random is if Richard shuffled all the slides he’d put together and picked the first 10.
That said, the dictionary does offer an “informal” definition of random which does fit the challenge:
Informal .
a.
unknown, unidentified, or out of place: A couple of random guys showed up at the party.
b.
odd and unpredictable in an amusing way: my totally random life.
I just don’t like this definition very much as I think it waters down the original meaning of the word.
Oh, and incidentally… the reason I point this out is that the first few Bettakultchas I attended I actually did think the slide challenge was random, ie. I thought Richard had a massive pool of slides and literally picked 10 slides at random from the pool.
When I started to see that some or most of the challenges had an actual connecting theme between the slides it became obvious to me that more care and attention was being put into crafting the challenge and I felt like “random” didn’t sum up what they really were.
Thanks Rich. I take your point although it sounds like the original definition of ‘random’ is almost identical to the one for ‘chance’, or is there a nuance that I’m missing?
I must admit, I do like the idea of a machine that allows Richard to press a button which then activates a process which throws up a randomly selected slide…
‘Chance’ is a noun (normally). ‘Random’ is an adjective meaning (roughly) ‘chosen by chance’.
Hope that makes sense!
That makes sense. OK, I concede the argument. That will learn me not to try to argue with someone using their preferred weapons… (see what I did there?).