Questions for you:
- When reviewing information, do I look for patterns that are suspiciously regular or “too good to be true”?
- What data or claims do I accept at face value that might benefit from scrutiny about their randomness?
- Am I aware of what natural randomness should look like in the contexts I work in?
Questions for your organisation:
- Do we have systems to detect when data or behaviour is unnaturally regular, suggesting manipulation or fraud?
- Are our fraud detection and quality assurance processes sophisticated enough to spot statistical anomalies?
- Where might we be fooled by fabricated data because it looks more “random” to human intuition than actual randomness does?
Further reading
This paper on fraud detection techniques used in financial markets includes a plethora of uses of randomness: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957417421017164?via%3Dihub
This article explores how match fixing can be spotted in betting: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-57195-8
About the image
There was a point between the referendum in 2016 and the pandemic when it felt like we were in a state of permanent election. This signboard would appear regularly at the bottom of our road pointing the voting population of Teddington towards the polling station at the Sea Scouts hall.
Photo montage and photo by Matt Ballantine, 2026
Random the Book 