In the hard sciences, it's called the 'drunkard's walk' and it can be a useful thing.
But the social scientists never really understood.
Math is hard.
/johnny
Thank you for you adding to the discussion.
Amazon has what appears to be an interesting book on the subject: “Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (Hardcover)”
“A drunkard’s walk is a type of random statistical distribution with important applications in scientific studies ranging from biology to astronomy. Mlodinow, a visiting lecturer at Caltech and coauthor with Stephen Hawking of A Briefer History of Time, leads readers on a walk through the hills and valleys of randomness and how it directs our lives more than we realize. Mlodinow introduces important historical figures such as Bernoulli, Laplace and Pascal, emphasizing their ideas rather than their tumultuous private lives. Mlodinow defines such tricky concepts as regression to the mean and the law of large numbers, which should help readers as they navigate the daily deluge of election polls and new studies on how to live to 100.”