Does True Randomness Actually Exist? ( ^&*#^%$&#% )

We’re told the quantum world appears to be entirely random.

Simple answer: we are not!

Predictions of observations are probability distributions (eg one probability of one value, another probability of another value), but a distribution can provide you with a lot of information.  For example you may be able to predict the position of an electron, but the prediction has a specific amount of uncertainty, so you can think of knowing its position is in a fuzzy patch. Sometimes the predictable part can be large compared with the uncertainty (and other times it is not).

If this were so - how is it we see only order before our eyes? What is the nature of the process whereby everything at the smallest is random but is observed to be ordered?

I think this is a good questions. One simple point is that the randomness in quantum mechanics tends to be inversely proportional to energy or mass. Large objects have huge mass or energy compared to particles, so the uncertainty is tiny.

The way this works is that when you go from the quantum world to the large scale world, you add together uncertain quantities for the quantum components. When you add randomness a lot of it cancels out (by random chance!). The net result is that the uncertainty becomes relatively very small.

It's like tossing a coin is very random, but the number of heads from a million coin tosses has small uncertainty relative to its size. You can predict the proportion of heads in a million coin tosses quite accurately. Not so much with 10 tosses.

Or could it be that what we have thus far observed of the quantum world is defying proper explanation?

Firstly quantum mechanics is the most precisely tested theory in physics. It is extremely accurate. And secondly, the above gives a hint why there is no evidence from large scale phenomena against it.

I think he has a point because you don't really try to be clear in what you write.

I really do. This needs emphasing and don't make false claims. When I communicate about anything, my objective is for others to understand. But this can be very difficult to achieve. There are many topics I understand that I could not explain to more than a fraction of 1% of people, because too much background is assumed. If for example I talk about an AI algorithm that can crack all pseudorandom number generators (something I learnt about in an academic paper), to explain this in full requires the sort of understanding of AI that I got from a few years of study.

It also works the other way. I only understand a minority of most academic papers I read. This is true of mathematics and physics just as much as say biology, strangely, because although I am better qualified in the former, the concepts in specialised work are extremely difficult in these subjects. That's not to say I understand everything in a biology paper on evolution or genetics or whatever, but it is a fact that sometimes they are easier to get the gist of than physical sciences and maths.  It is also true that those who write papers are not trying to obfuscate or make things difficult: they are trying to communicate (and doing a good job to people who have the exact specialised knowledge that is needed, just not to everyone else, because that would be pretty much impossible).

Compare it with how I write. I try to keep it simple because I know you sometimes struggle to understand abstract points such as implied priorities. Well, I struggle to understand cosmological terms I've never heard of and which were probably invented just to try to keep me in the dark, to prevent criticism before it arises!

I don't know what terms you mean, but I am absolutely sure they weren't.

Google answers all questions about standard terms. You will find a wikipedia page on most, which is often a good start.

Non-standard terms require a question to the person who used them rather than assuming falsely they are trying to confuse you!

I get it now. As randomness increases, it tends to cancel itself out and become ordered.

Brilliant - who thought of this?

Large is composed of the small. Yes? All of the small is random and the large being ordered takes some fancy explaining indeed. 

its not about failure in communication. i understand you very well now.
your argument is based on your own definition. lets call it AR for now. (apparent randomness)
i say apparent because according to your definition it exist even in determinism. so it cant be real. (opti can explain determinism to you)

No, you did not understand the definition.

this topic is about TR not AR.

The term was undefined. It was therefore not about anything specific until the term was defined, By undefining it, you do not improve the situation (especially when motivated by a failure to understand the definition).

As a general point, you would do well to learn that changing the label for a concept, as you just did, has no effect on discussions of the concept, any more than changing the letter used for a mathematical or physical quantity would change the facts about it.

AR is meaningless to this topic because it tells us nothing about the OP question, which is all about philosophy and determinism.

Determinism is the absence of randomness in behaviour. See any respectable text on the subject (the wiki article refers to many examples).

so basically you never really understood the topic, and was arguing with everyone for no reason. how fun is that.

One of us has a distinction in a course on randomness and has worked on modelling stochastic systems for years. Can you remember which? 

Your problem is you are trying to win a game of chess without being clear about the rules. You would do better to aim to understand first. I wish I had a way of helping you do that.

So when/at what point is something determined to be random? 

If you can find a way to predict it accurately, it is not random to you. If you can't, it is random to you. If there is no possibility of anyone predicting it however much information they had, it is roughly what I thought was a good interpretation of "truly random".

Are somethings random and others not?

This was an open question until experiments to check quantum mechanics showed (in a way which is not easy to understand) that some things are random in a way which can't be fixed by having more information. 
Some here understand these to be philosophical questions. Science makes the measurements and we make our conclusion. 

Again, the conclusions of all physicists who understand the consequences of Bell's experiments is that some things are (truly) random. The philosophers' question has been answered.