It sounds like the explore / exploit trade off as seen in a multi-armed bandit problem.

Also, a known source of randomness (that you add yourself or already occurring) is pretty important for determining causality.

And to poke fun, my random post about hobbits and unicorns is clearly preordained by the boundary conditions of the big bang.

It's not my fault I ate all the cheetos, it's science :p

TFA author could use a good drunken walk through the garden of forking paths /s