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Yeah, this was a really interesting read. In my experience, power-law distributions seem to more accurately describe more of the world than bell-curves. Yet we
by elblanco 17y ago
Yeah, this was a really interesting read. In my experience, power-law distributions seem to more accurately describe more of the world than bell-curves. Yet we seem to have better tools for working with bell curves (at least in my highly limited experience working with statistics).
- Perceval 17y agoNassim Nicholas Taleb's books (Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan) make the point that power laws are better at describing how uncertain the world we live in is, rather than making uncertainty and risk tractable in the way that the bell curve models. The properties of the bell curve are well known, and therefore easier to perform statistical tests with, whereas the many stable power law distributions are harder to deal with and more difficult to simply assume.
- elblanco 17y agoI'm curious, on a biological level, if this is one of the assumptions our sensory and cognitive systems make to filter out lots of noise and find patterns.