I think he meant rather: - it's hard (impossible) to predict population statistics from a sample with size 1, ceteris paribus. Over the short term, you have sa

I think he meant rather: - it's hard (impossible) to predict population statistics from a sample with size 1, ceteris paribus. Over the short term, you have sample size 1 for rare events, over the long term ceteris paribus doesn't hold. - people "coerce" everything into a normal distribution in order to get a handle on things which is of course wrong if the thing you look at is not normally distributed. Finance comes to mind.