Thanks for the interesting reply. Perhaps I'm guilty of not reading Taleb as carefully as I should have! I definately respect the guy's technical chops - he wa

Thanks for the interesting reply. Perhaps I'm guilty of not reading Taleb as carefully as I should have! I definately respect the guy's technical chops - he was mandelbrot's student. I'll think a more critically the next time I see a straight line drawn on a log-log plot. I remember reading a sermon by cosma shalizi chastising physicists for making basic errors when estimating the exponent of power laws. I'm sure there's a lot of suspect results in the literature due to the error that you described :) maybe even a few bank failures. Regarding the impact of rare words: misinterpreting certain rare words like "teratogenic" or "mesothelioma" could conceivably have a pretty high impact!