Black Swan Discussions
From the review The Black Swan
Bell Curves Deviations Promote Black Swans
The title is wrong.
Bell curves don’t directly promote black swans, but they contribute in making them more unexpected and, potentially, disastrous.Bell curves measure the normal, the average, and they ignore the large deviations and the unexpected.
I was thinking of not putting this under Typos, Grammar, Syntax, & Content Improvement as it may lead to interesting discussions.
I believe this could be a linguistic interpretation issue.
I think Taleb and Lucio may actually have a similar interpretation.
Taleb's title may have been phrased in an ambiguous manner.
Taleb could mean
- Far from the mean in bell curves, that's where black swans can happen.
- In probability distributions that deviate from bell curves, tail events may occur much more frequently.
Like a fat-tailed distribution.
Thank you for the heads up, Matthew.
I don't remember the detail of the book now, but if the title was exactly as reported, then I still find it confusing to say the least.
But I amended the paragraph now thanks to your note.