I haven’t read Taleb; I guess I should. I think ‘power law world’ has the same problems that ‘heavy-tailedness’ has, as a name—seems too specific, and the connection between statistical distributions and the properties I’m gesturing at seems too hand-wavy. But maybe it only seems hand-wavy to me because I haven’t read his explanation.
You really should read Taleb; you can probably start with The Black Swan. His terms for these are “Mediocristan,” domains that are described by Gaussian distributions, and “Extremistan,” domains that are described by power laws.
I haven’t read Taleb; I guess I should. I think ‘power law world’ has the same problems that ‘heavy-tailedness’ has, as a name—seems too specific, and the connection between statistical distributions and the properties I’m gesturing at seems too hand-wavy. But maybe it only seems hand-wavy to me because I haven’t read his explanation.
You really should read Taleb; you can probably start with The Black Swan. His terms for these are “Mediocristan,” domains that are described by Gaussian distributions, and “Extremistan,” domains that are described by power laws.
OK. But isn’t power law too specific? There are other distributions with heavy tails, e.g. log-normal.