> If anything, the problem is worse, because now the company has eliminated most of the “warning bells”—the more-frequent fires which are big but not disastrous.
Why would preventing small fires, which are qualitatively different from and causally unrelated to supervolcano eruptions, eliminate any of the “warning bells” suggesting that supervolcano eruptions are a thing?
“Ignoring breakdowns of the model” means the same thing as “using the model where it is useless”; that can serve an illustrative purpose, but it means that in order to apply that metaphor to something real, you must first demonstrate that the negative impact of that thing /actually/ follows the behavior of the power law even for very large N; you can’t just observe it for small N and extrapolate.
For example, insurance companies have a hard cap on liability. If every policy they have outstanding is filed for the policy limit, there is no additional source of liability to be had- their tail actually has a hard cutoff. That still allows actual claims to exactly match a power law for all observed cases.
> If anything, the problem is worse, because now the company has eliminated most of the “warning bells”—the more-frequent fires which are big but not disastrous.
Why would preventing small fires, which are qualitatively different from and causally unrelated to supervolcano eruptions, eliminate any of the “warning bells” suggesting that supervolcano eruptions are a thing?
“Ignoring breakdowns of the model” means the same thing as “using the model where it is useless”; that can serve an illustrative purpose, but it means that in order to apply that metaphor to something real, you must first demonstrate that the negative impact of that thing /actually/ follows the behavior of the power law even for very large N; you can’t just observe it for small N and extrapolate.
For example, insurance companies have a hard cap on liability. If every policy they have outstanding is filed for the policy limit, there is no additional source of liability to be had- their tail actually has a hard cutoff. That still allows actual claims to exactly match a power law for all observed cases.