From the course: Machine Learning and AI Foundations: Prediction, Causation, and Statistical Inference

Unlock the full course today

Join today to access over 24,400 courses taught by industry experts.

Taleb on normality, mediocristan, and extremistan

Taleb on normality, mediocristan, and extremistan

From the course: Machine Learning and AI Foundations: Prediction, Causation, and Statistical Inference

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Taleb on normality, mediocristan, and extremistan

“

- [Instructor] Nassim Taleb is famous for writing "The Black Swan." He also wrote "Fooled by Randomness" in which he talks about similar issues. We'll have more to say about Black Swan events when we discuss inductive reasoning, but for now let's revisit the notion of the normal curve and how it helps us determine what is expected and what is sufficiently rare that it's unexpected. In other words, it's predicted to be in the thin tails or the outer edges of the distribution. In "The Black Swan" Taleb performs a thought experiment in which he introduces two imaginary place names, Mediocristan and Extremistan, to be metaphors for types of data distributions that we might encounter. For his example of Mediocristan, he has us imagine a distribution of our caloric intake over the course of a whole year. On one day, perhaps Thanksgiving dinner, we have an unusually high caloric intake. It might be twice or maybe even more than…

Contents