Taleb: "standard deviation is not how much something moves on average."
ask anyone - even statisticians, even government agencies - and that's exactly the wrong definition you'll get back.
what they're describing is mean absolute deviation. real standard deviation squares the moves first - which quietly hands almost all the weight to the rare extremes.
his demo: 1,000,000 numbers, all zero except one. mean deviation ≈ 2. standard deviation ≈ 1,000. same data, a 500× gap.
~10 min, free. why the risk metric everyone trusts falls apart on fat tails ↓
Babies are easy because when they are upset it is one of three easily verifiable things (hungry/tired/poopy).
Toddlers are hard because when they are upset it is because you disrupted some perceived esoteric order to the cosmos that is nearly inscrutable. Like “you can’t put the green crayon next to the purple crayon because banana goblins”
Typically when I travel and tell folks am from Senegal, first thing said is a combination of either or:
- Sadio Mané!
- Akon!
- Soccer!
- Muslim brother?
[1/3] Men's testosterone levels did not plummet over the past decade like many wellness podcasts would have you believe... we just switched the measurement assay from immunoassay to mass spectrometry
When we switched assays, we observed a ~100% increase in self-reported healthy men with low testosterone. The threshold needed to be updated when the assay changed.
Arun AS, Durant TJS, El-Khoury JM, Krumholz HM. Re-evaluating the threshold for low total testosterone. Clinical Chemistry 2025.
@stats_feed This is a non-issue!
We went from hundreds to billions with less than stick and stones
Surely we can repopulate when theres a want.
The issue is economic, the modern demand for kids is less than it was before.
Lastly, hunters/gatherers avg less than kids agriculture societies