This metaphor started when Vilfredo Pareto made the observation that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people. People use it today to describe that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people, or 80% worth of effort contributes to 20% of the results. - page 235
Nassim Nicholas Taleb stetches this claim to say that this statement is the equivalent of saying 50% of the work is done by 1% of the workers. You can break down the 20% and observe that only a handful of workers deliver the "lion's share" of the results.
Whether or not I agree with this, the inequality that exists in any hierarchical society puts strain on only a handful of "outliers". His point is emphasized in later chapters when he attacks the Gaussian bell curve. Working with independent, equal outcomes (heads/tails ie) produces such a bell curve. But as soon as one considers the unequal fragility of other natural phenomena, the entire notion of a standard deviation, and all subsequent, statistical measures or risk fails. We enter the Platonic fold, the area where our representation of reality ceases to apply.
It would be interesting to talk about this during a statistics course.
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