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Beers with Bezos
When Jeff Bezos walks into a bar, the average customer becomes a billionaire. Unfortunately, that fact won’t pay for their next round. Extreme outcomes like Bezos’ net worth are a common characteristic of power law distributions. In a fat-tailed world, averages can mislead.
Watch Your Head, Part 1
Many things in the natural world follow a normal distribution: heights, weights and blood pressure. In a normal distribution, or bell curve, most measures fall around the mean. Move further away from the average in either direction, and occurrences become less likely. For example, the average height of an adult male in the United States is 5 feet, 7 inches. Most guys you know probably fall within six inches average, a relatively tight range. A man one foot above average is tall enough to play in the NBA, where the average height of a player is 6 feet, 7 inches (in shoes).
Even in the most extreme cases, a normal distribution’s range isn’t that wide. Chandra Bahadur Dangi, the shortest adult on record, was 22 inches tall. Robert Wadlow, the world’s tallest man, was 8 feet, 11 inches tall. The height of the world’s shortest and tallest person are within an order of magnitude of each other. In normal distribution, extreme events are rare. There will occasionally be an eight foot tall person, but never someone who’s eight centimeters or eight miles tall.
