We learn a world about probability om from gauss's world, which is this world of nice, smooth, normally distributed stuff. Out outliers are unimportant because they don't move the mean at all. The best example is fortunately, unfortunately. No single day is going to make you poor. Going to make you ten, ok? Bread. An outputtemo primitive environment has other complicated variables, but thatis mostly what you see.
Nassim Taleb talks about the challenges of coping with uncertainty, predicting events, and understanding history. This wide-ranging conversation looks at investment, health, history and other areas where data play a key role. Taleb, the author of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan, imagines two countries, Mediocristan and Extremistan where the ability to understand the past and predict the future is radically different. Taleb's contention is that we often bring our intuition from Mediocristan for the events of Extremistan, leading us to error. The result is a tendency to be blind-sided by the unexpected.