Is Nature a Thin Tail Process or a Fat Tail Process?

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Nature has produced some sentiale things under a process that it has to have some kind of balance. But nature doesn't deliver erer senttals between species. Look at an elephant versus a mouse. A this is very fat process. Or the difference in size between a mammas and a bacteria. Under all life o gan, the same life as can take longer form. So nature has is effectively largely fat tailed. And the way we define fat e in in a paper is as rigorously as in the class. We call some exfinential class.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Antifragile, Black Swan, and Fooled by Randomness, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about a recent co-authored paper on the risks of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the use of the Precautionary Principle. Taleb contrasts harm with ruin and explains how the differences imply different rules of behavior when dealing with the risk of each. Taleb argues that when considering the riskiness of GMOs, the right understanding of statistics is more valuable than expertise in biology or genetics. The central issue that pervades the conversation is how to cope with a small non-negligible risk of catastrophe.