Nassim Taleb: We should retire the notion of standard deviation

There are those that dislike his ideas because it is threatening to their existing assumptions about probability and statistics. He argues that experts and majority of people do not account for the unpredictable but significant impact a single event can have which often shatters the commonly held belief. For example, swans were white until the discovery of black swans in Oceania, too big to fail multi-national corporations going bankrupt like Lehman's brothers and etc.

He's not anti-academic, but he is against teachings in the common academia that is based on naive assumptions that is specifically tailored to serve those that thrives most off the limited quantitative measures, such as market callers, hedge funds selling complicated quantitative algorithm trades, academics seeking fame and fortune by writing the most logical and quantitative paper without questioning any of the tools they are using, it is this hypocrisy and laziness that is apparent and those that try to deny to the point of making ad hominem remarks against a man, who simply observes these things and decides to write it in an entertaining manner (otherwise nobody would give a shit because the topic would be dry without lay man's linguo).

Keep an open mind, a lot of what he says I do find interesting ideas and it has influenced my thinking process quite a bit, however it's no way in anyway, grounds for cracking jokes or ridicule, in fact when I read some of the comments here, it's a bit shameful. We should be embracing new ideas in order to explore them, regardless of who the explosive nature of the claim, because the black swan event is very real and is not captured or understood completely by our current set of statistical tools and methodology based on questionable assumptions about how the real world operates. For example, 1/2500 chance is not what we really think it means in the real world because black swan events are more common than we think, a percentage probability do not fully reflect it's frequency and the magnitude of it's event.

Note the fall of crime rates in the United States following a decision to legalize abortion, economists and experts would come on television and bring up all sorts of random theories and ideas but little did they realize it was a chain effect from a court ruling passed decades ago until two economists came out with a paper that was ridiculed because it suggested that 'killing babies from poor neighbourhoods = lower crime rate' where most poor neighbourhoods is occupied by African Americans. Because such idea was earthshakingly controversial and still denied even to this day. Because Galileo claimed the earth was round instead of flat, he was executed. This is simply the nature of our world, almost all part of life, there exists a hierarchy that people simply do not ask questions either due to blind trust or the fear of reprisal.

The reasoning for this is that many sexually transmitted infections can be acquired, passed on to others, etc. without causing any clinical symptoms. See: HPV, among others.

Yes, and as SD is widely used in those so this is quite a bold statement to make an Taleb doesn't give one example of things going wrong with it and his proposal working better. This observation is also wrong and I pointed out some areas where standard deviation is useful.

>Your comment appears to have an agenda or ideology underlying it.

Yes it's ideology of calling people out when they assert incorrect things in condescending tone without any arguments while insulting whole groups of scientists and statisticians.

>That is pretty much what his entire article is about: taking squares may not be the best idea universally.

No, article isn't about it. It was in my comment. Taleb doesn't mention how MAD works better than SD in some situations and why or why it should be substituted. Taleb doesn't point one situation when MAD works better than SD (I pointed out some where SD works better than MAD) he also doesn't address obvious problems which such substitutions create. Heck, he doesn't even discuss how nature of SD is different than MAD, he just says they are different and the latter is more applicable for "real life". Also he doesn't argue that MAD is sometimes more useful than SD. He argues that the latter should be disposed of outside some very narrow theoretical applications.