TWO WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT SHAKESPEARE AS A BLACK SWAN (COMMENT).

TWO WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT SHAKESPEARE AS A BLACK SWAN (COMMENT). Nick commented here that even if Shakespeare was a one in a billion occurrence, there have been more than a billion people in human history so that the a one in a billion event is not that surprising. Nick expressed his thought in terms of standard deviations because of the statistics courses he has taken (an event that is five standard deviations from the average will still take place once in a billion random events.) Taleb’s argument is different. He believes that the probability of a Black Swan (Shakespeare) is much higher than we think. He would go further and say that we don’t know enough about the probability distribution even to use a single measure like “standard deviation.”