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                                             May 11, 2008
Some things have a predictable
range that they probably won't exceed,       BLACK_SWAN
other things can scale like King Kong.

What controls whether something
behaves one way or the other?

Can we make generalizations
about what belongs to "Extremistan"?


  The way Taleb tells the tale,
  physical quantities such as
  human size are likely to follow
  a Gaussian distribution.

  So the difference is "physical"
  vs.  "social" or "informational"
  (he says one then the other
  in quick succession, see p.33
  and p.30).


It's not hard to list examples of things
that "scale", it is less easy to rigorously
categorize them.

                      PRIMITIVE_BIOLOGY






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