"But... it doesn't. You ever hear about the hypothetical possibility of your atoms lining up and falling through the floor?"
A bad example; that's a very, very large sample space, such that deviations from mathematical perfection are irrelevant. They do exist, if you're precise enough (for instance, the universe is not modeled by perfectly continuous space), but I'm not inclined to argue them, because it's too easy to argue that they're irrelevant. So instead consider something more human-sized: Match a normal distribution to the height of human beings.
It works very well, except in real life, the probability of a negative-height human being is zero. This is not what the Gaussian model predicts.
Unfortunately, rather more science takes place in the second ___domain than the first.
"that's not what Taleb was talking about"
I'm quite aware. The fact that I commented on how I got something other than what I expected rather suggested that, I thought... The fact that this isn't precisely what Homunculiheaded said is also why I posted, rather than just upvoting....
>The fact that this isn't precisely what Homunculiheaded said is also why I posted
Ah. I misread the following...
>>This is actually what I expected to read:
as agreement ("This is actually what I expected to read."). My mistake.
>Unfortunately, rather more science takes place in the second ___domain than the first.
As I said to Homunculiheaded, this is because of the relative utility of the models, which we understand--and even those that do not understand it do not make the tool's use invalid.
What are we bemoaning, here, but actual misunderstanding itself?
A bad example; that's a very, very large sample space, such that deviations from mathematical perfection are irrelevant. They do exist, if you're precise enough (for instance, the universe is not modeled by perfectly continuous space), but I'm not inclined to argue them, because it's too easy to argue that they're irrelevant. So instead consider something more human-sized: Match a normal distribution to the height of human beings.
It works very well, except in real life, the probability of a negative-height human being is zero. This is not what the Gaussian model predicts.
Unfortunately, rather more science takes place in the second ___domain than the first.
"that's not what Taleb was talking about"
I'm quite aware. The fact that I commented on how I got something other than what I expected rather suggested that, I thought... The fact that this isn't precisely what Homunculiheaded said is also why I posted, rather than just upvoting....