A few weeks back, see, Richard Dawkins caused a bit of controversy when he claimed that Trinity College has produced more Nobel Laureates than the entire Muslim world has been able to muster. As it turns out, Trinity College has also produced more Nobel winners than all of femininity combined, or of all of China as well. The problem isn’t the numbers, but the inference that Dawkins makes from it, which was something along the lines of when it comes to intelligence, the entire Muslim world is backward. Taleb addresses this in the video below as being flawed in terms of the probabilities of there being more smart folks living in the West than there are in the rest of the world.

Basically, he argues that you can’t make inferences from things that take place in the tails of a Gaussian distribution curve, especially in that place we live that Taleb calls Extremistan, where the winners take a disproportionate amount of the gains in a society. Be advised, math alert!

via Nassim Taleb on the Errors of Richard Dawkins and of Intervening in Syria..