Tag Archives: standard deviation

2014 : WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT? | Edge.org

2 Replies

Standard Deviation

The notion of standard deviation has confused hordes of scientists; it is time to retire it from common use and replace it with the more effective one of mean deviation. Standard deviation, STD, should be left to mathematicians, physicists and mathematical statisticians deriving limit theorems. There is no scientific reason to use it in statistical investigations in the age of the computer, as it does more harm than good—particularly with the growing class of people in social science mechanistically applying statistical tools to scientific problems.

Say someone just asked you to measure the “average daily variations” for the temperature of your town (or for the stock price of a company, or the blood pressure of your uncle) over the past five days. The five changes are: (-23, 7, -3, 20, -1). How do you do it?

via Edge.org.

Nassim Taleb Educates a Quant

3 Replies

Now you all know I’m a Taleb super-fan, but this is excellent and hilarious. It’s not going to mean much to the general public, but to those of us following the argument it’s genius.  Would love to watch NNT’s face as he saw it for the first time. I like to think that he’d get a few laughs out of it as well, but who knows?
It has 55 views so far and was created with the very fun Xtranormal software. Here’s the link.  It’s attributed to Peter Cotton. Snooping around on the net I see a Peter Cotton associated with Taleb’s name here, which leads me to believe that it may have been created this Peter Cotton. Would love to get confirmation on that if only to thank him for a good laugh.