> Performance at most athleticism-based sports is light-tailed. For the 100m sprint, the current world record from Usain Bolt is 9.58 seconds, while “a non-elite athlete can run 100m in 13-14 seconds.”
On the other hand, I'm guessing pay among athletes is heavy-tailed.
Anyway, thought this was going to be a post on anomaly detection or something but turned out to be quite different.
It was an interesting read, but it was super dense and hard to choke the whole thing down.. Maybe I just need to eat some more lunch though..
An entire article on the subject without mentioning black swans or Nassim Taleb's other work on 'fat tails' gives the impression of a fresh absence of derivativity but also makes me wonder if it is missing something.