As a statistician: this is why heavy-tailed modeling matters. Schools teach the finite-variance version of the Central Limit Theorem and students believe they live in a normal world. The real Central Limit Theorem [1] predicts large rare events following Lévy α-stable distributions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_distribution#A_generali...
The normal distribution is just a very particular case of the generalized CLT.
For example, some drug effects are heavy-tailed, but safety trials are often ignoring this.
[1] https://adamwierman.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/2013-SIGM...
[2] https://adamwierman.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/book-05-1...
where can i read about this? curious
Log-normal is a quite nasty heavy-tailed distribution as it's easy to take it for normal if you have small sample sizes.
This has tricked the safety calculations of a few trials. I don't think it's too worrying or generalized, just some area to improve.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2006/jul/26/uknews
But we're still designing ships as though they only happen once every thousand years because the cargo and the ship are insured and the crews are considered expendable.
The loss of ten ships a year seems incredible to me. Surely "weather", if it were to blame, could be avoided.
This amount of loss is steep. Is it being investigated? We should have ocean swell data beamed to satellite from every ship that capsizes.
If those are all ocean-going, ten a year is about 1.1%. Depending on how expensive it would be to prevent this, that may not be bad for ship owners, but it is very bad for those seeking a career in working on those ships.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/198227/forecast-for-glob...
although the parent comment mentioned "longer than 200m" but its difficult to find containership stats by length rather than by TEU.
ignoring that though it would be 0.07% lost per year or 1 out of every 1447.
probably not too surprising, since if you pick 1447 oil tankers/containerships and audit them consider what the worst looking one is going to look like after decades of salt damage and abuse and poor maintenance.
AFAIK rogue waves are called 'rogue' due to their unpredictability.
So in the sense of trying not to die, avoid the Gulf and Agulhas currents, especially when a low blows through.
This coming from an amateur sailor. I believe freight shipping etc just plows through most weather systems in order to avoid delays.
Ocean floor methanhydrate and a volcanic shift, results in tremendous bubble columns, which just open up a shaft that can carry nothing. Water begins to boil, ship falls in, breaks apart... End of story.
How many incidents of this have there been? I've heard of the theory, but no actual losses attributed to it.
Not worth it to try to make every ship less sinkable - e.g. it may decrease the number of annual losses by 50% at the cost of making an average ship 10% more expensive - obviously a bad trade. Some ships will still sink, because of stuff like human errors.
How much do you think the humankind is willing to pay to save a human live - a million dollars, a billion, a trillion?
Also, even if they do, it doesn't stop them from being exploited.
Your own skeletal system is a trade-off of different factors.
>One passenger was killed and four more injured after a "rogue wave" hit a cruise ship bound for Antarctica, travel company Viking has said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-63846157 (Dec 2022)
Preparing for stuff like a nuclear war would mean buying land in South America, Africa or Australia, building an underground bunker, stacking on water, food, medicine and weapons, etc.
And practically speaking, the tax avoidance means that's considerably better than 11% in a non-retirement account, but it was too much effort to do the math.
Despite all the pestilence, war, earthquakes, and stuff like that, doing nothing was the smart move again, with $1 or $1 million.
I don't think it makes sense to prepare for a global collapse of civilization because in the event whatever you will reap won't make hardly any difference in how much things suck. You can't eat money, much less use it as a shelter from a global rain of molten rock.
So on principle, regardless of the probability of Armageddon, I don't think one should give up much to try to hedge the end of the world.
That’s a surprise to me. Now I’m curious: With what definition of “short tailed” can that be true?
How much water does your faucet leak per day? That might be a good case for a normal distribution. But today I smack it with a hammer and it can’t stop flowing. We now have a ton of water far more than should ever appear on that original normal distribution. Is that because the model is wrong? No. It’s because the model is not designed for these circumstances.
We can’t build a model that estimates flow distribution including the possibility that I smack it with a hammer. That doesn’t mean we don’t believe it won’t ever happen or even that we think it is unlikely to happen. It’s just a weird edge case.
A lot of people (taleb) imply statisticians are idiots because they insist the distributions are comprehensive. But statisticians don’t insist this. Black swan, fat tails, and all that are just terms for things outside modeled conditions. And yeah. They happen.