This is a one-page answer as the journalist-passing-for-scientist Pinker has been working the press to show that violence has “dropped” since 1945, citing political science bloggers innocent of fat tails, who seem clueless about the difference between data and information. How to separate anecdote from evidence, sampling error from truth, journalism from science? Well there is something called a “test statistic”.
This also illustrates how to do rigorous statistics in the absence of a textbook recipe for a fat-tailed process, by means of Monte Carlo analyses.
I will be teaching a course called “Extreme Risk Analytics” at NYU-Engineering this fall and will have to produce an 80-p lecture notes booklet, which I will write progressively from interaction with the class. SILENT RISK is too advanced, so I need a more introductory book.
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