Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

Re:Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among p... by hn_throwaway_99 on Sunday January 02, 2022 @12:33PM (#29770988)

I commented on this elsewhere, but I think your point is fair. Many real-world processes follow power laws, but they are modeled as normal distributions. The issue with that is that a power law can "look like" a normal distribution, except it has fat tails, where you get these "once until the heat death of the universe" type events much more frequently.

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Re:Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among p... by chmod600 on Sunday January 02, 2022 @12:43PM (#29771176)

Black Swan by Nassim Taleb is an entire book about this very common mistake.

It's a case where highly-educated people often make errors that laypersons would not.

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Re:Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among p... by richardw on Sunday January 02, 2022 @01:05PM (#29771522)

I think Taleb’s point was more that humans don’t have a good intuition for extreme events, layperson or expert. See the housing crisis during which experts and laypeople were equally fooled. We’re good at understanding eg height of people (small variation) but have no sense of wild scale, eg stock market movements or a huge bank imploding within days.

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Re:Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among p... by hn_throwaway_99 on Sunday January 02, 2022 @01:27PM (#29771828)

> See the housing crisis during which experts and laypeople were equally fooled.

Not discounting your main point, but there were plenty of experts and laypeople that were completely unsurprised by the housing crisis. If anything, I think the housing crisis was more of a case that so many people had a vested interest in thinking/pretending the music would never stop.

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Re:Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among p... by richardw on Sunday January 02, 2022 @02:53PM (#29772994)

Totally, I’ll claim to have been very pessimistic before it happened. Referenced the likely downturn in an economics assignment that didn’t impress my very optimistic lecturer. I missed the bottom though, was convinced we were going down a lot further. Don’t fight the Fed, I guess.

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Re:Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among p... by chmod600 on Sunday January 02, 2022 @07:12PM (#29775662)

Been a while since I read it, but I seem to remember a false sense of confidence (caused by belief in a normal distribution) being a major theme.

Regardless, we should be skeptical of the assumption that we're dealing with a normal distribution.

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Re:Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among p... by richardw on Sunday January 02, 2022 @11:35PM (#29777370)

Yeah I think he used the word intuition. Exactly same insight though. I think “recency” is the bias that causes our view that tomorrow will be pretty similar to today. I’ve noticed it in myself, for sure. Market at X? Yup that seems rational. Hard to imagine the market at 2X or 1/2X. Bitcoin blew my mind during the ultra-growth phases.

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Re:Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among p... by lumost on Sunday January 02, 2022 @01:05PM (#29771530)

Anecdotally, I see a lot of pseudo-rigor in Business oriented statistics. Leadership selects the statistics and statisticians which make the most rigourous plausible model that achieves the desired outcome.

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Re:Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among p... by dukeofdoom on Sunday January 02, 2022 @02:09PM (#29772380)