" This disconnect between our Gaussian perception and the Pareto reality is not an obscure intellectual point, but instead carries serious practical consequences. Because of this error, our approach to most problems is, at best, suboptimal. Malcolm Gladwell, for example, has written about how the typical solutions meant to address homelessness — shelters and soup kitchens — have been ineffective because they’re based on the mistaken assumption that the majority of homeless people follow the average: average number of days without a roof, average cost per person to the public purse, or average reasons for being homeless. Yet on all these dimensions, homelessness follows a power law, too. In the words of Nobel laureate physicist Philip Anderson, we need to free ourselves from “average” thinking, or focusing on the mean, which, in most cases, is misleading. The joke that when Bill Gates walks into a bar, everyone in that bar becomes a millionaire on average, illustrates the point. Outliers and tails are dismissed as aberrations, when in fact they have the most impact — good and bad. A small viral event, for example, snowballs into a global coronavirus pandemic and economic disaster."
(It worthes reading up to here only)
@mc
"The average person has one breast and one testicle."
-- attributed to various people in later 20th century,