God's Error
Taleb criticizes the move from describing a statistical average to treating it as a social ideal. In his account, labeling deviations as errors can confuse a measurement model with a judgment about how people ought to be.
THE IDEA
God’s Error
A much more worrisome aspect of the discussion is that in Quételet’s day, the name of the Gaussian distribution was la loi des erreurs, the law of errors, since one of its earliest applications was the distribution of errors in astronomic measurements. Are you as worried as I am? Divergence from the mean (here the median as well) was treated precisely as an error! No wonder Marx fell for Quételet’s ideas.
This concept took off very quickly. The ought was confused with the is, and this with the imprimatur of science. The notion of the average man is steeped in the culture attending the birth of the European middle class, the nascent post-Napoleonic shopkeeper’s culture, chary of excessive wealth and intellectual brilliance. In fact, the dream of a society with compressed outcomes is assumed to correspond to the aspirations of a rational human being facing a genetic lottery. If you had to pick a society to be born into for your next life, but could not know which outcome awaited you, it is assumed you would probably take no gamble; you would like to belong to a society without divergent outcomes.
One entertaining effect of the glorification of mediocrity was the creation of a political party in France called Poujadism, composed initially of a grocery-store movement. It was the warm huddling together of the semi-favored hoping to see the rest of the universe compress itself into their rank—a case of non-proletarian revolution. It had a grocery-store-owner mentality, down to the employment of the mathematical tools. Did Gauss provide the mathematics for the shopkeepers?
When to use it
Evaluating social policies that aim to compress outcomes, such as egalitarian economic reforms.
Analyzing biases in performance reviews that penalize outliers.
Understanding political movements that appeal to the 'average' citizen, like Poujadism.
Critiquing the concept of 'normal' in psychology and its effect on mental health diagnostics.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
Social Policy Compression
Imagine a policy justified solely by the claim that every departure from median income is an error. That argument confuses a statistical reference point with a moral standard. A policy favoring less inequality could instead rest on separate ethical or practical reasons.
Performance Reviews
An organization rates employees against a standard 'average' performance, penalizing both high and low outliers, thereby discouraging exceptional talent and innovation.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
How does the confusion between statistical average and normative ideal influence public policy?
In what ways do we treat deviation from the mean as error in everyday life?
What are the dangers of glorifying mediocrity in social or professional contexts?
Often confused with
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- The Black Swan The Impact of the Highly Improbable With a new section On Robustness and Fragility (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)