I don't know what Taleb is referring to, but I assumed it was something related to this line:
>In fact, whenever people make decisions after being supplied with the standard deviation number, they act as if it were the expected mean deviation.
That is, I suspect he means that if you gave them equations or data and asked them to run some computations on them, they wouldn't mess up the two. But if you were to then say, "okay, what does this result tell you to do when you're buying groceries at the super market?" they would then make that decision incorrectly.
This isn't to dismiss the problem. Just I don't think he's saying it's quite what you think he's saying. Too bad Taleb didn't write more on either of these two lines. (Well, chances are he did, but I just don't know where.)
>In fact, whenever people make decisions after being supplied with the standard deviation number, they act as if it were the expected mean deviation.
That is, I suspect he means that if you gave them equations or data and asked them to run some computations on them, they wouldn't mess up the two. But if you were to then say, "okay, what does this result tell you to do when you're buying groceries at the super market?" they would then make that decision incorrectly.
This isn't to dismiss the problem. Just I don't think he's saying it's quite what you think he's saying. Too bad Taleb didn't write more on either of these two lines. (Well, chances are he did, but I just don't know where.)