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>More accurate how?

By better predicting (being closer to) any unseen (e.g. future) sample values. What else did you expect "accurate" to mean?

>Less volatile, not overweighing tail events: what inference would I make incorrectly by using the standard deviation?

You would over-estimate the importance of tail events (e.g. rare big values).

I mean, what you ask is trivially answered by the statements in the article. Perhaps it's the terminology you find confusing?




I guess I thought it meant something more than "they're different values and people sometimes think one is the other".


He also says that, but elsewhere in the article. In that part, "more accurate" is used as

(a) "it has better statistical properties"

rather than

(b) "it's more accurate to call it X".




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