Searching for outliers | Ben Kuhn
Appreciation
9
Importance
10
Date Added
8.14.25
TLDR
Most important things in life are outlier-driven (jobs, relationships). But because heavy-tailed distributions are unintuitive, we make serious mistakes (e.g., undersampling, underestimating the tail). So take a ton of shots on goal (and quickly), know what to look for, and don't get demoralized!
2 Cents
Made me realize that my life's work is perhaps the most important outlier-driven area of my life; this essay fundamentally changed how I (and my girlfriend) think about the problems we work on. Wonderfully written with tons of quality sources embedded throughout. Revisit!
Tags
Will revisit with better notes.
Heavy-tailed distributions are really unintuitive to most people, since all the “action” happens in the tiny fraction of samples that are outliers. But lots of important things in life are outlier-driven, like jobs, employees, or relationships, and of course the most important thing of all, blog posts.
Because heavy-tailed distributions are unintuitive, people often make serious mistakes when trying to sample from them:
- They don’t draw enough samples
- They underestimate how good of an outcome it’s possible to get
- They find it hard to tell whether they’re following a strategy that will eventually work or not, so they get incredibly demoralized. If you’re aware of when you’re working on something that involves sampling from a heavy-tailed distribution, you can avoid those mistakes and end up with much better outcomes.
If you zoom in on the extreme outliers, you'll see they're more likely under the heavy-tailed dist.
(Featured in Nabeel S. Qureshi's Principles .)