{"id":4190,"date":"2019-11-29T08:57:27","date_gmt":"2019-11-29T12:57:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=4190"},"modified":"2022-03-11T15:34:45","modified_gmt":"2022-03-11T19:34:45","slug":"mediocristan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/mediocristan\/","title":{"rendered":"Mediocristan: The Predictable, Boring World (Black Swan)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>What is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/mediocristan-and-extremistan\/\">Mediocristan<\/a>? Where is it? Where does the word come from? What elements of our lives fall under the purview of Mediocristan?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Mediocristan is a term coined by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/nassim-nicholas-taleb\/\">Nassim Nicholas Taleb<\/a> to explain the facets of our experience that are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/non-scalable\/\">nonscalable<\/a>. Mediocristan&#8217;s law is: <strong>Given a large-enough sample size, no individual event will have a significant effect on the total.<\/strong> The term was popularized by Taleb&#8217;s book <em>The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/black-swan-theory\/\">Black Swan<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We&#8217;ll cover what Mediocristan is, how it differs from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/extremistan\/\">Extremistan<\/a>, and what kinds of events, characteristics, and professions come from the land of Mediocristan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Scalability and the Provinces of Mediocristan and Extremistan<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>One reason that Black Swans are so profoundly disruptive is that they occur in the \u201cscalable\u201d parts of our lives\u2014where physical limits don\u2019t apply and effects tend toward incredible extremes. When a particular thing\u2014an income, an audience for a particular product\u2014is \u201cscalable,\u201d it can grow exponentially without any additional expenditure of effort.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cMassage therapist,\u201d for example, is a \u201cnonscalable\u201d profession. There is an upper limit on how many clients you can see\u2014there\u2019s only so much time in a day, and therapists\u2019 bodies fatigue\u2014and thus there\u2019s only so much income you can expect from that profession.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cQuantitative trader,\u201d however, is a \u201cscalable\u201d<em> <\/em>profession. It takes no additional energy or time to purchase 5,000 shares of a stock than 50, and your income isn\u2019t limited by physical constraints.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Artists, too, are in a scalable profession (at least in the age of digital reproduction). For instance, a singer doesn\u2019t need to perform her hit song each time someone wants to hear it. She performs it once for the record, and that performance can be disseminated widely.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The problem with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/what-is-scalability\/\">scalability<\/a> is that it creates vast inequalities. Let\u2019s look at the singer example again:<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><em>Before the advent of recording technology<\/em>, a singer\u2019s audience was limited to those for whom she could physically perform. That is, a singer in one town wasn\u2019t likely to prevent the survival of a singer in another town; they might have different sized audiences\u2014based on the populations of their respective towns\u2014and thus different incomes, <strong>but those differences would be comparatively mild<\/strong>.<br><br><\/li><li><em>After the advent of recording technology<\/em>, however, a small number of singers come to dominate the listening public. Now that we can pay pennies to stream Beyonc\u00e9 any time we want, why spend the $10 or $20 to see a local singer we\u2019ve never heard of? Suddenly, differences in audience and income become vast. <strong>With scalability comes extremes<\/strong>.&nbsp;<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Contrary Worlds of Mediocristan and Extremistan<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cMediocristan\u201d: Taleb\u2019s term for the facets of our experience that are nonscalable.&nbsp; For example, like the income of a massage therapist, human physical traits such as height and weight hail from Mediocristan\u2014they have upper and lower bounds, and if you were to graph every human\u2019s height and weight, you would produce a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/the-bell-curve\/\">bell curve<\/a>.&nbsp;<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Mediocristan\u2019s overriding law can be stated thus: <strong>Given a large-enough sample size, no individual event will have a significant effect on the total. <\/strong>That is, there will be outliers\u2014extremely heavy or tall people\u2014but those outliers (1) will not be <em>exponentially<\/em> larger or smaller than the average, and (2) will be rendered insignificant by the sheer number of average cases. Most physical phenomena\u2014human footspeed, trees\u2019 rate of growth\u2014come from Mediocristan. (Shortform note: Taleb sometimes treats Mediocristan as a distinct place, other times as an adjective to describe certain kinds of phenomena.)&nbsp;<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cExtremistan,\u201d oppositely, describes those facets of our experience that <em>are eminently <\/em>scalable. <strong>In Extremistan, inequalities are vast enough that one instance can profoundly affect the total<\/strong>.&nbsp;<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Most social (man-made) phenomena come from Extremistan. For example, wealth: It has no readily detectable upper limit; and if you were to include, say, Jeff Bezos, in any average of human wealth, you would produce a grossly distorted picture of how much money most people have.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><strong>Key Qualities of Mediocristan<\/strong><\/td><td><strong>Key Qualities of Extremistan<\/strong><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Nonscalable<\/td><td>Scalable<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Typical <br>member is <br>mediocre <br>(\u201caverage,\u201d in <br>the statistical <br>sense)<\/td><td>Most members are dwarfs, a few are <br>giants<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Best-off are <br>only marginally better <br>than worst-off<\/td><td>Best-off are considerably better off <br>than worst-off<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Events are predictable from <br>available information<\/td><td>Events are highly unpredictable from <br>available information<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Probability distribution is a bell <br>curve<\/td><td>Probability distribution accords either <br>with Mandelbrotian \u201cGray\u201d Swans or is <br>dominated by Black Swans<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Limits of the Bell Curve<\/strong>&nbsp;<br><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>The classic bell curve\u2014which is also called the \u201cGaussian distribution\u201d after German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss\u2014is an accurate description of Mediocristan phenomena, but it is dangerously misleading when it comes to Extremistan.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Consider human height, an eminently Mediocristan phenomenon. With every increase or decrease in height relative to the average, the odds of a person being that tall or short decline. For example, the odds that a person (man or woman) is three inches taller than the average is 1 in 6.3; 7 inches taller, 1 in 44; 11 inches taller, 1 in 740; 14 inches taller, 1 in 32,000.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s important to note that the odds not only decline as the height number gets further and further away from the average, but they decline at an accelerating rate. For example, the odds of someone being 7\u20191\u201d are 1 in 3.5 million, but the odds of someone being just four inches taller are 1 in 1 billion, and the odds of someone being four inches taller than <em>that <\/em>are 1 in 780 billion!<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now consider an Extremistan phenomenon like wealth. In Europe, the probability that someone has a net worth higher than 1 million euros is 1 in 62.5; higher than 2 million euros, 1 in 250; higher than 4 million, 1 in 1,000; higher than 8 million, 1 in 4,000; and higher than 16 million, 1 in 16,000. <strong>The odds decrease at a constant, rather than accelerating, rate<\/strong>, <strong>indicating that their distribution doesn\u2019t conform to a bell curve.<\/strong><br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(Note: The European wealth statistics cited above aren\u2019t precise, but they illustrate the central point: that wealth is scalable and does not look like a bell curve.)<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The upshot is that<strong> in Extremistan, as the name suggests, extreme events have much better odds of occurring than in Mediocristan. Simply put, <em>the bell curve does not apply<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What is Mediocristan? Where is it? Where does the word come from? What elements of our lives fall under the purview of Mediocristan? Mediocristan is a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain the facets of our experience that are nonscalable. Mediocristan&#8217;s law is: Given a large-enough sample size, no individual event will have a significant effect on the total. The term was popularized by Taleb&#8217;s book The Black Swan. We&#8217;ll cover what Mediocristan is, how it differs from Extremistan, and what kinds of events, characteristics, and professions come from the land of Mediocristan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4205,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,25],"tags":[60],"class_list":["post-4190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society","category-statistics","tag-black-swan","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.3 (Yoast SEO v24.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Mediocristan: The Predictable, Boring World (Black Swan) - Shortform Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Mediocristan is a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain the facets of our experience that are nonscalable and conform to the mean.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/mediocristan\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mediocristan: The Predictable, Boring World (Black Swan)\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Mediocristan is a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain the facets of our experience that are nonscalable and conform to the mean.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/mediocristan\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Shortform Books\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2019-11-29T12:57:27+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2022-03-11T19:34:45+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/swan-mediocristan.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"778\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"517\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Amanda Penn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Amanda Penn\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/mediocristan\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/mediocristan\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Amanda Penn\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/01b0e4c9ddb993e51d03808839d538b0\"},\"headline\":\"Mediocristan: The Predictable, Boring World (Black Swan)\",\"datePublished\":\"2019-11-29T12:57:27+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2022-03-11T19:34:45+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/mediocristan\/\"},\"wordCount\":1026,\"commentCount\":0,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/mediocristan\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/swan-mediocristan.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"The Black Swan\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Society\",\"Statistics\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/mediocristan\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/mediocristan\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/mediocristan\/\",\"name\":\"Mediocristan: The Predictable, Boring World (Black Swan) - 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