[spenuke]

Thanks. Ok, so is he creating strawmen everywhere, then? I know people working in government, biotech, climate research, and none of them seem to think that the normal distribution is the only model out there, or that the mean is a very meaningful (no pun intended) statistic.

[pfortuny]

The problem is: the normal assumption is just an assumption with a very interesting asymptotic property. That makes it good for computations.

However, Nature and more specifically economic events have little asymptotics in them (mainly isolated things like crises, earthquakes, crashes, accidents...).

I tend to agree with him on this.

He is not against science. He is mostly against economic modellers.