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by vzhang 4532 days ago
I'm seriously questioning some people's reading comprehension - he NEVER said STD is not useful! He's only saying the name "Standard Deviation" is badly chosen.
1 comments

Read the blog post carefully:

> it is time to retire it from common use and replace it with the more effective one of mean deviation

> Standard deviation, STD, should be left to mathematicians, physicists and mathematical statisticians deriving limit theorems

>There is no scientific reason to use it in statistical investigations in the age of the computer, as it does more harm than good

He is saying it's not useful for real world things and people are just confused. What you wrote is reasonable view. What Taleb writes isn't.