THE EXTREMES THAT RULE WORLD

Every forecast you have ever trusted was built on a bell. The curve that Carl Friedrich Gauss drew to describe the errors of astronomers has been quietly promoted to describe floods, markets, epidemics, careers, and the people next door. It works beautifully on the days nobody remembers. It fails on the days that change everything. In The Extremes That Rule the World, Boris Kriger takes the reader on a warm, funny, and unsettling tour of the places where the bell breaks. Why did the best-credentialed hedge fund on Earth lose billions in a few weeks? Why did a nuclear plant that survived one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history fail because of where somebody put the generators? Why do the rich get richer, the hits come from nowhere, and a single storm outweigh a century of calm? The answer is not that we are stupid. It is that we reason correctly from a false premise. In a bell-shaped world, every large event has a large cause, and hunting for it is sensible. In the world we actually inhabit, large events are often just the tail of the distribution doing what tails do, and the cause we find is one we invented to make the story end. Models miss three ways: in size, in direction, and in cause. This book shows all three, and then turns to the older and humbler craft of living well among things that cannot be predicted. Along the way the reader meets astronomers who lost a planet, a Belgian who invented a man nobody has ever met, Dutch engineers who built for a storm that comes once in ten thousand years, a pile of sand that explains earthquakes, and an author who opened his royalty report one Tuesday and immediately looked for someone to blame. Keywords: extremes, risk, probability, causation, uncertainty, prediction, catastrophe