Human height is bounded (cannot be fat-tailed) for scientific reasons: humans need wombs for gestation, and if heights were fat-tailed, occasionally someone would be 1,000 kilometers tall, which is physically impossible; therefore, you can rule out fat-tailed distributions for human height using a priori scientific reasoning rather than just fitting distributions to data.

factualpending

Speaker

Nassim Taleb

Evidence Quote

if human heights were fat-tailed...you observe someone who's a thousand kilometers tall...we can rule out on scientific grounds

Source

A conversation between Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Stephen Wolfram at the Wolfram Summer School 2021Wolfram
Created: 8/11/2026, 1:49:43 AM

My Notes

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