[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
I think you're still misunderstanding. It is not always a bell shaped world. It is only a bell curve shaped world if one observation does not outweigh all the others. Take the 1000 random people and put them in a room. Now put the world's tallest man in. The average height will not change much. Now send in bill gates and see what happens to the average wealth.

Applying some "General bell shaped curve approach" to things that do not correspond to the bell curve is a big error. It isn't ok because it "works most of time". The point is that when you make a decision or want to test proposition that is extremistan in nature you can not use the bell curve because it will cause you to ignore the outliers and their huge impact.

P.S. I suggest getting taleb's book as he explains it much better than I.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ok. I guess I'm still not following. I agree with you on the "not always a bell curve" part, I just don't see why the turkeys are making a mistake. Sure, the final result, that they die, is a huge result, and blows the previous data out of the water. But they made their decision BEFORE that, right?

Or are you saying that we should take the opinion of the hypothetical turkey that just got killed over the opinions of the 90% that think humans are awesome, even though he is the minority and the mean opinion is still "humans are nice?" If this is what you are saying, I have definitely been misunderstanding you this entire time, and I certainly agree. Although, I'm not sure I see the parallels to atheism/agnosticism. However, if you can clear this up, I'm positive you can explain the rest of the analogy to me. It seems like I just misunderstood the whole time.