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The most salient feature of rare+extreme is ontological explosions. In going from 1 to 3 sigmas of phenomenological coverage, parametric range only increases about 50% but variety can explode orders of magnitude.
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1-sigma of household pets is 2 species (cats and dogs). 3-sigma is maybe 10? You can include goldfish, parrots, hamsters. But at 6-sigma, you get insane numbers, like Pablo’s hippos, people in Texas with tigers… any exotic species that can plausibly be a pet for some nutjob
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This is relevant to extreme weather. “A year’s rain in a day” is “extreme rain” the way a hippo is a horse. It’s an ontologically distinct type of weather event. The jet stream destabilizing isn’t just seasonal weather, it’s like an Australia-worth of “weather event” species.
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I’d like an extreme weather index that tracks variety. The historical frequency fails to convey information past a point. “Aliens have landed” is an event that fast happened in all 6000-odd years of recorded human history as far as we know. That’s… not a useful observation.
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Replying to
seeing like a state- and hayekian-thinking seem to explain much here which is to say that the problem isn't the diversity of the world, but the attempt to neuter of the world via goals
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Replying to and
growing corn successfully is really hard and massively destructive (by necessity) because it's only through destruction of environment that we achieve goals put another way, the only way to control a cow is to demand that it graze and wander
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