35  Go Forth and Look at the Tail

Closes not with a library tour but with a single instruction meant to outlast the book: the next time someone hands you an average, ask what happened in the tail before you believe it. Pointers to Mandelbrot’s work on scaling in markets, Taleb’s Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails, and the extreme-value-theory literature are offered for readers who want to go from aware to rigorous.