shooting. He nails the first two shots. The third one misses. It is true that this doesn't truly falsify the model, but we should now be very skeptical that the model is correct. Allan Marlow November 3, 2012 at 10:04 am @ Wheeler's Cat The use of sigmas to convey brackets of event certainty doesn't imply you believe in a Gaussian density for the event in question. It is used as a matter of convenience, that is all. If, as Taleb correctly assumes, reality is such that it contains much more "probability mass" under its tails than you can capture with typical continuous densities, all that means is the sigmas are no longer attached to frequencies from the normal density, but you can still use them. As for AGW, that is not an experiment you have the luxury of repeating over and over to see if the models are right. In that case, you have to accept the fact that properly informed people are doing the right thing and trust them, there is no other alternative, just like you trust cancer researchers, aircraft designers, etc. If you are a conservative, you will doubt that AGW happens, regardless of who espouses it, but if you are a conservative with a heart condition that requires immediate help, you won't doubt the competence of your surgeon. This dichotomy is not acceptable at a social level in an advanced nation. The fact that it happens in the US is what should scare all Americans