Great Things Are Not Normal – But Hope Should Be

Most of the world is normally distributed. IQ, apple sizes, exam results. The things we actually care about are not: forest fires, hit songs, careers, companies. A handful of extreme outcomes account for almost everything.

That has an uncomfortable consequence. You cannot plan your way to an outlier - you can only take enough shots to be exposed to one. This lecture is about what that means in practice: how you handle failure, how long you should be willing to wait, how much attention you owe to skeptics and forecasters, and why hope turns out to be the most underrated of them all.

Doors open at 11:00.
The lecture starts at 11:15.