thin-tailed

A better generalisation: if a function is thin-tailed, and its Fourier transform is thin-tailed, then it's Riemann sums converge to its integral at an exponential rate.

Gaussian is sometimes a good approximation if the error is a sum of independent thin-tailed variables (due to the c.l.t.).

The problem is that normal distribution is thin-tailed ie.

Consider also that a building full of smart people has a skewed and thin-tailed distribution of brain power.

Exponential is completely positively skewed and thin-tailed, and Pareto is roughly the same shape but very fat-tailed.

And you can model this through two survival functions, one thin-tailed and one heavy-tailed.

The risk of coal plants due to CO2 is a thin-tailed long term risk.

A- Falls from ladder are thin-tailed, and the estimate based on past observations should hold for the next year with an astonishing accuracy.

But the well-paying firms do not apply for lots of visas, and there are lots of them, leading to a long thin-tailed distribution.

The basic idea is that Pinker uses data about very thin-tailed processes, like street crime, to make inferences about very fat-tailed processes, like casualties in war.

In my experience, bug fixing time has been surprisingly thin-tailed.

This is not unexpected -- Deming worked mainly with thin-tailed statistics, whereas Reinertsen applied his knowledge to the power laws that show up more in design and development work.

At first blush, for the sake of policy stability, a "thin-tailed" congress appears desirable.

* You can have a "thin-tailed" congress, where moderates are overrepresented.

In a thin-tailed distribution (like a bell curve) the fluctuations from “typical” can often be assumed small enough that any measurement/sample could be fungibly replaced by the typical (Eg: designing furniture for the typical person).

Thin-tailed long-term risks can be mitigated and planned for and the result is always a sum of many smaller choices (albeit global warming is an existential risk for sure!).