logoalt Hacker News

abetusktoday at 5:22 AM0 repliesview on HN

The fact the article said that is a gross error. You've identified the issue head on.

The sum of independent identically distributed random variables, if they converge at all, converge to a Levy stable distribution (aka fat-tailed, heavy tailed, power law). In this sense, Levy stable distributions are more "normal" than the normal distribution. They also show up with regular frequency all over nature.

As you point out, infinite variance might be dismissed but, in practice, this just ends up getting larger and larger "outliers" as one keeps drawing from the distribution. Infinities are, in effect, a "verb" and so an infinite variance, in this context, just means the distributions spits out larger and larger numbers the more you sample from it.