Is planning truly a sign of calm, rational behavior? Or is it something that can be accomplished in a controlled rage? Be irrational is not always a sign one has lost control. Quite often the irrational person in very much in control, it's just that his thinking is irrational

Thank you! I've been fumblingly trying to tell people this in conversations for the past few days, but without the example.

Really, it's not clear how we can completely *prevent* these kinds of violent psychotic breaks because their causes are so variegated and, well, random. HBD being what it is, in any social order you're going to get a few people who are just really bad fits to their surroundings, and a small number of them are going to direct their frustrations outwardly. The best I think we can do is to grow a social order that biases people toward finding a place in life that fits their personality and aptitudes, rather than pushing them toward an environment that just does not fit them at all (i.e. public schools, or in this case universities for people who manifestly have no business being there). That and being prepared for them so that when they happen the damage is minimized (e.g. getting rid of the ridiculous notion of "gun free zones", which are a big flashing neon sign that says "you will not encounter resistance here").

If you looked at the distribution of how many people each person murders in their lifetime, you'd get an interesting distribution, with nearly everyone set at zero, probably the next batch stuck at one, and decreasing tiny fractions down till you get to someone like the OKC bombers, who killed over a hundred. This sounds a lot like the Lotke distribution, right? How many people do you murder and how many academic papers do you publish are going to give similar distributions. (I've long suspected a link.)

One thing about this, though. Sometimes people (Art De Vany comes to mind) talk about extreme distributions where the rare big events dominate the distribution. Apparently movies are like this--the revenue is dominated by the small number of winners, not by what happens at the middle of the distribution.

Murder isn't like this. The total number of murders is dominated by single murders, which I think typically amount to the drunken husband finally shooting his wife instead of just beating her up, or thug A shooting thug B over which one of them gets to sell drugs on this particular street corner. These super-rare mass-shootings have essentially zero impact on the total murder rate, but it's much more interesting and easy to report 32 murders in one day than 32 individual times that the drunken husband finally killed his wife instead of just putting her into the hospital.

extreme value theory.

The probability (assuming a normal distribution of a 40+ SD event) is :

3.655 893 540 915 x 10 ^(-350)

I used the cumulative distribution function of the normal distribution.

Software used was Wolfram's mathematica.

yes, but observed distributions tend to have thicker tails than what is predicted.

Black Swans and Virginia Tech

Shattering the Bell Curve

Black Swans and Virginia Tech

Shattering the Bell Curve

On the one hand, I'm bummed that I was beaten to the obvious, but on the other, I'm glad that someone has managed to use reporters to widely broadcast the obvious.