The inter-arrival time for wars with death tolls exceeding 10 million is approximately 100+ years, and this follows an exponential (memoryless) distribution, meaning that not having observed such a war for 80 years does NOT reduce the expected wait time—you cannot infer declining violence from the absence of recent large conflicts.
factualpending
Speaker
Nassim Nicholas TalebEvidence Quote
“because of these inter arrival times we really should wait about 300 years without seeing a conflict of the scale of World War II yeah if you had to wasit 300 years then you'd say oh the the distribution has changed yes then we could say but we have had no information statistically from the past 80 years”
Created: 8/11/2026, 7:44:21 AM
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