When economists stumble onto some entity that doesn’t conform to the usual trajectory of things and can’t be easily explained, they often describe it as a black swan. In Silicon Valley, the land of infinite possibilities, a tech company that emerges from its founder’s basement to earn a valuation in the billions of dollars is called a unicorn. This sort of thinking holds sway across the entire spectrum of the sciences. When researchers gather a sample of test subjects, one of their first steps is to eliminate the outliers. The logic is that these anomalies, with their exaggerated results,
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