Talk:Rare events

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I've read about Normal accidents, Black Swan theory, and Brittle Power and accidents and disasters are not rare -- they are built into complex systems; This article seems like WP:OR to me. Need a more scholarly approach, with full referencing. Johnfos (talk) 19:00, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

I don't think this is WP:OR. Rare events is a common framework in social science, with a fairly deep history. For instance, see this JASON report http://fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/rare.pdf from several years back, and Gary King at Harvard has written extensively about them (for instance http://gking.harvard.edu/files/0s.pdf ). I think the idea of rare events subsumes the ideas of Black Swan theory, and is also related to power-law distributions, which often produce very large events that appear to be "rare" since they are low probability relative to what we would expect from a normal distribution. So, I propose that we remove the original research warning from the page. -- Paresnah (talk) 06:43, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

I wouldn't even think of removing tags at this stage and probably more tags are needed. If a WP:Lead is not written soon then someone will probably add a tag regarding that. Even though "rare events is a common framework in social sciences", you need to show that by referencing scholarly sources with full referencing per WP:RS, paying particular attention to any criticsm of rare events theory. The sources you have provided above are both very old; isn't there something more recent? You may also wish to see Vulnerability of nuclear plants to attack, Lists of nuclear disasters and radioactive incidents, and Aurora Experiment. I just can't see how nuclear-related events in particular are in any way rare. Perhaps User:Bksovacool and other editors could comment here and clarify things. Johnfos (talk) 09:15, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

More tags would be fine, if that encourages more work fleshing out the article. It wouldn't be hard to dig up the references for the claim that rare events is a legitimate thing in the social sciences (mainly political science and applied statistics), and the two I listed are a starting point. I just did a quick Google Scholar search, and there are plenty more (including a nice-looking book from 1981 on nuclear accidents as "rare events."). As for the authoritative sources I listed above, you're crazy to say that they are "old". One is 2001 and the other is 2009. That's downright modern in the social science literature. If you want popular press references, then I think you're out of luck; the press doesn't talk in these terms. Also, to be clear, I'm not going to rewrite this article; I just think it shouldn't be deleted. -- Paresnah (talk) 05:50, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Here's a fairly fresh article (from April 2014) explicitly about rare events, from the perspective of computational sampling http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10463-014-0460-2 . I agree that a good WP:Lead is needed. -- Paresnah (talk) 20:05, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Added WP:Lead and additional references to support a more scholarly approach. Researcher1010 (talk) 18:44, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

Removed WP:OR tag due to additional references.Researcher1010 (talk) 17:45, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

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