Are you an 'Outlier'?

Statistical out.li.er -

an observation that lies at an 'abnormal' distance from other values in a random sample from a population.

Societal out.li.er -

a person or thing differing from all other members of a particular group or set.

If you are someone who dabbles with statistics or data science, you are likely to be familiar with outliers; values that sit far, far away (remember Donkey's frustration at losing a sense of time, getting reprimanded by Shrek and Princess Fiona?) from the normal distribution of a sample, picked at random, from a universe of data. You stare at an 'extreme' value, check whether it sits within 3 standard deviations of either side of the mean (of the said sample). If it does, it finds a place in your model. If it doesn't, it invariably gets dropped out of the sample.

On the other hand, if you aren't a statistician, don't worry about the gibberish opening to this prosaic tirade. You've always known outliers . You've read about them in your history textbooks, almanacs, magazines. Closer to home, you've probably interacted with outliers yourself. You have unconsciously referred to them in conversations. You've probably attempted to borrow a few glowing embers from the halo of their success, strategically dispensing it as conversational currency, for 'soft gains' from a notional sense of legacy. Alternatively, you've maintained 'safe' distance, hoping that your friends or peers (who are aware of your 'outlier' roots) never finding the window to connect you to him/her, attempting to brandish and use it against you as a caustic whip for petty one-upmanship in WhatsApp 'debates' where people apparently find their daily validation these days; in between bright 'Good Morning' photos, 'accidental' awkward jokes and boomeranging forwards.

Your 'outlier' could be that unassuming, shy cousin who cracked the toughest ivy leagues in the world, went on to register eleven patents and is now the president of the most cutting-edge tech start-up in San Jose that is on the cusp of bringing Drake's equation to life, eventually establishing contact with extraterrestrial intelligence and inadvertently becoming responsible for some of us getting abducted.

Or...it could be that one semi-educated 'black sheep' uncle in your extended family who took off (as the legend goes) outside a gas station at the height of pre-pubescence, only to resurface 20 years later, with a chain of cooking gas agencies, wielding obscenely thick wads of multi-colored currency and boasting influence on all types of local infamy, all of whom are highly venerated at the friendly neighborhood cop station.

Either ways, the issue is that people don't know what to do with 'outliers'. Society does not know how to 'treat' them. Should they be included in the 'normal distribution' of a societal construct? Why should they be included at all??? Aren't they constantly 'threatening' to influence champions of predictability, skewing them for good, playing pied piper to them, shepherding them into the unknown, 'polarizing' opinion, ringing the division bell?

Turning believers into seekers?

Well...truth is, the bell in the bell curve of society abhors outliers because the latter reshapes the former. The perimeter of society loses its external aesthetic and appears awry, almost asymmetric. It loses relevance over the very core of its hypothetical being and fears the rise of its principal nemesis, the alternate reality, Mr. Contrarian.

In other words, in the perennial pulsating nature of the universe, normality fears ceding control to ab-normality on the altar of confidence (Intervals, of course).

Thus....societies clip outliers by default. Brutally. They simply don't allow any alternate reality to gain critical mass and inspire eminently forgettable followers to gather the required escape velocity and gravitate out! Which is why, in 'The Matrix', Agent Smith feared Morpheus more than anything else because the latter was busy hustling alternate reality on the streets of Sydney; offering red pills to those who wished not to 'bend to the spoon' that fed them but to instead 'bend the spoon'.

We've all seen that movie. We've all seen it a second time. Outliers are hard to grapple with!

Beyond pulp fiction, in the real world, outliers transcend people. They represent value systems, ideologies, political theories. The world lived through 45 years of the war of the null and alternate hypotheses, even as Democratic and Communist forces wrestled for the ownership of the bell curve, trying to appropriate their idea of what they believed was the true 'normal'. Eventually, the side that got 'treated' or 'clipped' became the outlier, the alternate hypothesis. The sentinels subscribing to, and living inside and outside the '3 sigma' threshold of the post second world war theater, by choice or otherwise, rearranged themselves between these two hypotheses, either resigning as dead stars or gestating as dormant moles, waiting for reality to flip again. In a sense, these remnants of the cold war, chose to live like 'alternate' values in 'null' societies and vice versa, throwing the classical definition of an outlier itself under the bus of dystopia...

...all of which brings me back to my original cryptocurrency question...

Are you an outlier?