The game of life

摘要

Diagnosed as suffering from abdominal mesothelioma, Stephen Gould went to the library to read about the disease. There he found the statistic that the median time from diagnosis to death was eight months. His case sounded hopeless until he wondered why the median was given, rather than the mean. The reason, he surmised, was that a few long-term survivors were skewing the probability of dying to the right. Plainly, the distribution could not extend far to the left (no one survives for less than zero time after diagnosis), but it might extend to the right over many decades. Happily, Gould's place was on the right tail of a strongly skewed distribution, and one improved by recent advances in treatment.