Extreme Value Theory and how one bad day can change your life

OCTOBER 26 — Not so fun fact: Our lives are often judged not by how we regularly live it but by its most extreme events.

There is a branch of statistics called Extreme Value Theory in which an extraordinarily high value overwhelmingly impacts the entire set of numbers, even shifting the average by a huge percentile.

A simple example is salaries. If you take the monthly pay of 100 junior staff in, say, an insurance company, any one of their wages will not substantially impact the average.

But if you add the salary of the CEO of the regional group into that set, suddenly this addition could mutate the average to an unrecognisable number.

It’s like adding JK Rowling’s earnings to the earnings of the average 10,000 authors just barely scraping to get by.

That’s extreme value — when one factor changes everything.

Ditto with school bullying and murders, not least the recent spate of tragic incidents.

Each one of those students in the news now for being the antagonist or culprit in a bullying or otherwise incident were living “normal” lives until something snapped in them and they went ahead and did something extreme.

Nurturing positive extremes

I’m not a huge fan of Tony Robbins but I do recall him saying something to the effect that our lives can change in an instant.

One meeting, one email, one speech, one tweet, one bad acquaintance, one special friend and our world can tilt on its axis.

The good news is that maybe we can learn to put ourselves in “places” where positive manifestations of EVT can occur.

This is why many good mentors counsel us to tinker, to try new things, to meet new people, to join new projects, to check out new places and so on. We just never know what can happen.

You could say it’s the epitome of “working smart”. Do enough new and unexpected things and, who knows, we could be struck by lightning (in a good way).

The bad news is we need to be even more vigilant about how casual, tiny and “inconsequential” encounters (physical, online, etc.) can affect people for the worse.

The sad thing about negative events in life is that it’s much easier for such events to bring about a tipping point and make individuals do crazy things.

That’s extreme value in real life.

If nothing else, maybe we all need to take a good hard look at the daily habits we take for granted. Both the healthy and unhealthy ones could produce major disruptions in our lives, some great and some terrible.

Candidates sit for the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia examinations at school in Shah Alam on March 3, 2022. — Picture by Yusof Mat Isa

EVT and schools

Schools talk a lot about character and values, yet the places where students actually practise dealing with other human beings — the co-curricular activities, the clubs, the uniformed bodies — often remain underused for anything beyond trophies, discipline drills or attendance.

What if these were treated as spaces where kids learn, in real time, how to handle rejection without collapsing, how to disagree without turning it into a war, and how to cool down when anger shows up?

By doing so we’d be reducing the likelihood of terrible extreme events occurring.

Role-playing exercises sound almost too obvious, but they rarely happen systematically. Peer mentoring could give older students a reason to look out for the younger ones instead of simply ignoring them.

We spend most of our days inside the ordinary middle of the distribution. The problem is that almost nobody remembers us that way.

One extreme moment — a single reckless overtake, a humiliating afternoon that festers, a group chat that turns poisonous — can rewrite the story for everyone else and, more importantly, for the person who lived it.

Schools already know how to manufacture high-stakes extremes; they do it every exam season.

What they still underuse is the quieter machinery that might keep those extremes from turning violent: the clubs, the uniformed bodies, the unstructured hours where students actually practise not collapsing when things go wrong.

None of it guarantees safety. Extreme value never works that way. But the alternative is to keep treating emotional competence as something that can be postponed until after the next tragedy, then wonder why the numbers keep shifting so violently.