What is meant by "empirical survival" in Taleb's Tail Risk of Contagious Diseases paper? Nassim Taleb e.a. published a paper Tail Risk of Contagious Diseases which contains the following plot, based on 62 historical disease outbreaks:

I think I understand Zipf's law from the Wikipedia example, which plots word rank vs. word frequency:

But I'm confused about the units used in Taleb's chart. What is "empirical survival" here?

cwindolf answered the question:

Survival function is 1-CDF, empirical survival indicates 1 - empirical CDF

I zoomed in and annotated the image to make it a bit more intuitive.

The first three dots are outbreaks that, after adjusting for world population, had 2,000 rescaled casualties. The next dot is the Yemen Cholera outbreak with 4,000 rescaled casualties (see table on page 6, 6th column), etc.
The y coordinate of each dot is given by 1 minus:

So for the first dot we have 1 element in the sample, so we get 1 - 1/62 = 0.98. For the second dot we have two elements in the sample, so 1 - 2/62 = 0.97, ..., the fourth is 1 - 4/62 = 0.93.
