▲ | jtbayly 7 days ago | |
What a minute, this sentence was literally in the SA piece: “First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.” Is that not a denunciation of the normal distribution? | ||
▲ | andrewla 7 days ago | parent | next [-] | |
I don't think so -- the comment in context was not about the "normal distribution of statistics" per se, because when we're talking about Bernoulli trials and the law of large numbers, it clearly is not necessary to assume anything about "default humans". Rather the article is critiquing the specific use of the normal distribution in assessing population and sub-population statistics. I do think that this critique is kind of nonsensical because the normal distribution assumes nothing of the kind -- a person who is of average height, a "default height" human, is a concept utterly distinct from the concept of a person who is of average weight, a "default weight" human. | ||
▲ | jayd16 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |
It's saying multi-modal data should not be crammed into a simple normal distribution. | ||
▲ | leephillips 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] | |
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