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AndrewKemendo 6 hours ago

That’s exactly the right take and the article proves it:

Statisticians love averages so everywhere that could be sampled as a normal distribution will be presented as one

The median is actually more descriptive and power law is equally as pervasive if not more

fsckboy 3 hours ago | parent [-]

combining repeated samples of any distribution* (any population density fuction including power law distributions) will converge to the normal distribution, that's why it appears everywhere.

* excluding bizarre degenerates like constants or impulse functions

abetusk 17 minutes ago | parent [-]

No, that's not correct. Sums of power law distributions can converge to power low tailed distributions, not normal distributions.