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What evidence is there of height following a normal distribution? Weight? Size of rocks in a riverbed? The normal distribution simply implies that there is som
by zo1 9y ago
What evidence is there of height following a normal distribution? Weight? Size of rocks in a riverbed?
The normal distribution simply implies that there is some sort of "average" or middle area, and that the further you go from it both sides (smaller/larger, faster/slower, etc), it becomes harder and harder to find instances of that measurement.
It's just the way it is, and I'm probably not smart enough to explain it to you in a concise-enough way, but that's the gist of it from my understanding.
- pizza 9y agoThe thing about the normal distribution is that it's the distribution with the least information content. It has really little to do with real-world complex processes, and fitting real world phenomena to one typically ends in frustration and wildly incorrect estimates of likelihoods of samples. Intelligence (as measured through some test) being representative of a process that has minimal conditional structure underlying it seems pretty fishy to me. I'd expect intelligence to be more of an asymmetric distribution, with the vast majority of people being above the threshold of, say, catatonia; most people being under "genius" level, and a blip for geniuses that have really changed humanity's capabilities as being pretty far to the upper bounds, but with incredible impact on the group. Something like a "6 sigma" intelligence on a normal distribution would probably show up a lot more often on the skew distribution I have in mind. Although, this might be measuring something like E[f(intelligence)] where f is a convex impact-measuring function of intelligence