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I believe it is the same case with height. https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/07/20/why-heights-are-not-normally-distributed/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2

I believe it is the same case with height. https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/07/20/why-heights-are-not-normally-distributed/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/07/20/why-heights-are-no... It's close to a normal distribution one or even two deviations away from the mean, but real-life has way more samples appearing +5 deviations away from the mean. I haven't really looked into it ever, but this could be because of a positive skew versus a distribution with purely fat tails?

SamReidHughes 7y ago
The difference is, it's easy to make a long-boned freak or a blithering idiot. But there's no hormone (I know of) that makes you a genius. (Also, intelligence/aptitude/performance scales like IQ, SAT, or ASVAB scores are arbitrarily numbered, so I'm don't know what a "fat tail" means in that respect. Maybe there's a standard definition that isn't completely arbitrary.)