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> Please don't make this a partisan issue. I live in Missouri. I've voted for Republicans in the past. You're alienating people like me from being on your side.
by arcticbull 5y ago
> Please don't make this a partisan issue. I live in Missouri. I've voted for Republicans in the past. You're alienating people like me from being on your side.
Every group of humans - indeed, thanks to the central limit theorem, every sufficiently large sampling - is going to be normally distributed and there are going to be folks on either side offset from the mean.
However, that doesn't indicate that the mean isn't interesting or worthwhile to discuss, and isn't representative of the group as a whole.
- leephillips 5y agoThat’s not what the central limit theorem says, and it’s not and cannot be true in practice.
- arcticbull 5y agoI was taking humans political opinions as the sum of a sum of independent random variables :) still may have been a bit of flourish, I suppose.
- leephillips 5y agoSorry, still doesn’t mean that the quantity that you’re averaging (position on the left-right political spectrum?) will be normally distributed. In fact, it almost certainly won’t be. But it’s a common error.
- arcticbull 5y agoWell, thank you for letting me know!
- danbmil99 5y agoAs someone else responded, in the case of United States politics in 2021, it's pretty clear that there is not a normal gaussian distribution of opinions on various matters. I suspect for all the hot-button issues it's extremely bimodal.