4 ms·

I saw only this quote on Twitter the other day > The so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standar

by imgabe 5y ago

I saw only this quote on Twitter the other day > 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. Which was, frankly, shocking to see coming from Scientific American, something I had assumed was a respectable scholarly publication, if not an actual academic journal, per se. It's an absolutely mind-boggling mistake to publish in something that claims itself to be about science. That is not at all what a normal distribution is, and the normal distribution makes no such assumption. Anyone who passed a basic Intro to Statistics course should be able to explain why this is wrong. To open with such a profoundly wrong assertion, and then publish an article built on this flawed assumption just beggars belief. I feel like I've wandered into some kind of Twilight Zone that there are apparently serious people, charged with informing the public about science, who are publishing obvious falsehoods and expecting us to go along with them. I cannot understand how an editor of a scientific publication read that sentence and did not immediately send the piece back to the author with a note reading "No thank you. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about".

namdnay 5y ago
it's like reading something from Derrida.. you have to abandon all assumption that technical terms mean what they're supposed to
- funnay 5y ago
  When you sample a population you infer the type of distribution and try to sample it in a way that respects the distribution properties, because that can have a great impact on the results. I'm afraid most people here criticizing her normal distribution remarks are oversimplifying it much more than her.
  - qsort 5y ago
    Very funny how you are doing more of that Derrida thing yourself. The problem with the claim lies in the attempt to associate a strictly technical concept (the normal distribution) to $GENERIC_BAD_STUFF with nothing more than vague wordplay. Also, just FYI, you have it the other way around. When you sample from a population, you (usually) assume a certain distribution (at most you infer parameters). For example, if you're sampling for opinion polls, you would actually want to oversample minorities and then correct back.
    - funnay 5y ago
      Sorry, I meant assume instead of infer. *not english native.
  - usgroup 5y ago
    I think most of the problem with the statement is that it is ambiguous. If she is saying that the Gaussian distribution is used because it assumes there exists people who are the mean average representatives of humanity; then she is just failing to understand what the law of large numbers implies about the distribution of sample mean(X) regardless of the distribution of X. If on the other hand she is saying that a problem in healthcare is that significantly different sub-populations are lumped together resulting in inappropriate benchmarks for some sub-populations, that is more palatable. Even if this latter interpretation is not true, at least it isn't false by definition.
  - tibbar 5y ago
    The author’s word salad honestly doesn’t qualify as ‘remarks about the normal distribution.’ The author is wildly flinging random technical terms around. Try substituting ‘normal distribution’ with ‘exponential distribution’ or simply with ‘collecting data’. You can draw two possible conclusions from that sentence: either the author believes that observing data or —- horror —- drawing it is racist, a violently anti-knowledge stance, or the author is stringing words together like GPT-3 in hopes of sounding woke. This kind of discourse is an insult to science and an embarrassment to the journal.
masklinn 5y ago
> Which was, frankly, shocking to see coming from Scientific American, something I had assumed was a respectable scholarly publication TBF SciAm has been popsci since the 50s (before that it was mostly about new patents apparently, the original styling was "The Advocate of Industry and Enterprise" and the "Journal of Mechanical and other Improvements"). It's never been a scholarly publication per se, though it used to be pretty respectable in the sense that reading sciam is what you'd do if you were well-read middle-class and weren't going to read the papers and reports straight but wanted to keep abreast of the major stuff. The "level of depth" so to speak has varied a lot since it switched to popsci. But the recent years are some pretty damn shallow levels.
qsort 5y ago
The thing that strikes me is how obviously nonsensical that is. It's not only a lie, it's someone straight up insisting that 2+2=5. I'm frankly stumped by claims like those, I feel it's pointless to even debunk them (what is there to debunk? If you're willing to listen anybody qualified at all, you wouldn't believe it in the first place.) Reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood HN post, just 14 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29773082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29773082
- gadders 5y ago
  >> The thing that strikes me is how obviously nonsensical that is. It's not only a lie, it's someone straight up insisting that 2+2=5. As Pauli said "It's not even wrong."
makomk 5y ago
The article where they endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in their history was pretty atrocious too - just based on out and out lying about what the US coronavirus response involved and how it compared to the rest of the world. It turns out that when you mix science and politics, all you're left with is politics that calls itself science and accuses its political opponents of attacking science.
- funnay 5y ago
  I respected SA for that. And I think it was on topic for them given the anti-science sentiment transpired from one of the sides. And science will always be political.
  - naasking 5y ago
    > I respected SA for that. And I think it was on topic for them given the anti-science sentiment transpired from one of the sides. One of the sides? Like Biden and Kamala saying they wouldn't trust the Trump vaccine?
    - tomrod 5y ago
      The notion is that it was extremely fast delivery of a complex solution by an administration known to regularly stretch the truth when politically convenient (if not outright lie, c.f. inauguration crowd size and, now, response to the legitimate 2020 election). The reality is that the mRNA vaccines were basically ready to go within a few weeks, and political dregs kept it from being approved even faster. But its inadvisable to change the bureaucratic infrastructure for disasters during disasters, and so here we are. But yes, the crowd that Trump tends to seek support from is anti-science.
      - roenxi 5y ago
        At risk of feeding the troll, but the vast majority of the US population are incompetent at science. There is a reason that science is the domain of people who are not only fairly smart but also carefully trained in how to make decisions based on evidence rather than social dynamics. While Trump's appeal is targeting people who are clearly scientifically-illiterate ... all politicians have messages crafted to appeal to scientific illiterates. There aren't enough scientifically competent people to even be a meaningful swing vote. Every partisan is perfectly happy to claim that they are following science and usually fail to modify their behavior when confronted with actual science. That holds across the political spectrum. The Trump crowd aren't anti-science, they simply tend to anti-authority. I guarantee you that they're highly pro-science on the issues where the science agrees with them.
Terretta 5y ago
I’m baffled even pop pulp rag “editorial” leadership wouldn’t be familiar with the famous “stats don’t mean normal exists” examples dating back to the 1950s: No “normal” man: “Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions. One pilot might have a longer-than-average arm length, but a shorter-than-average leg length. Another pilot might have a big chest but small hips. Even more astonishing, Daniels discovered that if you picked out just three of the ten dimensions of size — say, neck circumference, thigh circumference and wrist circumference — less than 3.5 per cent of pilots would be average sized on all three dimensions. Daniels’s findings were clear and incontrovertible. There was no such thing as an average pilot. If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’ve actually designed it to fit no one.“ And no “normal” woman: “Before the competition, the judges assumed most entrants’ measurements would be pretty close to the average, and that the contest would come down to a question of millimetres. The reality turned out to be nothing of the sort. Less than 40 of the 3,864 contestants were average size on just five of the nine dimensions and none of the contestants — not even Martha Skidmore — came close on all nine dimensions. Just as Daniels’ study revealed there was no such thing as an average-size pilot, the Norma Look-Alike contest demonstrated that average-size women did not exist either.” https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-... On the other hand, maybe the editor of Scientific American being unaware of this is why there’s room for a not so new book, “The End of Average”: ”Yet, as Rose, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D.’07, a lecturer at the Ed School and director of the Mind, Brain, and Education Program, writes in his forthcoming book, The End of Average, from the moment we’re born to the moment we die, we are measured against a mythical yardstick — the average human — and it’s hurting everyone. That’s why with this book and through his nonprofit, the Center for Individual Opportunity, Rose is on a mission to dismantle this myth of the average and instead help the public understand the importance of the individual.” https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/15/08/beyond-average https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/15/08/beyond-average http://www.toddrose.com/endofaverage http://www.toddrose.com/endofaverage
- oneoff786 5y ago
  Note the difference here is that your examples use multiple dimensions at once. Assuming Gaussian distributions are a good fit, most of the population will look relatively normal on a single variable measurement. It’s only on multivariate measurements where this stops being true. Though this is exactly what the mode expects. Plot a 2D cross section of a 9 dimensional Gaussian curve and you’ll see the center lose its density very quickly.
usgroup 5y ago
I think most of the problem with the statement is that it is ambiguous. If she is saying that the Gaussian distribution is used because it assumes there exists people who are the mean average representatives of humanity; then she is just failing to understand what the law of large numbers implies about the distribution of sample mean(X) regardless of the distribution of X. If on the other hand she is saying that a problem in healthcare is that significantly different sub-populations are lumped together resulting in inappropriate benchmarks for some sub-populations, that is more palatable. Even if this latter interpretation is not true, at least it isn't false by definition.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
The problem with the cult of The Science is that like all religions it needs outs when the actual data and science contradicts the faith. This is where the "math is racist" type of craziness comes from.

by imgabe 5y ago

namdnay 5y ago

it's like reading something from Derrida.. you have to abandon all assumption that technical terms mean what they're supposed to

funnay 5y ago
When you sample a population you infer the type of distribution and try to sample it in a way that respects the distribution properties, because that can have a great impact on the results. I'm afraid most people here criticizing her normal distribution remarks are oversimplifying it much more than her.
- qsort 5y ago
  Very funny how you are doing more of that Derrida thing yourself. The problem with the claim lies in the attempt to associate a strictly technical concept (the normal distribution) to $GENERIC_BAD_STUFF with nothing more than vague wordplay. Also, just FYI, you have it the other way around. When you sample from a population, you (usually) assume a certain distribution (at most you infer parameters). For example, if you're sampling for opinion polls, you would actually want to oversample minorities and then correct back.
  - funnay 5y ago
    Sorry, I meant assume instead of infer. *not english native.
- usgroup 5y ago
  I think most of the problem with the statement is that it is ambiguous. If she is saying that the Gaussian distribution is used because it assumes there exists people who are the mean average representatives of humanity; then she is just failing to understand what the law of large numbers implies about the distribution of sample mean(X) regardless of the distribution of X. If on the other hand she is saying that a problem in healthcare is that significantly different sub-populations are lumped together resulting in inappropriate benchmarks for some sub-populations, that is more palatable. Even if this latter interpretation is not true, at least it isn't false by definition.
- tibbar 5y ago
  The author’s word salad honestly doesn’t qualify as ‘remarks about the normal distribution.’ The author is wildly flinging random technical terms around. Try substituting ‘normal distribution’ with ‘exponential distribution’ or simply with ‘collecting data’. You can draw two possible conclusions from that sentence: either the author believes that observing data or —- horror —- drawing it is racist, a violently anti-knowledge stance, or the author is stringing words together like GPT-3 in hopes of sounding woke. This kind of discourse is an insult to science and an embarrassment to the journal.

masklinn 5y ago

> Which was, frankly, shocking to see coming from Scientific American, something I had assumed was a respectable scholarly publication TBF SciAm has been popsci since the 50s (before that it was mostly about new patents apparently, the original styling was "The Advocate of Industry and Enterprise" and the "Journal of Mechanical and other Improvements"). It's never been a scholarly publication per se, though it used to be pretty respectable in the sense that reading sciam is what you'd do if you were well-read middle-class and weren't going to read the papers and reports straight but wanted to keep abreast of the major stuff. The "level of depth" so to speak has varied a lot since it switched to popsci. But the recent years are some pretty damn shallow levels.

qsort 5y ago

The thing that strikes me is how obviously nonsensical that is. It's not only a lie, it's someone straight up insisting that 2+2=5. I'm frankly stumped by claims like those, I feel it's pointless to even debunk them (what is there to debunk? If you're willing to listen anybody qualified at all, you wouldn't believe it in the first place.) Reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood HN post, just 14 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29773082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29773082

gadders 5y ago
>> The thing that strikes me is how obviously nonsensical that is. It's not only a lie, it's someone straight up insisting that 2+2=5. As Pauli said "It's not even wrong."

makomk 5y ago

The article where they endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in their history was pretty atrocious too - just based on out and out lying about what the US coronavirus response involved and how it compared to the rest of the world. It turns out that when you mix science and politics, all you're left with is politics that calls itself science and accuses its political opponents of attacking science.

funnay 5y ago
I respected SA for that. And I think it was on topic for them given the anti-science sentiment transpired from one of the sides. And science will always be political.
- naasking 5y ago
  > I respected SA for that. And I think it was on topic for them given the anti-science sentiment transpired from one of the sides. One of the sides? Like Biden and Kamala saying they wouldn't trust the Trump vaccine?
  - tomrod 5y ago
    The notion is that it was extremely fast delivery of a complex solution by an administration known to regularly stretch the truth when politically convenient (if not outright lie, c.f. inauguration crowd size and, now, response to the legitimate 2020 election). The reality is that the mRNA vaccines were basically ready to go within a few weeks, and political dregs kept it from being approved even faster. But its inadvisable to change the bureaucratic infrastructure for disasters during disasters, and so here we are. But yes, the crowd that Trump tends to seek support from is anti-science.
    - roenxi 5y ago
      At risk of feeding the troll, but the vast majority of the US population are incompetent at science. There is a reason that science is the domain of people who are not only fairly smart but also carefully trained in how to make decisions based on evidence rather than social dynamics. While Trump's appeal is targeting people who are clearly scientifically-illiterate ... all politicians have messages crafted to appeal to scientific illiterates. There aren't enough scientifically competent people to even be a meaningful swing vote. Every partisan is perfectly happy to claim that they are following science and usually fail to modify their behavior when confronted with actual science. That holds across the political spectrum. The Trump crowd aren't anti-science, they simply tend to anti-authority. I guarantee you that they're highly pro-science on the issues where the science agrees with them.

Terretta 5y ago

I’m baffled even pop pulp rag “editorial” leadership wouldn’t be familiar with the famous “stats don’t mean normal exists” examples dating back to the 1950s: No “normal” man: “Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions. One pilot might have a longer-than-average arm length, but a shorter-than-average leg length. Another pilot might have a big chest but small hips. Even more astonishing, Daniels discovered that if you picked out just three of the ten dimensions of size — say, neck circumference, thigh circumference and wrist circumference — less than 3.5 per cent of pilots would be average sized on all three dimensions. Daniels’s findings were clear and incontrovertible. There was no such thing as an average pilot. If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’ve actually designed it to fit no one.“ And no “normal” woman: “Before the competition, the judges assumed most entrants’ measurements would be pretty close to the average, and that the contest would come down to a question of millimetres. The reality turned out to be nothing of the sort. Less than 40 of the 3,864 contestants were average size on just five of the nine dimensions and none of the contestants — not even Martha Skidmore — came close on all nine dimensions. Just as Daniels’ study revealed there was no such thing as an average-size pilot, the Norma Look-Alike contest demonstrated that average-size women did not exist either.” https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-... On the other hand, maybe the editor of Scientific American being unaware of this is why there’s room for a not so new book, “The End of Average”: ”Yet, as Rose, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D.’07, a lecturer at the Ed School and director of the Mind, Brain, and Education Program, writes in his forthcoming book, The End of Average, from the moment we’re born to the moment we die, we are measured against a mythical yardstick — the average human — and it’s hurting everyone. That’s why with this book and through his nonprofit, the Center for Individual Opportunity, Rose is on a mission to dismantle this myth of the average and instead help the public understand the importance of the individual.” https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/15/08/beyond-average https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/15/08/beyond-average http://www.toddrose.com/endofaverage http://www.toddrose.com/endofaverage

oneoff786 5y ago
Note the difference here is that your examples use multiple dimensions at once. Assuming Gaussian distributions are a good fit, most of the population will look relatively normal on a single variable measurement. It’s only on multivariate measurements where this stops being true. Though this is exactly what the mode expects. Plot a 2D cross section of a 9 dimensional Gaussian curve and you’ll see the center lose its density very quickly.

usgroup 5y ago

I think most of the problem with the statement is that it is ambiguous. If she is saying that the Gaussian distribution is used because it assumes there exists people who are the mean average representatives of humanity; then she is just failing to understand what the law of large numbers implies about the distribution of sample mean(X) regardless of the distribution of X. If on the other hand she is saying that a problem in healthcare is that significantly different sub-populations are lumped together resulting in inappropriate benchmarks for some sub-populations, that is more palatable. Even if this latter interpretation is not true, at least it isn't false by definition.

throwawaylinux 5y ago

The problem with the cult of The Science is that like all religions it needs outs when the actual data and science contradicts the faith. This is where the "math is racist" type of craziness comes from.