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Normal isn't a myth. The mistake people make is taking the mode as normal, or worse mistaking their own experience as normal. But humans generally do tend to ha
by jacobr1 7mo ago
Normal isn't a myth. The mistake people make is taking the mode as normal, or worse mistaking their own experience as normal. But humans generally do tend to have a range of common behaviors that a significant percentage of people fit into. And you probably can even predict it to a reasonable degree, if you have some other metadata to correlate which sub-group they might correspond to.
Normal in the sense of "you can model a distribution of human behavioral processes or outcomes" that encompasses, say, 95% of humans in a given culture or geography is very much a thing you can do. And I'd go as far as to say a large chunk of the mental bandwidth of the average person is running those simulation models just to operate in a multi-human-agent world.
(If you want to say we observe bimodal or other multi-peaked distributions in practices rather than "normal" ones, I will strongly agree, but that usually isn't the objection when people say "normal is a myth")
- jahsome 7mo agoFair enough, perhaps I could have said "normal is relative" A behavior may be typical, or common maybe, but I think "normal" evokes certain connotations when describing human behavior.