alt Hacker NewsA lot of times I can't tell if I'm the idiot or if everyone else is. Says that this isn't an interesting question at all and the article was horrible. I studied data science for a few years but I'm no expert, but it seems pretty obvious to me that if you make a series of 50/50 choices randomly, that's the shape you end up with and there's really nothing more interesting about it than that.
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alanbernstein • today at 5:02 AM
I don't think "obvious" is the right word here. It makes perfect sense when you understand it, but it's not a conclusion that most people could come to immediately without detailed, assisted study.
Sampling 50/50 choices would be a binary distribution that (very crudely) approximates a normal distribution.
But the counterintuitive thing about the CLT is that it applies to distributions that are not normal.