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bandramitoday at 10:26 AM1 replyview on HN

I flinch at "everywhere", particularly when people keep asserting they are places that they aren't (and in fact can't be). Nothing with a hard zero can be normally distributed, for instance, but people will keep insisting quantities with a hard zero are.


Replies

Epa095today at 10:40 AM

Is this not just a linguistic issue, where people say normal distributed but actually mean approximate or assumed normality? Its not like height is normally distributed (there is nobody 8 feet tall), but its not like the distribution bares no resemblance to the normal distribution either, and in a colloquial sense the term seems to he used more freely than the mathematical defined term.