Life Outside the Normal Distribution

Humans like regularity. Our brains drive us to seek out that which is predictable. If we could have our way, then everything would fall into neat categories. Unfortunately, the universe does not work this way. Nature is chaotic and scattered. Scientists must constantly work with randomness and try to extract the order. In our desire for consistency, humans often find patterns that are not there. During the Scientific Revolution, many people studying nature became aware of its inherent uncertainty. This led to the development of probability theory and eventually modern statistics. However, uncertainty is almost always harder to deal with than we think. Despite making considerable progress in dealing with the unknown, we still tend to gravitate toward methods that provide clean and straightforward solutions. In this article, I am going to talk about the most common technique for dealing with randomness: the normal distribution. While the normal distribution certainly has its uses, it has become far more widespread than its accuracy warrants. I am also going to give multiple examples of where this method goes wrong and provide some alternatives. <a href="https://www.cantorsparadise.com/life-outside-the-normal-distribution-e5d50cac7d2a">Read More</a>