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by 3pt14159 5484 days ago
Not hard, impossible. Bell curves go to infinity.

Edit: Shouldn't have said that. Everyone knows basic stats here and I was being pedantic.

1 comments

Yeah, it is literally impossible for a real bell curve to exist, but if you want to be pedantic, that's also because people are clumpy. The bell curve might say there ought to be 0.00000067 excellent answerers at age 12, say, but reality insists on there being 0 or 1 excellent answerers aged 12.

Whenever we look at real data, we acknowledge that it's a discretized approximation to a bell curve and not a real (continuous) one; the point was that on top of the discrete approximation, we have the additional problem of anthropic biases - people not existing or dying at either end.