[skissane]

> You can't say everyone is abnormal, it becomes a meaningless baseline

You can't meaningfully say everyone is abnormal in the same way.

You can meaningfully say everyone is abnormal in lots of different ways, if for each of those individual ways, only a small minority of people (say <5%) is abnormal in that way.

Consider the variable "number of deceased older siblings at time of birth". For most people, that's zero. For a small minority of people, that's 1. For me, it is 5. That's extremely abnormal, I expect there'd be less than 0.001% of the population for whom that variable is so high. I'd be rather surprised if you were abnormal in that particular way, although surely there are other ways in which you are abnormal but I am not.

[mym1990]

I am saying when you walk up to a person, know nothing about them, what actions do or do not make them normal in general...not in a very very specific parameter? If that person says "I don't really talk to my family"...does that make them an abnormal person in the most general sense?

[skissane]

Are we talking prescriptively (normatively) or descriptively?